It is 1861. Tom Wells is in pursuit of a girl from North Carolina. He accepts an offer from his employer to leave the quiet obscurity of his job as an office boy in a London shipping firm to cross the Atlantic to Nassau in the Bahamas. Now he must face the hazards of the Union blockade of the Confederate ports in the American Civil War. Tom’s bravado may help him with the dangers of running the blockade, but how will he cope with the conflicting issues of love, loyalty and morality as he becomes entangled with a lady of easy virtue in Nassau? Tom’s adventures take him through the perilous triangle between Nassau, Charleston and Wilmington NC, where he must smuggle arms and munitions through a gauntlet of Union warships to the Southern ports, bringing cotton and tobacco back to Nassau. David Kent-Lemon presents us here with a fast paced and dynamic narrative, exploring a fascinating, dramatic and less well-known corner of that extraordinary conflict – the American Civil War. The characters are finely drawn, with the balance between deceit and morality offset by courage and humor. The realism and historical accuracy of the background complete the picture. As the Civil War reaches its climax, so does the drama in Tom's life, heightened by the historical events within which he is embroiled.

Blockade Runner

Literature & Fiction

Kent-Lemon, David

Genre Fiction

Claymore Press

Set in a period of great social unrest, this novel explores the various rivalries acted out between Royalist and Parliamentarian factions in 17th Century Britain. The real-life historical figure of Elizabeth Murray serves as the novels central protagonist; Countess Dysart and Duchess of Lauderdale, she inhabited Ham House, a Jacobean mansion built on the River Thames at Petersham. Throughout the reigns of Charles I, Charles II, James II, William and Mary, she became deeply embroiled in the politics of the Civil War. Wielding a great deal of influence due to her elevated position, and partaking in her fair share of adventure, she found herself right at the heart of the action. It is into this, which we are thrust, as Anita Seymour takes us on a breathtaking ride through the landscape of a divided England.

Royalist Rebel

Seymour, Anita

British & Irish

In February 1945, the US Air Force launched the largest daytime bombing offensive against Berlin, dropping over 2,250 tons of bombs on the German capital. The Reichsbank, Germany’s state bank, received 21 direct hits. This left the building badly damaged its vaults unsafe and meant that most of its contents were at risk. The German authorities made the decision to take most of the Reichsbank’s treasure away and hide it for safekeeping. Some $200 million US in gold bars, weighing around 100 tons, plus much of the paper currency reserves, as well as a great deal of foreign currency (approximately $4 million in US currency alone) was sent in trains from Berlin. All this loot was placed in a salt mine at a place called Merkers. The US Army captured this intact. After this disaster, the Germans spent the next six weeks transferring their remaining bullion and currency reserves around what remained of the Reich in armored trains, an area that included parts of northern Italy, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Germany, looking for somewhere safe. Much of the treasure actually either ended up back in Berlin, was stolen, disappeared or, was captured, mainly by American troops and the SS. This novel, by Colin Roderick Fulton, imagines one plot, which could have been enacted around this time. The mystery surrounding the locations and ultimate destiny of the liberated treasures provides fertile ground on which to impose such a fiction. Secrecy, intrigue, and fast-paced action combine to create a well-paced novel, sure to appeal to fans of wartime fiction.

The Reichsbank Robbery

Fulton, Colin Roderick

Peenemünde: windswept corner of the Third Reich and birthplace of the space age. Otto Fischer, a severely wounded Luftwaffe officer and former criminal investigator, is summoned to solve a seemingly incomprehensible case: the murder of a leading rocket engineer during a devastating air raid. With only days until the SS assume control of the production of a remarkable new weapon, Fischer must find a motive and perpetrator from among several thousand scientists, technicians, soldiers and forced laborers. As he struggles to get the measure of a secretive, brilliant world in which imagination moves far beyond the limits of technology, what at first appears to be a solitary crime draws him into a labyrinth of conspiracy, betrayal and treason. McDermott brings skills previously honed whilst producing well-researched history books to the discipline of writing fiction, creating work that is historically accurate and evocative as well as stylish in a literary sense.

The Peenemunde Deceptions

McDermott, James

Lucrezia Tornabuoni, brought up in the Palazzo Medici alongside Cosimo’s children, always expected to marry his charismatic younger son, Giovanni, but now in later life, she finds herself imprisoned in a loveless marriage with the gout-ridden elder son, Piero.  Like Cosimo, she sees the future salvation of the family in the hands of her own son, Lorenzo the Magnificent, but how can she be sure he inherits the mantle before Piero ruins everything? For years she has groomed her son to be a great prince, and in the process to ignore the Medici Bank – whose wealth has funded the City and Republic of Florence. But now the economy is faltering, the money is running out, the burdens of leadership are becoming more onerous for her son, and she begins to question whether she has led him astray. Her difficulty is that in the closed society of Florence, there is no-one she can confide in.  Then, while on a journey away from the city, she is approached by a young priest, Girolamo Savonarola, recently appointed to a teaching post in Florence and asking for guidance about the workings of Florentine society.  In confessing the secrets of her family to this benign outsider, she is able to unburden herself of the various worries that plague her.  But Savonarola may not be the simple monk he appears, his objectives proving troublesome in compatibility with Lucrezia’s as the two characters hurtle towards a thrilling and unexpected ending.

The House of Medici: Seeds of Decline

Charles, Edward

When Germany’s leading tank ace meets the Steppe Fox it’s a fight to the death. Faced with overwhelming odds Kampfgruppe von Schroif needs a better tank and fast; but the new Tiger tank is still on the drawing board and von Schroif must overcome bureaucracy, espionage and relentless Allied bombing to get the Tiger into battle in time to meet the ultimate challenge. Based on a true story of combat on the Russian Front, this powerful new novel is written by Emmy™ Award winning writer Bob Carruthers and newcomer Sinclair McLay. It tells the gripping saga of how the Tiger tank was born and a legend forged in the heat of combat. Gritty, intense and breath taking in its detail, this sprawling epic captures the reality of the lives and deaths of the tank crews fighting for survival on the Eastern Front, a remarkable novel worthy of comparison with ‘Das Boot’.

Tiger Command (Eastern Front)

Carruthers, Bob

They found the flying officer hanging in his hut ― another man who couldn’t take the relentless pressure of flying operations, it seemed, although his fellow officers hadn’t liked him much anyway. Besides, what was one more death among the thousands dying on the Western Front?Except that this man’s family had connections to Field Marshal Kitchener and no one wanted him distracted on the eve of the big push on the Somme. So Investigator Miller is sent to the squadron to tie up the loose ends, to tidy the incident away. For some reason they think he is well-equipped for that sort of thing.Only it is all Miller can do to keep himself alive, flying daily over the enemy lines. And then he finds the suicide isn’t quite as straightforward as it is supposed to be. Particularly when a second man turns up dead, purportedly shot with his own pistol...Set against the backdrop of the Great War and infused with a sense of intrigue and high drama, this is a novel of unsettling force. With a keen eye for detail, Oldman evokes the brutality of mud splattered battlefields and aerial combat, bringing the reader right up close to the action. As events spiral and the war continues to impact upon the investigation, peril and suspense combine to create a real sense of unease and urgency, leading towards an unexpected and fascinating conclusion.

On Wings of Death

Oldman, David J.

Ever-loyal Maddalena, a diminutive, blue-eyed, black slave, has borne Cosimo de Medici a son and seen him rise to the position of cardinal.  Now, late in life, she finds herself committed to a convent, as part of a scheme to protect the Medici Bank from ruin by Cosimo’s sons by hiding a fortune in gold for Cosimo’s grandson, Lorenzo, to inherit.  But as the months go by, and the gold does not appear, her faith in Cosimo begins to wane and with it, her confidence in her own worth. Has she been duped?  Approaching old age, she finds in the abbess a confessor, to whom she can confide her true story and perhaps, at the same time, to convince herself that her life has been worthwhile. But the abbess, too, has objectives of her own, and the two of them may not be on the same side.  Ted Townsend presents us here with an enthralling evocation of Fifteenth Century Florence,  arena of intrigue, glamour, wealth and deception. One woman's devotion forms the foundation upon which the famed Medici bank was built. The largest and most respected financial institution in Europe in it's prime, it came to represent the might of the influential Medici clan, a family of great power, borne of Italy's gold; a family who scaled the very heights of human grandeur but were to suffer through one of the most catastrophic financial crashes of early banking.

The House of Medici: Inheritance of Power

“Robin of Locksley is a murderer. A wastrel. A disappointment to his mother, a humiliation to his father and a disgrace to the entire county. We have all known it for many years, but out of respect for his excellent father, we have refrained from admitting it. We can no longer stand mute. For eighteen years, this boy has led a life of selfish ease and sin. I shall tell you something of this young man, a secret I have kept to myself for weeks but now know I must reveal. Then you will see how undeserving this boy is of forgiveness...” 1193. A Crusader returns from the Holy Land to his home in Nottinghamshire, where he is known as a murderer and outlaw. His name is Robin of Locksley. After a youth spent with lowborn friends, Robin is determined to settle into the role his father wanted for him: a lord dispensing justice to the county. But a false rumor of his death in the East has stolen Robin’s lands from him, and the country he left only four years before is now crippled by taxation and struggling to maintain the King’s law. It seems Robin must choose between his desire to regain his lost inheritance and his intention to help the commons beneath his lordship. In this vividly imagined and carefully researched recreation of the era of King Richard ‘the Lionheart’, England is torn between the landowning Norman lords and their English subjects, and it soon becomes clear to Robin that more can be accomplished outside the law than within it... In her first novel, Lauren Johnson brings the sensibilities of a historian to the project, presenting us with an authentic depiction of the sights, sounds, conflicts and furies that defined this era and those at home within its confines. A story of redemption, loss, romance and adventure, the novel possesses all the component features necessary to enthrall.

The Arrow of Sherwood

Johnson, Lauren

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Claymore Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Claymore Press