Showing results by publisher "Crossroad Press" in Historical Fiction

Like The Last Temptation of Christ, Saint Francis is a fictionalized biography of a widely venerated Christian figure: Francis of Assisi, whose renunciation of his young man’s life of leisure and founding of a religious order dedicated to living in poverty and sharing the Gospels with all living things profoundly influence the ways in which Christians the world over worship and give service to their god even today.

Chiliad consists of two interrelated stories, stories filtered through the melancholy imagination of a narrator perched on the banks of a river that flows backward and forward through time. The first movement, "Men and Sin", takes place in the millennial year of 1000 AD. The second, "A Moment at the River's Heart", occurs exactly 1000 years - the length of a "chiliad" - later, as the new millennium approaches.

Eminent Oxford don Sir Harrison Ashcroft, on the verge of proving that Hitler did not die in the bunker, is murdered in Berlin. His daughter, Emily, continues this quest. Her life is endangered but she has new and unexpected protectors: Rex Foster, researching the vainglory of Nazi architecture; Nicholas Kirvov, curator of a Soviet art museum; and Tovah Levine, Mossad agent. The four prove a tough match for a coterie of neo-Nazis conspiring to perpetuate Hitler's image and obscure the details of his death.

In the days of pre-Civil War slavery - the unforgettable novel of a shocking portion of our American heritage. The time was not all magnolia blossoms and crinolines. It was more than romance and splendor. It was debauchery and slavery, gambling tables and dens of iniquity. It was murder and forgiveness. It was all the great contradiction of life in a golden era...

For more than 1600 years, Nick Medea has followed and guarded the Gate that keeps the mortal realm and that of Feirie separate, seeking in vain absolution for the fatal errors he made when he slew the dragon. All that while, he has tried and failed to keep the woman he loves from dying over and over. Yet in the 50 years since the night the dragon breathed over the city of Chicago, the Gate has not only remained fixed, but open to the trespasses of the Wyld, the darkest of the Feiriefolk.

No man is Boon’s equal, no gun more lethal. Boonsri Angchuan travels the trails, riding from town to town with her one and only friend, a portly Arkansan drunkard named Edward Splettstoesser. She has done nothing else for years, her only goal being revenge upon the one man who should have protected her but instead sold her and her mother into bondage. Boon and Edward navigate corrupt lawmen, hostile Kiowa, a mad judge, and countless gunmen aiming for their heads in Boon’s dogged pursuit of answers - and vengeance.

Charmian is handmaiden to Cleopatra. She is also an oracle, gifted with ancient memories that may hold the key to preserving Egypt. Through blood and fire, war and peace, love and death, she will face a desperate struggle that will remake the future of the world.

“I was to make myself a killer.” In 1865, a man calling himself Septimus Whitehall slashed, shot, and burned his way from New York to California in a frenzy of violence. This is his own story, told in his own words. Seven names were on the doctor’s list. Seven men and women scattered all over the United States and its western territories. Seven souls judged guilty by a mysterious man with no past apart from the loss for which his enemies are blamed. The War Between the States is over, but Septimus Whitehall intends to wage a bloody war of his own and he is willing to cut down almost anyone who stands in his way.

Nick O'Malley has come home from Vietnam but with more questions than answers. His unit, the 173rd Airborne, had orders to close the port of Cam Pha, which should have crippled supply lines and might have ended the war. Instead, just before Nick transferred out, the orders were cancelled. Nick later learns his entire unit was then dropped in behind enemy lines and wiped out. A mistake? Or something darker?

Set in the era of two world wars, this comprehensive work weaves together the bizarre mythology and eccentric beliefs that explain how a nation went insane for 12 years. Told through the compelling lives and loves of a pair of very unique characters, this tour de force will take you into a radical blend of religion and myth frighteningly similar to what is going on in parts of the world today.

1967: Chestnut Circle is an average suburban community inhabited by ordinary people - teenagers, housewives, retirees. Seventeen-year-old Nick Blake's only major worries are homework, high school, and how to date the pretty girl across the way. Then a fierce storm strikes the neighborhood and, overnight, all of Chestnut Circle is transported to an enchanted realm unlike anything its residents have ever known.

The Bennett family moved to Jamaica after inheriting a coffee plantation in the Blue Mountains. This novel covers three generations of their lives, loves, triumphs and failures as the build an amazing, profitable plantation, producing some of the finest coffee in the world, and then run afoul of history. This novel , in many ways, parallels the amazing life of it's author, Hugh B. Cave, who owned a plantation on the last road into the Blue Mountains in Jamaica, only to lose it to the government.

Riding the crest of the bloody tide is Jim Caspion, a Civil War veteran turned buffalo hunter, a man of notable conscience and courage, ever haunted by the war, yet fleeing settlement and routine, forswearing the practicable for the exotic, the forbidden, and the extreme. From the opening when he rides into a buffalo stampede to escape a band of Cheyenne, to the very end, his fate is inexorably tied to the white buffalo he spies in his harrowing flight. Thereafter, its spiritual aspect exerts a growing influence over his own wry, sensual nature, altering his outlook.

In 1712, Johann Bessler unveiled the perpetuum mobile, a wheel that continually spun after being set into motion until it was stopped with no mechanical input. Bessler's secret died with him. Except that it didn’t. Elly Kassel is the granddaughter of Evelyn Kassel. Elly is called into the offices of eminent London solicitors where she discovers that her grandmother was a rich woman. She also receives a trunk and an envelope, which she is not to open until she reaches New York City. In New York, she is told, all her questions about her grandmother and her inheritance will be answered.

Alexander the Great's soldier, Lydias of Miletus, has survived the final campaigns of the king's life. He now has to deal with the chaos surrounding his death. Lydias throws his lot in with Ptolemy, one of Alexander's generals who has grabbed Egypt as his personal territory.

1888, Whitechapel. Jack the Ripper terrorizes prostitutes and baffles Scotland Yard; 1888, London. Annie Oakley thrills audiences of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show with her expert marksmanship. The Ripper may have picked the wrong target in this fascinating retelling of Jack the Ripper's reign of terror...with a western twist. This blend of fact and fiction will keep you resisting to pause long after bedtime as the story unfolds in gaslit, Victorian London.

London, 1888. A madman has begun the most notorious series of murders in history. With each new discovery of a woman's mutilated body, the citywide panic grows. The police seem unable to stop the killer, even when he taunts them with letters. Letters signed...Jack the Ripper. In another part of London, the reign of terror has touched a young writer and theater manager named Bram Stoker. The police have closed his theater's production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and suspect its star of being Jack the Ripper. His livelihood endangered, Stoker sets out to find the real killer.

There are monsters roaming the desert and menacing the roads. There are sorcerers, harlots, and gamblers rampant in the city. In a compound in a forest, at the base of a mountain, one man and his family have received a prophecy. There will be a reckoning. There will be a flood. They will survive, but only if they obey the prophecy. Only if they build an ark, where there is no water. Only if they gather all of the creatures of the world. Only if they are faithful. Everyone else? Well, they're going to die.

A momentous archeological discovery, the greatest of all time - and the immediate effect it has on the varied group of men and women whose lives are intimately touched and altered by it - is at the heart of this exciting novel. In the ruins of the ancient Roman seaport of Ostia Antica, an Italian archeologist has discovered a first-century papyrus, its faded Aramaic text revealing a new gospel written by James, younger brother of Jesus, the original source of the four gospels of the New Testament.

They lived in a world of secret guilts.... Rafaella: At 17 she had a beauty that could possess and destroy. No man was safe from her, not even her father....