Looking over a local library’s event schedule yesterday, I came across the name of an author I hadn’t thought about for years—make that decades. He must be ancient, and if he’s still out there promoting, he’s earned an audience. I might just go and thank him for the memories. As a teenager,… Read More »History for Teenagers-A Dangerous Proposition by Peg Herring
Introduction It was while I was doing research for my first Leonardo da Vinci mystery, THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT, that I stumbled across references to a particular Tarocchi deck dating from the mid-15th century. Known as the Visconti-Sforza Tarot, it was created by Bonifacio Bembo, a skilled painter and miniaturist occasionally in the… Read More »Tarot, Leonardo, and the Renaissance by Diane A.S. Stuckart
In the coming months, many of the members of the Historical Fiction Authors Cooperative are going write about the books that influenced their decisions to write historical fiction. In my own case, I was startled to realize the enormous effect the books I read as a child had had on… Read More »Historical Fiction Books of My Childhood: Here are mine, what were yours?
Early in August of 1306, Elizabeth Bruce — wife of the newly crowned King of Scots, Robert the Bruce — was captured by the Earl of Ross at St. Duthac on the shores of Dornoch Firth. With her were the Earl of Atholl, her stepdaughter Marjorie Bruce, and her sisters-in-law… Read More »Robert and Elizabeth Bruce: A Love Story by N. Gemini Sasson
Taking up a long steel spindle—what had looked before like a knitting needle—Will scooped up a pea-sized dab of opium paste on its tip. He reclined on his side, his head on the chum tow, and rotated the tarry little mass just above the oil lamp’s flame… The little nugget… Read More »The Century of the Poppy: Opium in Nineteenth-Century America by P. B. Ryan