Want to visit Malmaison? Paris? Josephine's court?

In my new series, SCARLETT AFFAIRS, I give you the excitement of falling in love during the tumultuous time when Europe was awash in revolutions and the rise of one unknown man to power shook the Continent and the foundations of every other country.

Sweeping you from London to Paris, I am tickled to take you to Malmaison and the problems of navigating Josephine and Bonaparte’s court. The intrigues of spies, ambassadors, merchants, military men and the women who loved and aided them create a canvas of actual events that shaped the fate of millions. 

Over the years of Bonaparte’s rise and reign, espionage agents of all nationalities tried to stop him. Many failed. Like the attempt in LORD ASHLEY’S BEAUTIFUL ABLIBI to abduct Bonaparte in June 1800. A few succeeded easily, like the attempt of the British government to plant agents throughout the Continent during the peace of the Treaty of Amiens. 

Some of these events were documented, like the abduction of the duc d’Engien. Others still remain mysteries, such as the identity of the mysterious English woman who for decades sent thousands of coded secrets home to London. And the lady who stole documents from Talleyrand in Vienna during the Congress of 1814.

In SCARLETT AFFAIRS, I take you to those cities and towns that live in our history books—and palaces and streets I have walked. They are places that exude their own charm—and hold for the people of that time secrets and challenges for agents of all countries. 

You will go to the tunnels beneath Compiègne and to the palace where Napoleon met his second wife and within minutes escorted her to their bedroom. You will go to Reims, where kings were crowned, and enter the caverns of St. Denis in Paris where they were buried. You will go to the church in Varennes where gendarmes captured Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and sent to Paris to die. You will go to Baden where a greedy German margrave sold out his subjects to Bonaparte for land and money. You will track Bonaparte and his aide Caulaincourt as they race away from Moscow and are tracked by agents all the way to Paris.

 

I will also take you to other seemingly insignificant places that really existed. A public bath house, the smelly abattoir of Montmartre, then south to the huge fortress of Amboise and the vineyards of the Loire. To Verdun where the citadel becomes the prison for hundreds of British trapped inside France by the wily new emperor.

A panoply of stories, the series will be a rich discovery of the challenges of fighting an enemy while falllng in love with one irresistible person. I hope you enjoy them all, from this first search for a missing friend, to the action-adventure of saving an entire family from death, to the rewards of stealing Bonaparte’s gold and more. Through each story, one man and woman will try to save the world from a despot—and save each other and the love they treasure above all else.