The darkest days of Paris, 1790s. Riots ignite the street, classes struggle for power, and death rests at the foot of the guillotine. For Ani, the French Revolution is a catalyst for bringing down the corrupt aristocracy and avenging her fallen family, until she unwittingly befriends a high-ranking military nobleman who exposes the dark conspiracies of her own father' s past. Suspenseful twists, action-packed battles, narrow escapes, and daring feats of espionage find Ani walking a thin line between both sides of an epic clash brought to life in rich, gritty detail and sensory terror. When Ani becomes a pawn of rival political factions in this hostile, rapidly changing environment where naming suspects and pointing fingers is the only way to survive, eventually someone must get betrayed— either those she' s always trusted or those who' ve newly shown that trust itself might be a lie.

***Winner of the Shorts Award for Americana Fiction***A debut collection of genre-bending short histories and novellas spanning 16th- through early 20th-century.Through a historian's lens and folkloric storytelling, the pieces in SHOOT THE HORSES FIRST revel in the nuances, brutality, mythology, and tiny victories of our historical past. A launderer takes us inside the linens of the richest families in early Baltimore. A child on the Orphan Train has his teeth inspected like a horse. Civil War soldiers experience PTSD. While one woman lands on an island of the Wampanoag tribe, a woman 200 years later finds Apache in a harsh frontier. Children survive yellow fever, the desert heat, and mistaken identities; men survive severed fingers, untested medicines, and wives with obsessive compulsive disorders. Frederick Douglass' grandson plays violin at the World's Fair on Colored American Day, a woman with disabilities is kept hidden away like she...

Out Front the Following Sea is a historical epic of one woman's survival in a time when the wilderness is still wild, heresy is publicly punishable, and being independent is worse than scorned—it is a death sentence. At the onset of King William's War between French and English settlers in 1689 New England, Ruth Miner is accused of witchcraft for the murder of her parents and must flee the brutality of her town. She stows away on the ship of the only other person who knows her innocence: an audacious sailor—Owen—bound to her by years of attraction, friendship, and shared secrets. But when Owen's French ancestry finds him at odds with a violent English commander, the turmoil becomes life-or-death for the sailor, the headstrong Ruth, and the cast of Quakers, Pequot Indians, soldiers, highwaymen, and townsfolk dragged into the fray. Now Ruth must choose between sending Owen to the gallows or keeping her own neck from the noose.