Wednesday, August 27, 2025

The Ballad of Midnight and McRae

  

Literary Historical Fiction / LGBT Friendly

Date Published: 07-16-2025





For Caleb McRae--devout Baptist, Texas Ranger, hero of the Wild West--life's simple enough: lawmen bring bad guys to justice, and hellfire's a sinner's fate. At least it seems that way, until he falls in love with the notorious outlaw, Henry Midnight...

Thomas Anderson of Literary Titan calls The Ballad of Midnight and McRae "wildly entertaining" and recommends it "to lovers of literary fiction, fans of Cormac McCarthy or Marilynne Robinson, and anyone who believes that stories still have the power to save."

Poet Malcolm Guite writes, "In the story of Midnight and McRae we are enabled to hear the long conversation between Pagan and Christian, and within Christianity between protestant and catholic. and on a personal level between father and son, between lover and beloved, and deep within ourselves, the conversation between the person we are pretending to be and the person we really are. And all these vital conversations are enfolded in and arise from a compelling story set on the frontiers, the badlands, and the formative days of America itself, the place where so many of these conversations need to take place."


“Wildly entertaining… Jess Lederman writes with a fierce tenderness, blending lyrical prose with grit and grace.”

—Thomas Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Literary Titan





About the Author


Jess Lederman lives with his wife and young son in Southern California, where he writes historical fiction. His debut novel, Hearts Set Free, was an award-winning Amazon best-seller. When he's not writing or playing with his son, he's usually at the piano playing Chopin and Brahms for his wife.


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Whiz Kid

  

Historical Fiction

Date Published: 07-01-2025

Publisher: Sunbury Press, Inc.



Whiz Kid is a powerful coming-of-age novel set in 1950 Philadelphia, where Jewish Navy veteran Ben Green faces impossible choices.

Pressured by his pregnant wife to finish his novel or take a secure job at a prestigious ad agency, Ben must also navigate the era’s class divisions and antisemitism. His best friend’s elite world clashes with his working-class South Philly roots and Jewish identity.

Temptation, ambition, and loyalty collide—especially when Ilene, a captivating classmate, threatens to unravel his carefully balanced life. As the Phillies’ Whiz Kids chase a pennant, Ben’s own reckoning builds to a climax, culminating in a surprising decision that redefines his future.

Co-written with David S. Burcat, Joel Burcat’s late father, Whiz Kid is a deeply American story of resilience, legacy, and the true cost of following one’s heart.


 

About the Author


Joel Burcat is a novelist and retired lawyer living in Harrisburg, Pa. His previous novels, Reap the Wind, Drink to Every Beast, Amid Rage, and Strange Fire have been award-winning thrillers. He is a Gold Medal Winner from Readers’ Favorite, a Finalist of the Next Gen Indie Book Awards, and a winner of the PennWriters Annual Writing Contest. Strange Fire was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Week.

David S. Burcat was a Navy corpsman in World War II, a graduate of University of Pennsylvania (English Literature and Dentistry), and a proud son of Camden NJ and his adopted town of Philadelphia. He worked in advertising in the 1950s before returning to Penn to study dentistry. He wrote Match Point, the novella within the novel, in about 1950. He died in 1998. Whiz Kid- A Novel is his first published book. Dave was the father of co-author, Joel Burcat.


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Tuesday, August 26, 2025

Adélaïde by Janell Strube

 


Painter of the Revolution


Historical Fiction

Date Published: forthcoming January 13, 2026

Publisher: Acorn Publishing


In a world where women are seen but rarely heard, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard refuses to be silenced.

The daughter of Parisian shopkeepers, Adélaïde dreams not of marriage or titles but of earning a place among the masters of French art. With Queen Marie Antoinette on the throne and a spirit of change in the air, anything seems possible. But as revolution brews and powerful forces conspire to deny her success, Adélaïde faces an impossible choice: protect her life—or fight for a legacy that will outlast her.

Inspired by the true story of one of the first women admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution is a sweeping, evocative portrait of ambition, courage, and resilience in the face of history’s fiercest storm.



About the Author

 


Janell Strube makes a mean barbecue sauce. She’s also a world traveler, a baker, and a bicyclist. But when she writes, her identity as an adoptee often steers her attention to topics of alienation, erased history, and displacement.

In 2024, a personal essay of hers was published in the anthology Adoption and Suicidality. Her work has also appeared in Shaking the Tree: brazen. short. memoir and A Year in Ink. Her short memoir, “Taking my Blonde Daughter to a Black Lives Matter Rally,” was selected for the 2020 San Diego Memoir Showcase, an annual live storytelling event.

While much of her writing is personal, she enjoys the freedom that comes with crafting fiction. Her desire to learn about forgotten female artists who shaped the French revolutionary period motivated her to write Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution.

When not crunching numbers as a tax executive for a hotel chain, she can be found hanging out with Shiloh the Wheaten and plotting her second book.

 

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Tuesday, August 19, 2025

The Well-Tempered Violinistby Barbara T. Carlton 

 

Historical Fiction

Date to be Published: November 5, 2025

Publisher: Acorn Publishing



Book 1 of The Gift


Marthe Adler dreams of making history as a great violinist. But in 1905 Germany, tradition and deep-seated prejudice against women musicians stand in her way. To make matters worse, her beloved father’s sudden death shatters her family’s comfortable life, pushing them to the edge of poverty.

But the violin Marthe’s father left her is a constant reminder of the profound bond between them, and it gives her the strength to begin healing. When the Köln Conservatory offers her an unexpected scholarship, she seizes her chance to reach for excellence.

Under the rigorous tutelage of Professorin Wolff, and subjected to predatory harassment by a fellow student determined to destroy both her self-worth and her chances of success, Marthe quickly learns she will need more than motivation and talent to rise to the top.

Filled with heart, wit, and music, The Well-Tempered Violinist is an enduring coming-of-age tale about an artist striving for greatness against enormous odds.


Excerpt


FEBRUARY 1949, HEIDELBERG

In the very beginning was the sound, bright and rich, with an edge of darkness.

I knew it before birth, my mother said, for whenever my father played, I became still in her womb, as if I were mesmerized.

In the sitting room of our house in Eberlinstrasse, I became the audience, propped with pillows before I could sit up, listening to my father and his friends play string quartets on Saturday nights—for love, he said, not money, for he was a banker, though as a young man he had studied with the famous Schradieck in Hamburg. Later, he told me I never fussed, never had to be removed, but remained transfixed, no matter how rough the music nor how often they repeated it. So perhaps my mother was right.

***

The second beginning was my fourth birthday, when my baby sister Anni stuck her fist into my birthday cake when no one was looking and my grandparents gave me a music box that played “Papageno’s Magic Bells” from The Magic Flute, which I listened to until everyone but me was sick of it. Best of all, my father gave me my own small violin and began to teach me its mysteries. First, the names of the strings and their personalities: A, sensible and even-tempered; D, cheerful and impetuous; down to G, serious and thoughtful; up to E, nervous and temperamental, with a tendency to squeak. How to tune them, how to find the notes and make them pure instead of scratchy. He turned exercises and drills into games and improvised harmony to my children’s songs, something different every time. Alle Meine Entchen, All My Ducklings. Bruder Jakob, a round. Kleines Mädchen, Little Girl—my favorite, because it was about me.

I practiced every afternoon for my evening lesson. Occasionally, with nerves like caterpillars in my stomach, I played for the applause and praise of my father’s friends. I might have thought all children were as docile as myself, if not for Anni. Anni’s temper tantrums, Anni thundering up and down the stairs, Anni meddling with my toys and often breaking them. I couldn’t imagine where my parents had found her, or why. Someday, I thought—preferably soon—she would run off to become a pirate and leave us in peace.

The pirate would surely come to no good. But I dreamed I would become a famous violinist and lead an exotic and sophisticated life on the concert stages of the world.

***

When I outgrew my first violin, Anni inherited it and my father began to teach her—at least, he tried. Anni never practiced and she hated lessons of all kinds. The experiment was short-lived and a spectacular failure.

I felt horribly smug for weeks.

My father and I shared a secret language, a world full of treasures where Anni couldn’t stick in her fat little fist and grab anything and where my mother didn’t care to go. A bond grew between us as between two fibers of the same tree, pure and deep. . .

***

 

MARCH 1906, KÖLN

Both of these beginnings came before the real one, like the prologue in fiction.

The third beginning, the real one, is now: a cold March morning a month past my eighteenth birthday, before the grand front door of one of the grandest houses in Köln. Herr Dietrich keeps a firm grip on my elbow, probably to keep me from running away. In my other hand, I carry my violin in its case. This house, on Leopoldstrasse in the heart of the Lindenthal district, belongs to Herr Ferdinand Kurtz, president of the Bank of Köln. My father’s bank.

Yes. It begins here.

The violin I carry is my father’s, because he is dead.

 

***

 


About the Author


Retired architect Barbara Thornburgh Carlton is an author of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Though not a musician, she remains music-adjacent as a volunteer for the San Diego Opera and the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival in Washington. The mother of two grown children who are remarkably considerate about keeping in touch, she lives in San Diego, California, with her photographer husband, Barry.

The Well-Tempered Violinist, Book 1 of The Gift series, is her first novel.

 

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Instagram: @btcarlton_writer


 

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Thursday, July 24, 2025

Scars of Sand and Soil by Jean K. Kravitz

  

Historical Fiction

Date Published: July 24th, 2025

Publisher: Acorn Publishing





 


What’s left of a man’s soul when everything he loves is taken from him?

 

It’s 1864, and Gabriel Cooper couldn’t care less about the civil war raging around him. Framed for crimes he didn’t commit, he’s been sentenced to a Confederate chain gang, where swampland justice rules and alligators prey on the unwary.

So when Colonel Robert Tremont rides into camp offering freedom in exchange for fighting on the front lines, Gabriel jumps at the opportunity. He thrives as a soldier, but the end of the war leaves him adrift.

Gabriel ends up in New Orleans, where he meets Simone Livingston, a fiercely independent woman with hidden scars of her own. Kept on a tight rein by her overbearing father, Simone only wants freedom—and the enigmatic Gabriel.

But Gabriel has unfinished business and a mind for vengeance. Will he be able to create a peaceful life with Simone or will his greed and thirst for retribution keep them trapped in a dangerous web of deceit—a web Gabriel fears can only be untangled with murder.


About the Author


As the quintessential queen of “what if,” Jean Kravitz channeled her active imagination to pen her debut novel, Scars of Sand and Soil. However, achieving her childhood dream of being a published writer was not a straightforward path.

Jean earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in human development and aging from the University of California, San Francisco. She went into clinical research in pharmaceuticals, but left her career when her children were born. Then, she picked up writing again, honed her craft, published articles in a small newspaper, and passionately immersed herself in historical research.

Jean has many interests, including reading, gardening, needlepoint, and learning new languages. She lives in Southern California and has a husband, two daughters, and two cats, Lenny and Penny.

 

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Monday, July 21, 2025

The Place of Blood – Rinn-Iru Conall Book I by David H. Millar Genre: Historical Fantasy

  


Heroes and villains from myth, legend, and history converge in this saga set in the vast ancient forests, treacherous bogs, snow-capped mountains, and mysterious lochs of Scotland some four hundred years before the birth of Christ.


The Place of Blood – Rinn-Iru

Conall Book I

by David H. Millar

Genre: Historical Fantasy




Over four hundred years before the birth of Christ, the island of Ériu is a patchwork of feuding kingdoms, vast plains, and frozen bogs. Battle, intrigue, betrayals, and courage are part of life for the Celts who call Ériu home.


At the same time, from their underground halls, the mysterious demi-goddesses of the Aes Sídhe seduce brave warriors, turning men into kings and binding them with fearsome geis.


Conall Mac Gabhann is content with his apprenticeship with the local blacksmith. Content, that is, until he finds his family slaughtered in their home. Two men share responsibility for the massacre: a mad Irish king and a dissolute Roman. Conall will have his vengeance or die in the attempt.


Accompanied by his childhood love—the beautiful but dark-spirited—Mórrígan, and the veteran warrior Fearghal, Conall's quest takes him northward through unfriendly kingdoms to a confrontation beyond the ancient earthworks of the Black Pig's Dyke.


Along the way, Conall and Mórrígan will gather an army and come under the influence of the Aes Sídhe. If Conall desires, an apprentice blacksmith will become a king. Who knows what Mórrígan will become?


The Conall Series contains scenes of sex and violence and language appropriate to the period (400 B.C.) it is set in. It is not recommended for those under 14 without parental consent.

 

 

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The Raven's Flight – Eitilt an Fhiagh Dhuibh

Conall Book II



Conall II: The Raven’s Flight continues to chronicle the story of Conall and Mórrígan and the epic journey of the warriors from Ériu (Ireland).


Conall and his brooding queen, Mórrígan, lead over two thousand warriors with their followers across the narrow sea separating Ériu from Albu (Britain). Their quest: the capture of Cassius Fabius Scaeva, the dissolute Roman held responsible for the slaughter of their families.


The Ériu encounter human, natural, and supernatural foes and friends. At the mercy of the Aes Sídhe, a race of demi-goddesses who demand that he fulfil his geis, Conall is named the Hand of the Goddess and given the instrument that will crush the Na Daoine Tùrsach—a tribe of fanatical, blood-lusting priests.


They battle fierce northern tribes: the Forest People's one-eyed king, Drostan Ruadh, opposes their presence, as do the Na Mèadaidh, led by the sly Finnean Mac Sèitheach. Yet, not all are enemies. The Raven People offer their support, although it too comes at a price.


Heroes and villains from myth, legend, and history converge in this saga set in the vast ancient forests, frozen bogs, snow-capped mountains, and mysterious lochs of Scotland some four hundred years before the birth of Christ.

 

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The Sisters – Na Deirfiúracha

Conall Book III




It is 406 B.C. The Gaels tramp battle through the vast forests of Northern Albu and cross the brooding moors and marshes to reach the grain fields of Southern Albu. The majestic stone brochs, crannags and dùin of the north give way to the great hillforts of the South.


The Sisters is the third book of the series. In this tale, the fearsome women surrounding Conall take centre stage.


A malevolent queen bent on conquering Northern Albu launches an invasion and kidnaps the twin daughters of Conall and Mórrígan. The king's and queen's blood oath promises no mercy until the young twins are returned.


A merciless assassin stalks the community, and Tadhg is given the unenviable task of tracking the killer down. His mission worsens when the signs point to one of the women close to Conall, and he becomes the target.


Which partners are loyal to their hand-fasting oaths, and who will betray them? Will honour be redeemed on the battlefield?


Amid the battles, betrayals and intrigue, Mòrag, a tall beauty and fearsome warrior, desires Conall at any cost. A clash with Conall’s queen, also known as The Dark Huntress, is inevitable.

  

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A Brace of Eagles - Snaidhm Iolar

Conall Book IV



Butter-gold and cruelly hooked, the beak ripped a ragged gash across the newborn’s throat.”

Blacksmith’s son, Conall Mac Gabhann’s only desire was to follow in his father’s footsteps and enjoy a long life with his childhood love, Mórrígan. The slaughter of their parents dashed those dreams. Fuelled by vengeance, both embark on the dark path of retribution.


From the ancient forest, two great eagles take wing. With amber-gold eyes, Fate and the Goddess watch, ready to guide and meddle in human lives.


Conall, now Clann Ui Flaithimh’s ‘king over kings’, must complete his geis—at any cost. He takes another stride closer to Rome and a reckoning with Marcus Fabius Ambustus. Flat-bottomed biremes carry Conall’s army across the Muir nIocht to crash on the shingle beaches of Northwestern Gaul.
New enemies and uneasy alliances flourish. Assassins, treason, and betrayal thrive.


Above all, Conall values loyalty. Thus, treason within the tribe sours his belly. Mercy will have no part in his response.


The fourth novel in the Conall series, Conall IV: A Brace of Eagles, is a rousing epic of Celtic heroes and villains, bloody battles, political intrigue, honour, betrayal, tragedy and forbidden love.

 

 

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Retribution - Díoltas

Conall Book V



Witch!” Tullus gasped.
“You are not that fortunate, Roman,” came the menacing reply.”


Blood has purchased a fragile peace for Conall and Mórrígan and the close circle of friends they call family. However, allies and enemies alike wonder if the king and queen have lost the thirst for vengeance on those who slaughtered their families. Alarmed, gods, kings, and despots conspire to poke the slumbering fire.


Brennus of the Senones smarts at his defeat at Conall's hands and covets his lands and wealth. Will a bruised ego and hubris overrule the Gaulish king's typical pragmatism?


The Gaiscedach want revenge for the defeat and execution of their queen. In the dead of night, like cockroaches, they scuttle over the walls of Lugudunon.


Marcus Fabius Ambustus tolerates no challenge to his plan to be the Dictator of Rome. But has arrogance blinded him to the enemy he has nurtured?


The gates of Rome and retribution draw closer. But Conall needs his enemies as much as his friends. Still, who are enemies and who are friends? It is a time of schisms and rebuilding, of loved ones endangered, and assassins and spies revealed.


Yet, there has always been one constant: only the foolish doubt that Conall and Mórrígan will show mercy to those who threaten their family.


Conall V: Retribution is the final novel in the Conall series.



The Conall Series contains scenes of sex, violence, and language appropriate to the period (400 B.C.) in which it is set. It is not recommended for those under 14 without parental consent.

 

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Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, internationally published and award-winning author David H. Millar is the founder, owner, and author-in-residence of A Wee Publishing Company—a business formed to promote Celtic authors and literature.

David is the author of the five-volume, ancient Celtic-based Conall series and the spin-offs The Dog Roses, The Dog Roses: Resolution, The Blood Queen and Brianag: A Blood Queen Novel.

David resides in Houston, Texas, with his family and two recent family members, tuxedos Beau and Stiletto.

 

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Saturday, July 5, 2025

Whiz Kid

 

 

Historical Fiction

Date Published: 07-01-2025

Publisher: Sunbury Press, Inc.



Whiz Kid is a powerful coming-of-age novel set in 1950 Philadelphia, where Jewish Navy veteran Ben Green faces impossible choices.

Pressured by his pregnant wife to finish his novel or take a secure job at a prestigious ad agency, Ben must also navigate the era’s class divisions and antisemitism. His best friend’s elite world clashes with his working-class South Philly roots and Jewish identity.

Temptation, ambition, and loyalty collide—especially when Ilene, a captivating classmate, threatens to unravel his carefully balanced life. As the Phillies’ Whiz Kids chase a pennant, Ben’s own reckoning builds to a climax, culminating in a surprising decision that redefines his future.

Co-written with David S. Burcat, Joel Burcat’s late father, Whiz Kid is a deeply American story of resilience, legacy, and the true cost of following one’s heart.

 

About the Author


Joel Burcat is a novelist and retired lawyer living in Harrisburg, Pa. His previous novels, Reap the Wind, Drink to Every Beast, Amid Rage, and Strange Fire have been award-winning thrillers. He is a Gold Medal Winner from Readers’ Favorite, a Finalist of the Next Gen Indie Book Awards, and a winner of the PennWriters Annual Writing Contest. Strange Fire was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Week.

David S. Burcat was a Navy corpsman in World War II, a graduate of University of Pennsylvania (English Literature and Dentistry), and a proud son of Camden NJ and his adopted town of Philadelphia. He worked in advertising in the 1950s before returning to Penn to study dentistry. He wrote Match Point, the novella within the novel, in about 1950. He died in 1998. Whiz Kid- A Novel is his first published book. Dave was the father of co-author, Joel Burcat.


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