True Historical

1918: As the Great War rages, Jessie Carson takes a leave of absence from the New York Public Library to work for the American Committee for Devastated France. Founded by millionaire Anne Morgan, this group of international women help rebuild destroyed French communities just miles from the front. Upon arrival, Jessie strives to establish something that the French have never seen—children’s libraries. She turns ambulances into bookmobiles and trains the first French female librarians. Then she disappears.

An orphan who spent her youth without a true home, Marion Hoxton found in the Great War something other than destruction. She discovered a chance to belong. As a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service—the Wrens—Marion gained sisters. She found purpose in her work as a motorcycle dispatch rider assigned to train and deliver carrier pigeons to the front line. And despite the constant threat of danger, she and her childhood friend Eddie began to dream of a future together. Until the battle that changed everything.

In Cult Following, Ocker sheds light on the terrifying attraction of cults, demonstrating the elasticity of belief, the desperateness of belonging, and the tragedy of trust.

The Killer Queens is a new series of historical fiction books based on true stories. Sources, such as police reports and newspaper articles, are examined to gather as many facts as possible surrounding each case. As with any work of fiction, some creative additions are made when telling these stories, usually within the conversations between the personalities involved. The various sources are the basis of these conversations and hopefully, make them come alive for the readers to help understand what was meant by those words. Book 1 of the series focuses on what has been called "The Crime of...

On January 15, 1947, the tortured body of a beautiful young woman was found in a vacant lot in Hollywood. Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, a young Hollywood hopeful, had been brutally murdered. Her murder sparked one of the greatest manhunts in California history.

James Bond has nothing on Dusko Popov. A double agent for the Abwehr, MI5 and MI6, and the FBI during World War II, Popov seduced numerous women, spoke five languages, and was a crack shot, all while maintaining his cover as a Yugoslavian diplomat....

Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa’s most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university.

She was a beautiful and happy young woman who lived a fairytale life. Shurka, her beloved husband, and their two small children lived in a pretty house in a village in Poland, surrounded by a little garden with lilies. This was their life and nothing could harm it, or so they thought…. WWII broke out and though the happy family thought the Germans would never reach their idyllic village, they quickly understood they were wrong and their happiness came to a brutal end.

In this poignant and disturbing memoir of lost innocence, coercion, survival, and healing, Dianne Lake chronicles her years with Charles Manson, revealing for the first time how she became the youngest member of his Family and offering new insights into one of the 20th century's most notorious criminals and life as one of his "girls". While much has been written about Charles Manson, this riveting account from an actual Family member is a chilling portrait that recreates in vivid detail one of the most horrifying chapters in modern American history.

1941. A talented flier, Jessie Lovelace yearns for a career in aviation. When the civilian flight school in her small Texas town begins to clandestinely train British pilots for the RAF, she fights to become an instructor. But the task isn’t without its perils of near-misses and death. Faced with the weight of her responsibilities, she finds solace with a British officer who knows firsthand the heavy price paid in war . . . until he returns to the battles he never truly left behind.

Live the action of six deadly and seminal conflicts in Australia’s first 150 years: The Eureka Stockade – The Gold miners of Ballarat valiant stand against Government tyranny. The Siege at Glenrowan – Australia’s most infamous outlaw, Ned Kelly, shoots it out with police. The Battle of Cocos Islands – The face-off between HMAS Sydney and SMS Emden would result in the Australian Navy’s first victory. The Broken Hill Massacre – A call to jihad in Turkey is the catalyst for the first terrorist act in Australia. The Battle of Surry Hills – A rambunctious American, called ‘...

At the height of the Great Depression, Los Angeles oil mogul George Allan Hancock and his crew of Smithsonian scientists came upon a gruesome scene: two bodies, mummified by the searing heat, on the shore of a remote Galápagos island. For the past four years Hancock and other American elites had traveled the South Seas to collect specimens for scientific research. On one trip to the Galápagos, Hancock was surprised to discover an equally exotic group of humans: European exiles who had fled political and economic unrest, hoping to create a utopian paradise.

In the early days of Prohibition, long before Al Capone became a household name, a German immigrant named George Remus quits practicing law and starts trafficking whiskey. Within two years he's a multi-millionaire. The press calls him "King of the Bootleggers", writing breathless stories about the Gatsby-esque events he and his glamorous second wife, Imogene, host at their Cincinnati mansion, with party favors ranging from diamond jewelry for the men to brand-new cars for the women. By the summer of 1921, Remus owns 35 percent of all the liquor in the United States.

With his boyish good looks, Arthur Warren Waite charmed into marriage the daughter of wealthy Grand Rapids business tycoon John E. Peck in 1916. He then wasted no time executing what he believed to be a flawless scheme to hijack his wife's inheritance. The plot went awry when a mysterious telegram set off a sequence of events that ultimately exposed his immoral ambition to poison all other Peck heirs. Follow Waite's fingerprints of indiscretion around Grand Rapids and New York City as author Tobin T. Buhk details this audacious plan of staggering complexity.

The Witch of New York is the first narrative history about the dueling trial lawyers, ruthless newsmen, and shameless hucksters who turned the Polly Bodine case into America’s formative tabloid trial. An origin story of how America became addicted to sensationalized reporting of criminal trials, The Witch of New York vividly reconstructs an epic mystery from Old New York—and uses the Bodine case to challenge our system of tabloid justice of today.

The leafy Avenue de Foch, one of the most exclusive residential streets in Nazi-occupied France, was Paris' hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson, who lived with his wife and young son, Phillip, at Number 11, found himself drawn into the Liberation network of the French resistance, he knew the stakes were impossibly high.

In 1912, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the US government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code breaking. There she met the man who would become her husband, groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman. Though she and Friedman are in many ways the Adam and Eve of the NSA, Elizebeth's story, incredibly, has never been told.

1st PLACE WINNER, C.I.B.A. HEMINGWAY AWARD BEST 1st BOOK, INTERNATIONAL LATINO BOOK AWARDS "An inherently compelling read from start to finish that deftly combines the elements of espionage and romance." —MBR Bookwatch "Absolutely enthralling and entertaining. Kept me engaged to the very end." —Bare Books Podcast"Absolutely enthralling and entertaining. Kept me engaged to the very end." —Bare Books Podcast "This would make a great, great film." —On the Bookshelf with Doc Kirby, WTBF "A wonderfully rendered story." —Denton Record-Chronicle "The politics and historical events are ...

"You never really retire from a life of counterterrorism, international counterfeit rings, and haute cuisine," says Serge Smith. Born in Italy shortly before the start of WW2 to a Russian-Jewish mother, Serge spoke Russian at home, Italian on the streets, and learned German at school. Later, he learned French and English. That set him up for a double life: as a private security consultant and an intelligence asset for select countries around the world. From humble beginnings as a Russian émigré, Serge went from working in secure computer centers to living a high life of danger and ...

In the midst of the devastating Hundred Years’ War between France and England, Jean de Carrouges, a Norman knight, fresh from combat in Scotland finds his wife, Marguerite, accusing squire Jacques Le Gris of brutally raping her. A deadlocked court decrees a “trial by combat” that also leaves Marguerite’s fate in the balance. For if her husband loses the duel, she will be put to death as a false accuser. While enemy troops pillage the land, and rebellion and plague threaten the lives of all, Carrouges and Le Gris meet in full armor on a walled field in Paris.