Keeping company with a pirate is one thing. Falling in love with him could ruin Sophie and her eccentric family for good... Sophie Crestwood is never going to catch a husband. Her father is a gossip, her mother has her nose in a book, and little Jack has shamefully been dismissed from boarding school. Worst of all, a pirate moves next door into Pembroke Hall. When Sophie's sent to a matchmaking party at a neighboring estate, the pirate from Pembroke arrives and distracts everyone from the summer festivities. Unguarded, her feelings about the mysterious Captain Murdock bloom into a trusted friendship that Sophie fears may come to mean more than anyone could ever suspect. This book is a Jane Austen-inspired clean Regency romance. More historical romance from Danielle Thorne: Josette Proper Attire The Privateer of San Madrid The Gentlemen of the Coast Series 1. A Smuggler's Heart 2. A Captain's Bride 3. A Buccaneer's Deal

Robin Pembroke: Pirates & Winged Horses is the first book in J. B. Pelts' fiction adventure series, which will take you on a non-stop adventure-packed ride as Robin discovers his inheritance of a house on the island of Corentin and ends up spending his summer making new best friends, together chasing a fantastical pirate mystery that is interwoven with the hunt for wondrous secret treasures. -------------------------------- Robin Pembroke didn't foresee pirates playing any part in his upcoming school holidays whatsoever. But then again neither did he expect to find a secret treasure map, uncover a dinosaur fossil, sight a legendary lake monster, or make three fantastic new friends. That though is exactly what happened. Without a proper holiday in his almost-11 years of life, Robin was expecting to spend another summer in his parent's flat in rain-soaked middle England. That was until he arrived home one day to the news that his Great Aunt Dorothy had passed away and left him her estate on the island of Corentin. Robin hadn't even known that he'd had a Great Aunt Dorothy, let alone had he ever heard of Corentin. Join Robin as he and his new friends, Georgie, Millie, and Olwenn, stumble upon a pirate mystery that has been waiting over 200 years to be uncovered. After finding a secret entrance into Smuggler's Cove, clues start to mount up that point to the fact that not all of the pirates had actually died during the ambush there in 1812, the adventure unravelling secrets as they chase the story of the pirate Captain Longshadow across the island and across time. With its mysterious Breton heritage and even more mysterious stone giants standing guard over Corentin's eastern shore, the kids race from castle ruins to haunted inns to cannonballed ships as Robin explores this magical new island. As the days pass chapter by chapter, the five weeks of summer disappear in an adventure-filled haze. The solving of one mystery leads to another taking its place, and the questions mount along with the kids' realization as to the size of what it is that they are uncovering. Why had the Kerezenn really sunk? What was true reason that the lighthouse wasn't working that night? Whatever happened to the pirate ship Firemast? Where is Nante's lost treasure? And who is Captain Longshadow? Beyond Robin's new friends of Millie, who is late for just about everything and has a magical artistic talent, her brother Olwenn, with his checkered shirts and knowledge of all sorts of things about the history of Corentin, and Georgie, who lives in London but visits with her grandparents every summer and her frequent ability to be at the forefront of their adventures, we also meet many others who influence Robin's five weeks on the island. There is Alfie Andrews and his friends Nigel and Margaret who are computer wizzes and come to Robin's aid; the streaked haired Ezzie Telfair who dreams of being an archeologist; and Georgie's brother Greg together with his girlfriend Vicki Painter, who herself has a fantastic knowledge of the mysterious stone giants. Not everyone Robin encounters though is as friendly or helpful, and after he runs into the Mauriers he tries his best to avoid them for the remainder of his visit, especially Seb and Angelina who seem to have a particular hatred of his new best friends. The island of Corentin is magically brought to life in the adventure of a lifetime, and is a summer that will change Robin's world forever. Become engrossed with the tale as it races along, and get lost in that 'just one more chapter' feeling as you live through Robin's summer with him, feeling every high and celebrating every success, and being amazed at each new twist and turn. Oh, and what's the story with winged horses???

In this heart-pounding nautical action adventure, intrepid British intelligence operative Alex Hawke must thwart a secret, deadly alliance between China and France before they annihilate everyone and everything in their headlong rush towards world domination. Aboard the Star of Shanghai in the south of France, an American spy is held captive. He possesses vital, explosive intelligence linking two nations and one horrifying plot. If he is not rescued, he faces certain torture and inevitable death. In Paris, a ruthless descendant of Napoleon has risen to power, hell-bent on restoring France's former glory. His fiery ambitions are cynically stoked by a coterie of cold-blooded Mandarins, plotting behind the gates of Beijing's Forbidden City. Cloaked in secrecy, this unholy alliance devises a twisted global plan, backed by China's growing nuclear arsenal, that will send America and the world to the brink of a gut-wrenching showdown. British secret agent Alex Hawke must prepare to hurl himself deep into the nightmare visions of madmen. He will need all his strength and courage to defeat this enemy or else forfeit the lives of thousands, including his own, to an axis of evil no historian could ever have predicted.

Listening to what she terms 'unruly pirate voices' in early modern English literature, in this study Claire Jowitt offers an original and compelling analysis of the cultural meanings of 'piracy'. By examining the often marginal figure of the pirate (and also the sometimes hard-to-distinguish privateer) Jowitt shows how flexibly these figures served to comment on English nationalism, international relations, and contemporary politics. She considers the ways in which piracy can, sometimes in surprising and resourceful ways, overlap and connect with, rather than simply challenge, some of the foundations underpinning Renaissance orthodoxies-absolutism, patriarchy, hierarchy of birth, and the superiority of Europeans and the Christian religion over other peoples and belief systems. Jowitt's discussion ranges over a variety of generic forms including public drama, broadsheets and ballads, prose romance, travel writing, and poetry from the fifty-year period stretching across the reigns of three English monarchs: Elizabeth Tudor, and James and Charles Stuart. Among the early modern writers whose works are analyzed are Heywood, Hakluyt, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Wroth; and among the multifaceted historical figures discussed are Francis Drake, John Ward, Henry Mainwaring, Purser and Clinton. What she calls the 'semantics of piracy' introduces a rich symbolic vein in which these figures, operating across different cultural registers and appealing to audiences in multiple ways, represent and reflect many changing discourses, political and artistic, in early modern England. The first book-length study to look at the cultural impact of Renaissance piracy, The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630 underlines how the figure of the Renaissance pirate was not only sensational, but also culturally significant. Despite its transgressive nature, piracy also comes to be seen as one of the key mechanisms which served to connect peoples and regions during this period.

A World of Darkness and Mystery… That was what Olivia St. John discovered when she arrived at Blackthorne to serve as governess. But she was determined to uncover the secrets that haunted the estate of Lord Quenton Stamford, and bring the enigmatic nobleman out of his self-imposed gloom. Quenton Stamford had vowed that he would never trust a woman again. Until Olivia St. John came into his life. Her determination to overcome her own hardships had woken him from a long and lonely nightmare. But could he ever follow her example and learn to live—and love—again?