Spyderwort Press: 11 books

Historical mystery. In the icy winter of 1786, in the final years before the French Revolution, hunger, cold, and seething frustration with the iron grip of France’s absolute monarchy drive poor and rich alike to outright defiance. Slums, fashionable cafés, and even aristocratic mansions echo with...

Welcome to the weirder (and darker) side of the City of Light. You've probably visited—or plan to visit—the Paris Catacombs. But for history buffs, travelers trying to escape the overcrowded "must-sees," and fans of the bizarre, macabre, or morbid, there's a lot more than the...

Paris, 1796. Aristide Ravel, freelance undercover police agent and investigator, is confronted with a double murder in a fashionable apartment. The victims are Célie Montereau, the daughter of a wealthy and influential family, and the man who was blackmailing her. Rosalie Clément, an enigmatic,...

Charles-Henri Sanson is young, handsome, sophisticated, and rich. He’s also the eldest son of Paris’s most dreaded public official—and in the 1760s, after centuries of superstition, the executioner and his family are outcasts. Charles knows, despite the loathing he feels for the job, that the...

Children’s historical fiction, ages 9-12. If you should visit the Edwin Smith Historical Museum at the Athenaeum in Westfield, Massachusetts, you might meet Deborah, a very special doll. Her story, which she’ll share with the other antique dolls every night at midnight, that magical...

Louis XVI is in his grave, and Marie-Antoinette is on her way to trial. Paris is hungry, restless, and fearful in the autumn of 1793, and the guillotine’s blade is beginning to fall daily on the necks of enemies of the French Republic. Not even members of the republican government are safe from...

Paris, 1797. When illiterate servant girl Jeannette Moineau is accused of poisoning her master, police investigator Aristide Ravel cannot believe she is guilty. With stubborn witnesses, a mysterious white powder, and stolen goods all stacked against her, however, he knows it will not be easy to clear...

This is not a book on how to write historical fiction. It IS a book on how NOT to write historical fiction. If you love history and you’re hard at work on your first historical novel, but you’re wondering if your medieval Irishmen would live on potatoes, if your 17th-century pirate would...

You’re reading A TALE OF TWO CITIES for the first time—or perhaps for the fourth or fifth time. But what are gaols, bumpers, farmer-generals, tocsins, and the Court of King’s Bench? Where are Shooter’s Hill, Temple Bar, and La Force, and who on earth was Mrs. Southcott? And did all those starving...

Children’s historical fiction, ages 9-12. Tabby Copley can’t understand why, in the fall of 1773, her father would suddenly want to move their whole family from their comfortable house in a Massachusetts village to a lonely corn mill in the country, where the nearest neighbors are a mile...

Children’s historical fiction, ages 9-12. When Hannah Atwater’s father goes marching off with the Minute Men in the spring of 1775, his last words to her are, “Remember, little daughter, when I come home, you’re going to read the Bible to me.” As if poor Hannah doesn’t have...