C.J. Adrien

When Viking warlord Hasting arrives at the gates of Constantinople, he knows he can't conquer it. Not with deeds of arms alone. But fate has other plans. His failed raid turns into an opportunity: serve Empress Theodora as her sword-for-hire.

An unexpected betrayal forces Hasting to abandon his closest ally. With his heart turned black, he rekindles the savagery of his race. In sacking Nantes, his bravery and luck earn him a place in the skalds' songs....

Orphaned as a child by a blood feud and sold as a slave to an exiled chieftain in Ireland, the boy Hasting had little hope of surviving to adulthood. The gods had other plans....

King Horic is dead. The oaths that once bonded the Danes and Northmen in the islands of Aquitaine have broken. Hasting's new land is imperiled by fearsome challengers and old foes alike. A rumor from the continent will expose his deepest wound from the past....

For Hasting the Avenger, fame and glory were supposed to last forever. Two years after the legendary sack of Paris, Hasting remains haunted—not by his triumph but by the bitter twist of fate that Ragnar’s name made it into the songs of the Skalds and not his.

In the bustling frontier town of St. Louis, New Yorker Christian dreams of wealth in the fur trade, only to find himself perilously ill-equipped for its harsh realities. A rowdy tavern brawl thrusts him against the formidable trapper, Fergus MacBride.