Samuel Shellabarger: 18 books

Lord Chesterfield was an immortal of his age, synonymous with the art of gracious living and representative of his world at its best in point of culture, international relations, and the social arts. Yet, today's literary world knows him through an extraordinary collection of letters to his illegitimate...

A young Frenchman and a young Englishwoman are caught in the wild plots and counterplots surrounding the Bourbon conspiracy against Francis I in 16th century France.  Complete with rich pageantry, a jealousy-maddened king, an evil nobleman, Sire Francois the Sorcerer, wolf hounds and mad gallops...

A Study in Fading Chivalry by a Professor of History at Princeton University. Pierre Bayard belonged to a generation of men so fully absorbed in the sport of war that decades of their lives were often spent in battle following the whims of kings whom they believed acted on their behalf...

Jacklin Baron, an artist of great talent, temperament, and beauty, marries an older man of character and refinement never suspecting that the real love of her life, restless and hungry as the sea, would appear on a trip to Paris and awaken her heart, challenging the path she's chosen and changing...

For five generations, dating from 1753, the ancestral home of the Tolbecken family had grown and the land had dwindled;  the house had become a mansion and the land a town block. By the end of the 19th century, not only the land, but the fortune of the Tolbecken family was diminishing, and, fiber...

“But when nothing spiritual remains, what is left to man but the worship of vanity? Lord Vanity rules our present world.”     Richard Morandi (also known as Richard Hammond) is the illegitimate son of an English lord who lives in Venice with his ballerina mother. ...

The last gift given Lady Blanche from her beloved father as a token of his love was a silver girdle – “wrought with figures men and beasts” – to be worn by one who knows lonely sorrow and the pain of toil, but also granting the strength to endure and the right of lordship. Lady Blanche dons...

Set in the early 1500s in Renaissance Italy this novel is the story of Andrea Orsini, a peasant boy who rises far and becomes a secret agent for Cesare Borgia, who entrusts him with the most delicate political, military and romantic missions, Orson Welles was cast as Borgia, Tyronne Power as Orsini in the film version.

 To every man, joy and grief before night.~Old Norse proverb Count and Countess Falke of Falkenborg are deeply in debt and are about to lose the ancient but respectably shabby family castle when they meet Patricia Morier, a wealthy American heiress, who feels a tingle along her veins...

Maryland fried chicken and cream gravy, asparagus on toast, telephone peas, hearts of lettuce with French dressing, cream cheese balls, and meringue with whipped cream, all freshly prepared by Mrs. Lee, the new manager of the Montenera Inn - an old tavern with native stone and grumbly walls and an...

Peter Court is summoned to Dunbar Manor (the stuff in the house is worth millions) at the request of the lady of the house, Nina Galliard, who submitted to an affair with an unscrupulous Italian society man in a moment of rattle-brained, life-thirsty longing to experience what was missing in her marriage,...

In underworld parlance, the period between midnight and four in the morning.  “A little blarney is the lubricant of life.” Patrick Connelly, a rookie cop with an irreverent attitude and a swell Irish brogue, gets a tough assignment to get the goods on a big dope ring in spite...

Judge Matthew Frole is a hated figurehead, a zealot of the code, intolerant, and feared.  When he's paralyzed from an unknown poison and eventually dies, his wife and children are all suspects  – of a heinous crime. Inspector Norse, first introduced to readers in Door of Death,...