Look who is in the SPOTLIGHT - The Feathered Nest (The Thornton Mysteries, Book 4) by Ellen Read #HistoricalFiction #HistoricalMystery #SuspenseFiction @ellenreadauthor @maryanneyarde

 

The Feathered Nest
(The Thornton Mysteries, Book 4)
By Ellen Read

Publication Date: 14th March 2022. Publisher: Crimson Cloak Publishing. Page Length: 372 Pages. Genre: Historical Fiction / Cosy Murder Mystery 

Murder comes to Norfolk Island, but is the killer after Alexandra Archer’s Tahitian black pearl or a lost illustration of the rare Green Parrot?

The Thorntons, along with a small team of people, mount an expedition to Norfolk Island, a small island in the South Pacific, to study the Green Parrot and set up research programmes to help protect it and other endangered birds.

As a birthday surprise, Alexandra’s father tells her she is to be the official photographer for the expedition. Her father gives her a black pearl brooch that Alexandra’s great-grandfather had bought off a merchant in Hong Kong in the 1850s. The pearls are Tahitian black pearls.

Before they depart Melbourne, they learn that Norfolk Island has had its first murder. It sends ripples of unease through Alexandra. She hoped she could escape murder on this small island paradise.

Alexandra is astonished to learn that the main inhabitants of Norfolk Island are descendants of the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian wives. Once on the island, she wonders if this is why her Tahitian black pearl brooch causes such interest.

A chain of events is set in motion, commencing with a threat on the life of one of their expedition members, followed by intrigue surrounding bird smuggling and a lost illustration of the Green Parrot. Then two of their team are murdered.

 Alexandra is determined to find the answers and nearly loses her life in the process.

You can pick up your copy of this book at Amazon (and #KindleUnlimited).

Ellen Read

Ellen Read is the author of The Dragon Sleeps, The Inca’s Curse and The Amber Trap—historical murder mystery romance novels.

Ellen was born in Queensland, Australia. 

She loves to read fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. She particularly loves history and stories of ancient myths and legends. Authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, and Victoria Holt, the latter of whom wrote gothic mystery/romances, have influenced her own work.

Other interests include photography, painting, music and musical theatre, and dance. Ellen was a ballroom dancing teacher for many years and has also worked in Performing Arts administration. 

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Book Review - Waking Up Lost – A Mystical Fantasy Adventure (The Adirondack Spirit Series) by David Fitz-Gerald @AuthorDAVIDFG @maryanneyarde

 

Waking Up Lost – A Mystical Fantasy Adventure
(The Adirondack Spirit Series)
By David Fitz-Gerald

Publication Date: December, 2021. Publisher: Outskirts Press. Page Length: 263 Pages. Genre: Historical Fantasy/Historical Fiction

Traveling without warning. Nights lost to supernatural journeys. Is one young man fat-ed to wander far from safety?

New York State, 1833. Noah Munch longs to fit in. Living with a mother who communes with ghosts and a brother with a knack for heroics, the seventeen-year-old wishes he were fearless enough to discover an extraordinary purpose of his own. But when he mysteriously awakens in the bedroom of the two beautiful daughters of the meanest man in town, he realizes his odd sleepwalking ability could potentially be deadly.

Convinced that leaving civilization is the only way to keep himself and others safe, Noah pur-sues his dream of becoming a mountain man and slips away into the primeval woods. But after a strong summer storm devastates his camp, the troubled lad finds his mystical wanderings have only just begun.

Can Noah find his place before he’s destroyed by a ruthless world?

Waking Up Lost is the immersive fourth book in the Adirondack Spirit Series of historical fic-tion. If you like coming-of-age adventures, magical realism, and stories of life on the American frontier, then you’ll love David Fitz-Gerald’s compelling chronicle.

Trigger Warnings:
Rape, torture, cruelty to animals, sex, violence.

Book Rating:

📚📚📚📚📚⭐ = A book in a million

📚📚📚📚📚 = I could not put this book down. I Highly Recommend it.

📚📚📚📚 = A really great read.

📚📚📚 = It was enjoyable.

📚📚 = It was okay.

📚 = Um...! 😕

My Review

Waking Up Lost 

📚📚📚📚📚 = I could not put this book down. 

I Highly Recommend it.

I always love coming back to a series, as you know what to expect, and you know that you will enjoy it before you even start reading. Out of this series, I have only read the prequel, The Curse of Conchobar, and what I got in this book is not at all what I was expecting! Not only is it an entirely different cast of characters, it is also set much (much) later. Then again, I did assume The Curse of Conchobar was a stand-alone novel, so I shouldn’t have expected this book to be too similar.

Noah Munch has grown up in a family where being normal makes you different. His mother and brother both have ‘gifts’, supernatural abilities. His mother talks to ghosts, and his brother has, annoyingly, an affinity to be a hero. Noah, though, is normal, and that makes him stand out. His brother overshadows him, and Noah doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere. 

Although, when Noah starts sleepwalking far away from home, waking up miles away, things start to change. No longer is he the odd one out in his family, but his gift isn’t helpful and gets him into more trouble than he was getting into before. Especially so when he wakes up in the bedroom of the girl he has a crush on, whose father would kill him first, and ask questions later. 

Noah gets into plenty of sticky situations in this book, the kind of situations that, when reading, you are certain he will never be able to get himself out of them, and that this is where his life comes to an end. But, his story continues, until the next time you’re on the edge of your seat, waiting to see if he will make it out this time. Noah is a very easy character to like, and he goes through so much, it is impossible not to feel sorry for him. But, there’s always the hope of a happy ending!

I loved how Noah’s gift, as well as his mother’s and brother’s, are portrayed, and how the historical setting mixes with it. This book is completely unputdownable, for you are left wondering what is going to happen next, and you simply have to pick it back up and find out. 

You can find this novel over on Amazon.  if you have #KindleUnlimited, then this novel is free to read with your subscription.

David Fitz-Gerald

David Fitz-Gerald writes fiction that is grounded in history and soars with the spirits. Dave en-joys getting lost in the settings he imagines and spending time with the characters he creates. Writing historical fiction is like making paintings of the past. He loves to weave fact and fiction together, stirring in action, adventure, romance, and a heavy dose of the supernatural with the hope of transporting the reader to another time and place. He is an Adirondack 46-er, which means he has hiked all of the highest peaks in New York State, so it should not be surprising when Dave attempts to glorify hikers as swashbuckling superheroes in his writing.

Social Media Links:

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Look who is in the SPOTLIGHT!!! The Virgin of the Wind Rose: A Conspiracy Thriller by Glen Craney #HistoricalThriller #HistoricalMystery #BlogTour @glencraney @maryanneyarde

 

The Virgin of the Wind Rose: A Conspiracy Thriller

By Glen Craney

Publication Date: January, 2014. Publisher: Brigid's Fire Press. Page Length: 407 Pages. Genre: Historical Mystery-Thriller

A Templar cryptogram has confounded scholars for centuries.

Is it a ticking cipher bomb just hours away from detonating a global war?

Rookie State Department lawyer Jaqueline Quartermane was never much good at puzzles. But now, assigned to investigate a ritual murder of an American in Ethiopia, she and a shady stolen-art hunter must solve the world's oldest palindrome—the infamous SATOR Square—to thwart a religious conspiracy that reaches back to the Age of Discovery and an arcane monastic order of Portuguese sea explorers.

Separated by half a millennium, two espionage plots dovetail in this breakneck thriller, driven by history's most elusive mystery....

... the shocking secret that Christopher Columbus took to the grave.

Praise

"If you love Steve Berry, Dan Brown or Umberto Eco, you may have a new author favorite in Glen Craney." -- BESTTHRILLERS.COM

"An exciting journey across time, with more twists and turns than a strawberry Twizzler." -- QUARTERDECK MAGAZINE

You can pick up your copy of this book at the following bookstores: Amazon UK, Amazon US, Amazon CA,  Amazon AU, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play

A graduate of Indiana University School of Law and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Glen Craney practiced trial law before joining the Washington, D.C. press corps to write about national politics and the Iran-contra trial for Congressional Quarterly magazine. In 1996, the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences awarded him the Nicholl Fellowship prize for best new screenwriting. His debut historical novel, The Fire and the Light, was named Best New Fiction by the National Indie Excellence Awards. He is a three-time Finalist/Honorable Mention winner of Foreword Magazine’s Book-of-the-Year, a Chaucer Award winner, and a Military Writers Society of America Gold Medalist. His books have taken readers to Occitania during the Albigensian Crusade, the Scotland of Robert Bruce, Portugal during the Age of Discovery, the trenches of France during World War I, the battlefields of the American Civil War, and the American Hoovervilles of the Great Depression. He has served as president of the Southern California Chapter of the Historical Novel Society.

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