Showing results by author "Edward Cline" in All Categories

The American Revolution did not just happen. It was the culmination of two centuries of Enlightenment ideas that entered men's minds and were refined and honed until they expressed themselves in an unprecedented rejection of tyranny in the name of individual rights and political freedom from the whims of arrogant monarchs and conniving, power-lusting politicians.

Cyrus Skeen is hired by Edgar Freund, the defense attorney of Enoch Paige, a notorious lecturer charged with the savage murder of his ex-wife, to find evidence that will exonerate his client of the crime. Skeen soon finds himself at odds with Freund, as well as with Detective Sergeant Robert Hoile of the San Francisco police, who is determined to send Paige to the electric chair, and with Reverend Oswald Hoxley, the pastor of a popular church. More murders are committed.

As the British Crown plans to exact its Stamp Tax on the North American colonies, Hugh Kenrick, Jack Frake, and their friends in Caxton, Virginia, plot to foil the arrival of the hated stamps in the colony. Edgar Cullis and George Mercer, also Virginians, however, scheme to switch sides. Reverdy Brune returns to Hugh's life, and Etáin, Jack's wife, acquires a new friend.

In this episode of Skeen's cases he is invited by a new political party to stand for the office of public defender in next month's city election, a city office established to provide legal representation to the poor and indigent. He declines the invitation, but strange things keep happening, such as the curious death of the current public defender and the odd behavior of the principals of the new party.

British friends of colonial rights fight to defeat the Stamp Act in Parliament in 1765, led by Dogmael Jones. In the meantime Patrick Henry takes the floor, advocates the rights of the colonies to self-governance without interference from the Crown, and denounces the Stamp Act. Hugh Kenrick, now a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, helps Henry voice the opposition.

Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick resign themselves to the likelihood of war with the Crown. Hugh returns to England on urgent personal business, while Jack prepares for the coming conflict. In the meantime, Jared Turley, an agent of Earl Basil Kenrick, posing as a Customs official, sets his sights on Hugh Kenrick to punish in the name of his employer. He allies himself with the detested new royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, and confiscates the Sparrowhawk.

It is fall,1759. The saga of Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick moves to Caxton, a small trading town on the York River in Virginia, some miles up the wide river from Yorktown. Jack Frake, after having served his eight-year indenture, is a successful tobacco planter, having inherited his property from his former master, with whom he formed a close father-son relationship. He married the master's daughter, but she and her son died in childbirth.

Book Two introduces the second young hero, Hugh Kenrick, a member of the British aristocracy. While he has all the advantages that his rank bestows on him – family, wealth, prestige, and an assured future – his quest to preserve his self identity, his liberty, and his independence clashes violently with the demands of his station.

In this new case, Skeen confronts a new kind of nemesis that has been gestating in the Middle East for centuries and is now being enabled by oil companies and careless foreign policies: Islam. While investigating three murders whose savagery is unprecedented in the annals of San Francisco crime, he begins to understand that nemesis and the threat it holds.

When Merritt Fury, a fiercely independent American entrepreneur, returns to Hong Kong on business, little does he know that he has become enmeshed in a conspiracy to confiscate his investment and render the Crown colony a dependency on the Mainland dictatorship to the north. While he suspects foul play by some of his business partners in Bluelist TungstenTrading, he also learns that he is the object of scrutiny by an underground group combating the conspiracy. He meets Amber Lee.

Cyrus Skeen, private detective, scours 1928 San Francisco in search of the man who stole a priceless medieval artifact. The thief, who is also a pathological killer, is not Skeen's only obstacle. The exquisite Frenchwoman and retured British colonel who are searching for the artifact also prove to be obstructions. Helping him in his search is his loyal and adoring secretary, Dilys Jones. Complicating the search are two Yale classmates, one of whom has penned a hit play that is headed for Broadway, but who has a secret about its true authorship. This is the other side of Sam Spade's San Francisco.

Islam's Reign of Terror chronicles the war waged against the U.S. and the West, resulting in over 24,000 acts of terror and tens of thousands of deaths in a campaign to force the world to submit unconditionally to Islam and Sharia Law. It also discusses the West's anemic, evasive response to the war declared against it, and how that insipid response only encourages terrorists and states that sponsor terrorism and other Islam-dominated nations to continue to attack the West.

During a Nob Hill society party, Skeen and his painter wife, Dilys, befriend a beautiful sculptress who turns out to be a British spy carrying important information about the extent of that infiltration in American and British governments. In A Crimson Overture, one thing leads to another, and soon Skeen is enmeshed in a conspiracy to silence him and anyone else with knowledge of the scale of espionage and treason in both countries.

It is February, 1929. Cyrus Skeen is hired by an Austrian aristocrat whom Skeen calls a "One-Worlder Gadabout", Count Paul Axel Heinrich Joachim von Wormuth-Esterházy, of Vienna, to find out who is trying to kill him. He gives Skeen a list he has compiled of 20 attempts to murder him, including flowerpots are dropped from above, a bottle of poisoned schnapps is given to him in a "welcome basket", and nearly being run over by a speeding automobile.

It is June 1929. The Roaring Twenties are still roaring, but the period is doomed. San Francisco's celebrated Cyrus Skeen, private detective and scion of Eastern wealth, is secure in his solvency; he has never bought stock on margin. He is as finicky about what stocks to invest in as he is in the kind of client he is willing to accept and work for. He is approached by Susan Harker, wife of Hosanna Harker, a noted local novelist accused of murdering his publisher, Marc Pearson.

Merritt Fury is the unconquerable American entrepreneur who, in Whisper the Guns, foiled a Red Chinese conspiracy in Hong Kong and in We Three Kings gave a Saudi sheik his just desserts. Now, in Run from Judgment, he finds himself the target of a mysterious assassin who is eliminating, one by one, the financial enablers of the world's terrorists. He is also the object of another entrepreneur's malice and finally the subject of a captivating portrait painter.

We Three Kings is about how a single man, moved by the moral principle that one's life and property are one's own, can foil the faceless enablers and defeat a vicious conspiracy to deny him his property and his life. At issue is the possession of a rare gold coin, a British £5 Queen Una, given to Fury by a man whose life he saved.

It's August, 1929. Fresh and rested from his case in The Daedàlus Conspiracy in July, which took him to the Daedàlus Grove in Northern California to foil an assassination attempt, Cyrus Skeen hires a new secretary, the promisingly capable Clara Reyes. Soon after that, he's approached by a man, Bruce Willowman, who wishes him to try to find the murderer of his younger brother, Beauregard, in San Francisco five years before.

The Sparrowhawk Companion has become an indispensable reference book for readers of the Sparrowhawk series, containing, in addition to essays by the author and other contributors about the series and period in which it is set , a chronology of Acts of Parliament from 1650 onward up until the conclusion of the American Revolution, a glossary of 18th century terms encountered in the series, a handy list of the 375 characters that appear in the story, a list of all the naval and merchant vessels, and a selective bibliography of some of the author's sources.

It is March, 1929. Cyrus Skeen is called to New York by his father, Garnett Skeen, to attend to some trust fund affairs. Skeen's detective agency is subsidized by a trust fund his father set up years before, but his mother, Eleanor "Nellie" Skeen, wishes to set up her own trust fund for her son. A daughter of an Oklahoma oil magnate, she is "very well situated" in terms of wealth. Skeen's parents, however, are driving to Nags Head in the Outer Banks of North Carolina to spend the rest of the winter.