Perseverance Press imprint: 40 books

The Ghost in Roomette Four A California Zephyr Mystery By Janet Dawson "Engrossing..." -- Gumshoe "...a murder mystery a la Dame Agatha..." -- Terry Shames It's almost midnight on the sleek streamliner known as the California Zephyr en route from Oakland to Chicago in 1954. Heading...

Mitchelstown Castle in County Cork, seat of the notorious Anglo-Irish Kingsborough family, fairly hums with intrigue. In 1786 the new young governess, Mary Wollstonecraft, witnesses a stabbing when she attends a pagan bonfire at which an illegitimate son of the nobility is killed. When the young Irishman...

A few years after the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, where he lost his adoptive father and mentor, Pliny the Younger is asked by his friend Aurelia to help her husband Calpurnius, who has been accused of murder in Naples. Pliny has solved previous crimes, but never before has so much time and distance elapsed...

On the shores of beautiful Lake Como in Roman Italy, a Greek tragedy has taken place. Twenty years later, a skeleton falls out of a wall in Pliny’s villa, bearing mute witness to family secrets and crimes. Pliny the Younger is intelligent about everything but women. He agrees to his wife’s and...

Pliny’s servant Aurora, who is also the forbidden love of his life, has played Good Samaritan to a woman who claims to be searching for her missing husband. Thinking he can help the woman, Pliny steps in, assisted, as usual, by his friend Tacitus. But the situation turns into a web of deception...

Pliny the Younger hoped to improve relations with his unpleasant wife and her mother by investing in a warehouse on the Tiber with them. Now the building has collapsed due to heavy rains. Pliny discovers several dead people inside, including a man with a narrow red “equestrian” stripe on his tunic,...

December 23, 1952. A transcontinental train is stopped cold by a rockslide in a remote Colorado canyon. There’s a murderer aboard, one who has already killed, and will kill again unless stopped. The California Zephyr, with its run from Oakland to Chicago and back, was famous for its Vista-Domes,...

Based on a 1904 unsolved murder case, Crimson Snow weaves immigrant life, class and ethnic tensions into a taut drama centered around the Studebaker mansion in South Bend, Indiana. Hilda Johansson, a Studebaker housemaid, doesn’t want to look into the murder of her brother’s sixth-grade teacher....

Feminist Mary Wollstonecraft meets Henry Fuseli at her publisher’s circle of intellectuals, philosophers, and artists, and becomes obsessed with him and his erotic painting The Nightmare. When it is stolen, Fuseli accuses young painter Roger Peale, who is clapped into Newgate Prison. Escaping with...

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Theater of the Absurd takes on a whole new meaning when former teacher and Byron scholar Grace Hollister is hired as a script doctor for a cable film production. Hollywood wants to film the book Grace wrote about her her past academic (and extracurricular) exploits...

Hilda Johansson, expecting her first child and miserable in the summer heat, turns to crime investigation to occupy her mind. It’s a heat wave in more ways than one in the summer of 1905, as strikes, arson, and train wrecks threaten the fabric of civilized society in South Bend, Indiana. In the...

“Exciting.… Dawson keeps the suspense high as Jeri seeks to find her brother before it’s too late.” —Publishers Weekly Oakland PI Jeri Howard tackles her most personal case yet. Her brother, Brian, has disappeared and has been missing for four days before she is notified....

Horse vet Gail McCarthy's life turns stranger than fiction when her old boyfriend, Lonny Peterson, is arrested for murder-by none other than Gail's childhood friend, Bret Boncantini, now a sheriff's deputy in a Sierra foothills town. Lonny is accused of the murder of two local livestock auctioneers,...

Jane August, an artist who’s “a refugee from a wealthy family,” is visiting her estranged father and his fifth wife on the Columbia River Gorge. Doing a good turn for a wine maker from neighboring Hawk Farm, she is swept into a morass of family secrets and betrayals—in both the cozy farmhouse...