Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Historical

In 1912, John Wade and his brother, William - children of the American consul - were kidnapped off the street in Chungking, China, and raised in the house of Eunuch Chang, the city's master criminal. Twenty-five years later, John is the eunuch's most valuable ward, a trained assassin and swindler, and William has become a talented forger. On the brink of World War II, China is in chaos. When William betrays Eunuch Chang and escapes to central China, a place of ferocious warlords and bandits, John begins a desperate search to save his brother.

Jean Marc Andreas wanted what was his by right. He was seeking justice—and he would use any means to get it. Juliette de Clement, a confidante of the royal family, could aid his search for the priceless treasure so many had killed to possess...and died to protect. But in eighteenth-century revolutionary France, a world of power and intrigue, soldiers and assassins, royalty and rebels, death could come in many forms and from any direction, and none more lethal—or more likely—than from the person you trusted most.

Blending fact and fiction, Midnight Patriots follows real-life friends Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin as they confront powerful enemies threatening America. It’s 1940. Europe is in flames. Germany occupies much of the continent, and the Blitz rains terror on London. Fritz Duquesne, a German spy straight from the history books, plots to kidnap Einstein and steal America’s nuclear secrets. Enraged by Chaplin’s mockery in The Great Dictator, Adolf Hitler dispatches an SS assassin to silence the man who ridiculed him.

It’s not even a clue. It’s a whisper, a trace, a ghost echo, drifting down through the decades via chance connections so fragile that they would disintegrate in the puff of a breath. But it’s enough to get legendary former Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger interested in the events of November 22, 1963, and the third bullet that so decisively ended the life of John F. Kennedy and set the stage for one of the most enduring controversies of our time. Swagger begins his slow night stalk through a much-traveled landscape. But he’s asking questions that few have asked before....

Halfdan and his master, Winston the Illuminator, are guests in a monastery when they’re awakened in the middle of the night and asked to solve a crime. A monk praying in the church has been brutally murdered, and his severed hand offers the first clue of a motive. As they investigate who could have committed such a heinous atrocity - and why - Halfdan and Winston must negotiate bitter rivalries within the monastery’s hierarchy, a sensitive class structure, and the tension between the new laws King Cnut has sworn to uphold and the codes of honor that precede them.

New York, 1880. Elizabeth van den Broek is the only female reporter at the Herald, the city’s most popular newspaper. Then she and her bohemian friend Carlotta Ackerman find a woman’s body wrapped like a mummy in a freshly dug hole in Central Park - the intended site of an obelisk called Cleopatra’s Needle. The macabre discovery takes Elizabeth away from the society pages to follow an investigation into New York City’s darkest shadows.

From the Vatican to the Swiss Alps, from Australia to the heartland of America, the two masterful operatives known as Saul and Drew are being drawn together to solve a violent riddle: Why have 10 old men been abducted from around the world?

Seattle, 1933. The city is in the grips of the Great Depression, Prohibition, and vice. Cutting his teeth on a small-time beat, hungry and ambitious young reporter William “Shoe” Shumacher gets a tip that could change his career. There’s been a murder at a social club on Profanity Hill—an underworld magnet for vice crimes only a privileged few can afford. The story is going to be front-page news, and Shoe is the first reporter on the scene.

Missouri, 1955. Loretta Davenport has led an isolated life as a young mother and a wife to Pete, an ambitious assistant professor at a Bible college. They’re the picture of domestic tranquility—until a local girl is murdered and Loretta begins receiving messages from beyond. Pete dismisses them as delusions of a fevered female imagination. Loretta knows they’re real—and frightening.

December 1943. In the years before the rise of Hitler, the Gerber family’s summer cottage was filled with laughter. Now, as deep drifts of snow blanket the Black Forest, German dissenter Franka Gerber is alone and hopeless. Fervor and brutality have swept through her homeland, taking away both her father and her brother and leaving her with no reason to live.

It’s 1937. Poland is about to catch fire. In the boxing ring, Jakub Szapiro commands respect, revered as a hero by the Jewish community. Outside, he instills fear as he muscles through Warsaw as enforcer for a powerful crime lord. Murder and intimidation have their rewards. He revels in luxury, spends lavishly, and indulges in all the pleasures that barbarity offers. For a man battling to be king of the underworld, life is good. Especially when it’s a frightening time to be alive.

In the glittering world of 1920s New York, the seven Ridley heirs seem to have it all: wealth, status, and protection as the city’s most powerful family. But when notorious gossip columnist Dale Caimen is found dead during their family’s renowned summer soiree, their carefully constructed world begins to crack. Behind the champagne and jazz, each adopted Ridley sibling harbors secrets that could destroy them.

Mary Fawcett refines the healing recipes she’s inherited from generations of women before her—an uncanny and moral calling to empathize with the sick. When witchfinder Matthew Hopkins arrives in her small village, stoking the fires of hate, he sees not healing but the devil at work. Mary’s benevolent skills have now cast her and her young brother under suspicion of witchery. Soon, the husband of one of Mary’s patients is found murdered, his body carved with strange symbols.

Manhattan, 1923. Scandalous flapper Dot King is found dead in her Midtown apartment, a bottle of chloroform beside her and a fortune in jewels missing. Dot’s headline-making murder grips the city. It also draws a clutch of lovers, parasites, and justice seekers into one of the city’s most mesmerizing mysteries.

In Renaissance Italy, intrigue is as intricate as carved cathedral doors, but none is so captivating as that surrounding the prized Wind Dancer, the lost treasure of a family—and of the man who will stop at nothing to reclaim it. Lionello Andreas is bound by his vow to guard the exquisite statue. But to recover what is rightfully his, he will need the help of a thief—one he can control body and soul.

A captivating tale of two passionate women separated by decades but united by a shared vision. One, the famous jeweler Suzanne Belperron, fighting to protect her company and rescue the man she loves. The other, a young auctioneer whose exceptional gifts reveal a secret that endangers her very life.

April 1940. By terms of the Soviet Nazi Nonaggression pact, the two dictatorships divided the helpless nation of Poland. Now, the Russians are rounding up enemies of the state in their occupation zone, but one essential target slips away. Dr. Sebastian Kapsky had spent years working with Walter Riedel and Werner von Braun in the early days of rocket science, but as a man with a conscience he refused to continue when he saw the perversion of their work by the Nazis. That makes him the most knowledgeable person about German superweapons outside of Germany.

In the spring of 1914, Nadia Shulkina, the daughter of Russian aristocrats, looks toward a bright future. She has no premonitions of war, let alone the revolution that is about to destroy her comfortable world. Her once-noble family is stripped of every possession, and more terrible losses soon follow. To save what's left of her family and future, Nadia marries a zealous Bolshevik in an act of calculated reinvention.

Peter Fallon, the hero of William Martin's bestselling novel Back Bay, has found evidence that a priceless treasure - an undiscovered Shakespeare play - is hidden somewhere in the venerable halls of Harvard University. An antiquarian who knows many of the school’s carefully guarded secrets, Fallon understands the powerful implications of the discovery. But as he delves into the school’s past - from witch hangings to the fires of the Civil War to the riotous 1960s - he learns that men and women have risked death, disgrace, and banishment in pursuit of this invaluable relic.

Venice, 1752. On a cold December night, a man is found strangled in a dark alley. High magistrate Marco Pisani is tasked with investigating the grisly murder. When two more bodies are discovered, it is clear there is a serial killer on the loose. Helped in his investigation by lawyer Zen, daring gondolier Nani and the cunning Chiara Renier, Pisani is determined to uncover the truth before the murderer strikes again. But to find answers, he must move among the city’s criminal underworld of spies, shady taverns and gambling halls.