Showing results by author "James Nelson" in All Categories

Pushed out of Hispaniola, driven from the island of Tortuga, Jean-Baptiste LeBoeuf and the buccaneers under his command find a new home on the north coast of Cuba. There, LeBoeuf and his men turn to the work they do best, the work that most satisfies their need for vengeance: plundering the...

Jack Biddlecomb has much to live up to, being as he is the eldest son of the esteemed Captain Isaac Biddlecomb, wealthy merchant captain, leading light of the War for American Independence, and newly minted congressman. Jack finds himself off to a promising start, however, when he’s given command of the merchant vessel Abigail bound from Philadelphia for Barbados. But even before the dock lines are cast off, the voyage, which should have been routine, begins to look like a stormy passage indeed.

1775: General George Washington has discovered his store of gunpowder has dwindled to next to nothing. Captain Isaac Biddlecomb is despatched to Bermuda to capture the British gunpowder known to be there. But the plan is a trap, hatched by a traitor among the Patriots. Washington's aide-de-camp Major Edward Fitzgerald is tasked with hunting the traitor down; Biddlecomb meanwhile must work to free his ship and his men and capture the gunpowder so vital in the fight for freedom. Will Biddlecomb and Fitzgerald overcome their common enemy – the greatest military power on Earth?

For centuries, the Vikings have swept out of the Norse countries and fallen on whatever lands they could reach aboard their longships, and few could resist the power of their violent onslaught. They came at first to plunder and then to settle, an encroachment fiercely resisted wherever they went. Such was the case in the southern lands of Ireland. En route to the Viking longphort there, known as Dubh-linn, Thorgrim Night Wolf and Ornolf the Restless stumble across an Irish ship.

With their ill-fated raid on the monastary at Glendalough torn apart by betrayal and defeat, Thorgrim Night Wolf and his handful of survivors from the crew of Sea Hammer find themselves in desperate and tenuous straits. Stranded far from the safety of Vik-lo, surrounded by enemies, and with barely enough men to work the longship's oars, the Norsemen must make their way back through a dangerous and uncertain country. Thorgrim, however, is not interested in mere survival. His one thought, his one desire, is to take revenge.

More than one hundred years after Columbus blundered onto Hispaniola, the West Indies are held in Spain's iron fist, and no threat to that absolute rule is tolerated. But such total control cannot last, and one threat will emerge as the most dangerous of all: the buccaneers. Camped on the shore of Hispaniola, these half-wild men eke out a living hunting the island's feral livestock. Among them, Jean-Baptiste LeBoeuf lives out his exile, content that no one in the hunters' camp is curious about his past. But when a hurricane sweeps through the Caribbean, it upends their rough existence.

For nearly three years, Thorgrim Night Wolf has fought his way across Ireland, Engla-land, and Frisia, seeking riches and battling to keep him and his men alive. Through all that hardship, his foremost thought has been to return to his farm in Norway and to give up the life of a raider. With...

Fed up with an outlaw existence, Calico Jack Rackam swears off the pirate life, but he hasn’t reckoned with Anne Bonny, a woman who would as soon stab a man as give him a good tumble—that is, unless he’s a pirate. Soon Jack finds himself out on the high seas again, with Anne by his side and his men spoiling for action. And when they capture a Dutch merchant ship, they pick up an unlikely crewmate as well, an expert sword fighter and topmast seaman who has a secret: he just happens to be a woman named Mary. Together they cut a bold swath through the West Indies.

Welcome to the Broken Brain Mental Institution, where we’ve collected the world's most deranged minds, from the criminally insane to the mentally disturbed and everything in between. You’ll begin your tour with a foreword by Clay McLeod Chapman and continue through fourteen rooms, each containing unimaginable horrors from today’s most talented authors. Inside you’ll find abandoned institutions and haunted sanitariums alongside modern clinics filled with unethical experiments and inhumane treatments that are sure to test the limits of your sanity.

Driven ashore on the coast of Ireland, their longships nearly wrecked by the gods who seem unwilling to let them leave, Thorgrim Night Wolf and his band of Northmen once again face a fight for their survival. Helpless without their ships, they must find some refuge in that hostile country and begin the laborious work of making the vessels seaworthy again. But for all the shipbuilding skills that Thorgrim and the others possess, there is one thing they cannot do - weave cloth to replace the sails shredded in the gale that drove them ashore.  

Eager to return to his native Norway, Thorgrim agrees to participate in one last raid under the command of a man he does not trust. But the Northmen, he finds, are no longer simply invaders on foreign soil. They have become a part of the Irish kings' ongoing struggle for power, and, far from securing a means to return home, Thorgrim and his men are plunged into a battle for the throne of Tara - a battle that will test their strength and loyalty as none has before.

After the treachery and slaughter they met during the raid on Glendalough, Thorgrim Night Wolf and his small band of surviving Northmen have returned to Vik-lo, where Thorgrim again sits as lord of the Viking longphort. But the Northmen are a restless lot, and soon they find themselves eager to put to sea. Loading weapons and supplies aboard the four longships under Thorgrim's command, they set out in search of the rich merchant ships that now ply Irish waters. But not all cargoes are the same, nor all merchant captains easy targets for the Norse raiders.

With their longships storm-blown to the southern coast of Engla-land, Thorgrim Night Wolf and his men find themselves rich with plunder and safely ensconced in a priory called Christchurch. But that cannot last. Thorgrim, in a wolf dream, has seen the enemy armies closing in, and he knows that their peace will soon be at an end. The gods do not go so easy on him and his men. He has learned that through experience and hard use. Nor are the gods the only threat they face.  

Summer comes to Ireland, and an uneasy peace holds at Loch Garman. The Northmen, eager to get to sea, work relentlessly on their ships, with the aid of their unlikely allies, the Irish, who are just as eager to see them go. But not everyone is willing to just let them sail away. Certain that God demands the heathens be punished, the one-eyed warrior turned monk Brother Becc is determined that Thorgrim and his men will not simply go free. And when another band of raiders arrives, Becc finds the excuse he needs to take action.  

1775. The American War of Independence is starting in earnest and Captain – and smuggler – Isaac Biddlecomb, pursued by HMS Rose, sacrifices his ship, the Judea, rather than surrender to the British. Forced to go on the run, and to disguise himself as a lowly ship's mate on a brig bound for Jamaica, he finds himself captured by the enemy. Can he use his wits to survive a life of servitude under the deranged captain and sadistic crew of the HMS Icarus...?

Rugged, sparsely settled, but poised on the edge of Spain's trade routes, Tortuga is an ideal base for the outcast hunters. Among them is the hulking, enigmatic Jean-Baptiste LeBoeuf, now a reluctant leader of the buccaneers. But LeBoeuf's interest in Tortuga involves more than simply escaping the Spanish Empire. Ownership of a plantation on the island has fallen into his hands, and it is his dream, his vision, to lay claim to that property and put an end to his savage and nomadic life.

1776: A decade of simmering tensions is finally coming to the boil. Determined to cast off the chains of British tyranny, the rebel government of Philadelphia has authorised the creation of the United States Navy – a brazen act of American aggression against the greatest maritime power in the world. Captain Isaac Biddlecomb sets sail in the Charlemagne on a daring mission to raid the British store of arms on New Providence Island in the Bahamas. Yet his greatest enemy is an undisciplined crew on the brink of mutiny.

Thorgrim Night Wolf, now somewhere on the south coast of Engla-land, may be closer to his goal of returning home than he has been since reaching Ireland years before, but he is still very, very far away. His son Harald, however, has ambitions beyond just getting home. Given command of one of the ships in the fleet, Harald sees a chance to put his courage on display, unleashing consequences that will lead Thorgrim into a fight against the powerful armies of Wessex, a fight he does not want.

Speeding south from Indiana after a brutal crime wave, tormented Willard Ferguson and his 16 year old girlfriend, Anna Mae, leave a wake of death and destruction behind them. Anxious to find a safe haven from the authorities, they end up taking refuge in an odd attraction called Doctor Merryweather's Menagerie. Rather than offering the solace they had hoped for, Willard and his girlfriend find themselves thrust into a grotesque world far removed from anything they ever thought existed. Several seemingly separate events slowly merge into one, as the Menagerie of Broken Dreams pulls everyone into a dark web of danger, deceit, and murder. 

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives.