Historical Fiction Book Reviews

Review: Finding Billy Battles by Ronald E. Yates

Screen Review Finding Billy BattlesShot 2014-05-05 at 13.23.09Finding Billy Battles is the story of a rather remarkable character who lived during the last part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. The book is fiction, but according to the author, draws heavily on the author’s family history. Nonetheless, the book reads like a novel and never seems like those, usually unsuccessful, attempts to interest other people in one’s own family stories. The book gets off to a somewhat slow start, using the frame device of Battles’ great-grandson finding his great-grandfather’s journals, but soon enough becomes a page-turner about a fascinating, multidimensional character and […]

2019-01-24T19:46:44+02:00May 6th, 2014|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: , |

Review: Jesse James and the Secret Legend of Captain Coytus by Alex J. Mueck

Jesse James and the Secret Legend of Captain Coytus is the latest offering by Alex J. Mueck, an author who has shifted from more serious crime work to achieving more interesting edges in previous book Myth Man and to a much further extent in this new and bizarre title, which explores the story of Jesse James and the “truth” of his story, as ascribed by a delinquent student’s graduate thesis determined to expose this “secret legend” for fame, fortune and girls.

The story is set up in an interesting way that takes a little getting into, jumping from the present […]

2019-01-22T10:53:03+02:00December 11th, 2013|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: , |

Review: No Man’s Land: The Beginning (Book One of the Hyde’s Corner Trilogy) by J. B. Bergstad

J. B. Bergstad’s first novel, No Man’s Land, begins in 1947 with Tom Burks, grandson of Selmer Burks, leaving his hometown of Hyde’s Corner, Oklahoma to join the army. Then the story goes back to 1877 and takes up the tale of the settling of a wilderness known as “No Man’s Land,” the founding of the town of Hyde’s Corner, and the trials and tribulations of Selmer Burks—trials and tribulations that lead, inexorably and quite horribly, to the situation in Hyde’s corner in 1947.

Selmer Burks is born to a ranching family recently settled in what was then the […]

2019-01-22T17:47:06+02:00September 13th, 2013|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: , |

Review: The Book of Revelations: From Bombingham to Obama by Katy Ridnouer

The Book of Revelations: From Bombingham to Obama is a book of fiction. It is, however, based on real events, and the main character, Addie Mae Collins, was a real person. She was one of the four teenage girls who were killed in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed. Ridnouer’s novel works from the premise that Addie Mae survived the bombing, and explores the life Addie Mae might have lived had she survived.

The narrative follows Addie from her near-death at age 14 until November of 2012. The reader spends most of the book

[…]
2014-05-09T21:32:17+02:00November 2nd, 2012|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: |

Review: Maji by L.M. Meier

Maji, The Untold Adventure of the Men of the East is a fictionalized tale which will remind many readers of the Christian story of the three wise men seeking out Jesus in Bethlehem. However, the story is much more than a quaint retelling of this treasured event. Instead, it is a look behind the scenes at not only the journey of the three wise men, but also a coming of age tale about Zebedeo, a young Maji in training who accompanies the men on their journey. It is Zebedeo who drives the plot of the story as he must make […]

2014-05-19T22:32:11+02:00January 3rd, 2012|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: , |

Review: Song at Dawn by Jean Gill

Historical thriller/love story set in Narbonne just after the Second Crusade. 1150 in Provence, where love and marriage are as divided as Christian and Muslim. On the run from abuse, Estela’s musical talent finds a patron in Alienor of Aquitaine and more than a music tutor in the finst troubadour of the age, Alienor’s Commander of the Guard. Weary of war, Dragonetz los Pros uses Jewish money and Moorish expertise to build that most modern of invntions, a papermill,drawing the wrath of the Church down on his head. Their enemies gather, ready to light the political and religious powder-keg of […]

2014-05-19T22:33:19+02:00January 2nd, 2012|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: |

Review: The Wicked Wives by Gus Pelagatti

A true story from Philadelphia in 1938 that puzzled the police.

Lovers, drugs, gangs, the mafia, secret meetings, big insurance policies, dead husbands….that is what the Wicked Wives were made of.

These wives had many things in common and one of them was planning how to murder their husbands and not get caught so they could collect the insurance money. All this resulted in one dead husband after another, and the doctor listed the deaths from a rampant bout of pneumonia occurring in the city of Philadelphia. The wicked wives were not alone in the planning, though. The mastermind of […]

2011-12-12T14:52:26+02:00December 12th, 2011|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: |
Go to Top