When Victoria Torrington journeyed from England to claim a parcel of land in the wilds of Wyoming, she never expected to encounter the ruggedly handsome frontier judge--or the aching promise of passionate fulfillment she saw in his well-muscled body.

Victoria's Madmen is the story of those who were outcasts by temperament and choice; the non-conformists of the Victorian Age. Clive Bloom's readable account of the dark underbelly of Victoria's Britain captures the unrest bubbling under the surface of strait-laced Victorian society.

Drawn into an unprecedented raid on the British Columbia Legislature, impulsive RCMP Corporal Tim Murphy uncovers interconnected criminal activities pointing him to a startling secret with major implications for the entire country.

An unconventional figure in an age that excluded women from government, Victoria was accorded prominence unavailable to any male monarch. Yet as Adrienne Munich argues in this fascinating work, the originality of the solid, dour icon that was Victoria lay, paradoxically, in her very ordinariness. The first book to fully investigate the influence of this icon of British history, Queen Victoria's Secrets demonstrates the firm grasp the queen held on the cultural imagination of her country, exploring how Victoria created and maintained her royal authority. Gracefully weaving together feminist, anthropological, and postcolonial approaches, Munich searches out the myriad, often contradictory incarnations of the queen in the minds of her people. How did Victoria convincingly maintain her power for forty years after Prince Albert's death, never giving up her identity as a grieving widow? How did Victorian society's reverential treatment of their queen conflate with the monarch's plain, middle class public image? These are some of the secrets Munich examines in her richly detailed work. In demonstrating the subtle but powerful ways in which Victoria performed significant cultural work, Queen Victoria's Secrets goes against the grain of Victoria scholarship, which has tended to overlook the queen's political and cultural centrality. This stylish, accessible portrait will be of great interest to those who are fascinated by the myth-making and secrets of the Victorian age.

SHE VOWED TO RESIST HIS CHARM When Kathlyn McKinney saw Brad Hampton, her heart immediately began to race. Eleven years after that fateful summer, he was as dashingly handsome as ever -- but this time she wouldn't be taken in by him. Desire had made her reckless once long ago, but she was no longer an innocent girl who could be fooled by a Southern gentleman's easy charm. Still, not even the bitterness of his betrayal could extinguish Kathlyn's memory of the sweet rapture she'd known with Brad. And she couldn't ignore her own treacherous yearning for the warmth of his strong embrace and the tender magic of his kiss. . . HE VOWED TO CLAIM HER LOVE When Brad saw Kathlyn again, he found that the years had erased neither his pain at her faithlessness nor his need to make her his own. Honor required that he now help the violet-eyed beauty who had been left alone and defenseless by the war. Yet how could he protect her if she refused to trust him? With the urgency of long simmering passion, Brad swore no one would harm his lovely Southern belle. He had to keep her safe, at least until he could tempt her into offering him the fiery kisses and caresses he well remembered and surrendering with him to the ecstasy of desires too long denied!

“A fresh, lively ” perspective on Victorian England, as seen through the eight assassination attempts on Queen Victoria (Publishers Weekly, starred review). During Queen Victoria’s sixty-four years on the British throne, no fewer than eight attempts were made on her life. Seven teenage boys and one man attempted to kill her. Far from letting it inhibit her reign over the empire, Victoria used the notoriety of the attacks to her advantage. Regardless of the traitorous motives—delusions of grandeur, revenge, paranoia, petty grievances, or a preference of prison to the streets—they were a golden opportunity for the queen to revitalize the British crown, strengthen the monarchy, push through favored acts of legislation, and prove her pluck in the face of newfound public support. “It is worth being shot at,” she said, “to see how much one is loved.” Recounting what Elizabeth Barrett marveled at as “this strange mania of queen-shooting,” and the punishments, unprecedented trials, and fate of these malcontents who were more pitiable than dangerous, Paul Thomas Murphy explores the realities of life in nineteenth-century England—for both the privileged and the impoverished. From these cloak-and-dagger plots of “regicide” to Victoria’s steadfast courage, Shooting Victoria is thrilling, insightful, and, at times, completely mad historical narrative. Whether through film (Jean-Marc Vallée’s The Young Victoria), biography (Julia Baird’s Victoria: The Queen), television (Daisy Goodwin’s Victoria), or revisionist fantasy (Paul Di Filippo’s The Steampunk Trilogy) there is a strong interest in Victorian England. Now Paul Thomas Murphy approaches this period from an eccentric, entirely new, and unexplored angle, combining legal, social, and political history into a book that is both “enlightening [and] great fun” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).