"And you thought sisters were a thing to fear. In this scandalous follow-up to Sally Christie's clever and absorbing debut, we meet none other than the Marquise de Pompadour, one of the greatest beauties of her generation and the first bourgeois mistress ever to grace the hallowed halls of Versailles. I write this before her blood is even cold. She is dead, suddenly, from a high fever. The King is inconsolable, but the way is now clear. The way is...

England, 1586. Tensions rise as threats to the realm abound. Traitors are plotting for Mary Queen of Scots to depose Elizabeth I and take the throne. Rumors of a Spanish invasion by sea mount daily. And the body of one of Sir Francis Walsingham's agents is found floating in the Thames as other agents face enemies armed with crossbows and vials of poison. Nicholas Holt, a spy in Walsingham's employ, narrowly averts the same fate while setting off in...

"In the final installment of Sally Christie's "tantalizing" (New York Daily News) Mistresses of Versailles trilogy, Jeanne Becu, a woman of astounding beauty but humble birth, works her way from the grimy back streets of Paris to the palace of Versailles, where the aging King Louis XV has become a jaded and bitter old philanderer. Jeanne bursts into his life and, as the Comtesse du Barry, quickly becomes his official mistress. "That beastly bourgeois...

Through diary entries, reveals the life of Britain's strong-willed and short-tempered Queen Victoria from the age of eight through her twenty-fourth birthday, up to her third wedding anniversary with her beloved Albert in 1843.