England in 1381 is already straining under taxation and unrest when Blanche Fitzjohn finds herself caught on both sides of the widening divide. In Uprising, J.E. Rizzo gives that historical conflict an unusual perspective through an illegitimate daughter of John of Gaunt whose heightened hearing and ability to smell emotion make her an outsider even before politics place her in danger. Blanche's loyalty to England's villeins, her connection to the ruling family, an unwanted marriage, and abilities she has regarded as a curse converge as rebellion moves from discontent to open revolt.

Date Published: 09-01-2026

Publisher: Literary Wanderlust

She takes solace in her studies with the local wisewoman and in her friendship with Geoff, a groom at the local manor. Until the day Henry of Lancaster, Blanche’s half-brother, brings her news of an arranged marriage to Sir Thomas Prescott, Constable of the Tower of London. Although she smells cruelty on him, Blanche agrees to marry Thomas in the hopes that her influence may help better the lives of Geoff and all England’s villeins. 

But soon, the peasants’ discontent turns to revolt. Though her heart is of the people, Blanche’s nobility makes her an enemy to the rebels. To save herself and Henry from the executioner’s ax, Blanche must use every power at her disposal, even those she once considered a curse.

Blanche Fitzjohn occupies a particularly difficult place in the conflict at the center of Uprising. She is connected by blood to John of Gaunt and the nobility, yet her sympathies lie with the villeins suffering under the conditions that fuel the revolt. Her decision to accept a marriage to Sir Thomas Prescott in the hope of improving their lives makes that divided allegiance personal long before the rebellion threatens her own survival.

Rizzo adds another layer through Blanche's extraordinary senses. Hearing sounds from miles away and smelling people's emotions could easily function as simple advantages, but Blanche has regarded these abilities as a curse. When political danger forces her to depend upon the very traits that have helped make her an outcast, the speculative element becomes directly tied to her struggle for survival. That combination of medieval unrest, divided loyalties, an arranged marriage, and unusual sensory abilities gives the historical setting a distinctive tension.

Uprising should appeal to historical fiction readers who like real periods of political upheaval filtered through the life of a character with competing loyalties. Blanche's connection to John of Gaunt places her near power while her friendship with Geoff and concern for England's villeins pull her toward those rebelling against it. Readers interested in medieval England, class conflict, and heroines forced to navigate dangerous social boundaries will find those tensions central to the story.

The novel also offers something different for readers who enjoy historical fiction with speculative and romantic elements. Blanche's heightened senses operate alongside her studies with a local wisewoman, while her arranged marriage to Thomas and friendship with Geoff complicate an already precarious position. Readers who prefer their history blended with an element that pushes just beyond the strictly historical should be especially well matched to this first book of the Fitzjohn Duology.

 J.E. Rizzo is a life-long history fanatic and writer of historical fiction, and her work can be found in Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The Tudor Times, Tudor Life Magazine, Scary Mommy, and Ultrarunning Magazine. Rizzo won Manuscript Academy’s Agent Choice Award in 2024, and her article Past and Precedence: Abortion Law in the Middle Ages and Its Use to Overturn Roe v. Wade won History Inquiry’s Medieval History Writing Challenge. 

By day, Rizzo works in Human Resources—a field offering more than ample opportunity to observe the follies and fancies of humankind. Before her career in HR, Rizzo worked as an opera singer, a professional baker, and a dog walker. These days, when not writing she can be found running ultramarathons through the forests and mountains of New England, knitting, reading, sewing, baking, or performing any number of (what some might call) old-lady hobbies. She also keeps busing caring for her two children and forty-seven houseplants, making her husband carry heavy things and cook her gourmet meals, and rehabilitating her rescue dog and semi-feral ginger cat.

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Blanche's position makes Uprising particularly intriguing: the revolt threatens her because of the noble blood that has already helped make her an outcast among the people whose suffering she understands. Her attempt to use an arranged marriage to improve the lives of others further complicates the usual boundaries between privilege and powerlessness. By the time rebellion places Blanche and Henry in danger of execution, those divided loyalties can no longer remain theoretical.

Her strange abilities sharpen that conflict in an equally personal way. The senses Blanche once considered a curse may become essential when ordinary social protections fail her. Bringing that speculative thread into the upheaval of 1381 gives Rizzo a distinctive way to explore belonging, power, and survival—and leaves Blanche facing a world in which neither her family name nor her sympathies can guarantee which side will claim her as its enemy.

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A competitive figure skater, a Peace Corps assignment in Tunis, and a marriage interrupted almost immediately by an international crisis give Goodbye Demons an unusually wide emotional range. JJ Harrigan follows Angie Fernandez Parnell and U.S. diplomat James Whitcomb through two ordeals unfolding at once: James faces deprivation, political manipulation, and uncertainty as a hostage inside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, while Angie’s refusal to remain passive leads her toward a high-risk plan that could reunite them or destroy the life she is trying to preserve.

Goodbye Demons

Author: JJ Harrigan

Genre: Suspense, Historical Fiction

Date Published: April 24, 2026

Publisher: Salty Books Publishing Company, LLC

When injuries cut short the figure skating career of Angie Fernandez Parnell, she joins the Peace Corps. She is assigned to Tunis where she finds her soulmate, U.S. diplomat James Whitcomb. At the conclusion of their tours of duty, they marry, and within weeks of the wedding, he is taken captive in the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979-81. 

James, held hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, endures the same demons that afflicted the real-life hostages during the actual crisis 45 years ago. Deprivation, bad treatment, political manipulation, and above all the uncertainty of whether or when it would all end. 

Angie, biting her nails at home, endures her own demons. How can she support him? Should she join efforts that pressure the president to negotiate a release? Or even a rescue? A take-charge person by nature, she follows a path that will reap huge benefits if it works. Or destroy her life if it fails. 

Goodbye Demons is a visceral, emotionally charged exploration of resilience in the face of adversity. It is the story of a man and a woman struggling to overcome demons beyond their control.

This was the chance of a lifetime, and Angie swore she wouldn’t blow it. She did elaborate stretching exercises and weight training. She followed a dietician’s meal plan and skated five days a week under the guidance of her coach. Angie concocted a brilliant plan to capture the Gold at Nationals and guarantee her a slot on the Olympic team. 

Her coach objected. “No woman has ever done a triple axel, and you’re not ready.” 

“I did it in practice. You saw me.” 

“You fell. A perfect double axel that you’re capable of doing trumps a triple axel that you screw up.” 

Angie was determined to do the triple without falling. She doubled down on her training regime. Bruising falls came each day. It wasn’t until a week before the competitions that she completed a triple. She grinned triumphantly at her surprised coach. Then on the next try she took a nasty fall that left her limping when she rose from the ice. Her coach sped over to her. After making sure Angie had broken no bones, she again warned her to stop trying the triple axel. 

“You’re not ready. It’s a riverboat gamble.” 

“I have to take the gamble when I’ve got the chance.” 

“You’ll have a chance next year. You’ll be stronger and more experienced. That’ll be the time to do it.” 

“In the meantime, some other girl might do it first, and nobody will ever hear about me. Even if I do one the next day. Can you tell me who was the second woman to fly across the Atlantic?”

Angie’s history as an athlete matters because it establishes the instinct that drives her throughout the novel: she would rather risk a painful fall than surrender an opportunity through caution. The excerpt places that trait on the ice, where a triple axel becomes a “riverboat gamble.” The hostage crisis later gives the same instinct far greater stakes. 

The dual storyline also allows the novel to examine powerlessness from opposing directions. James must survive confinement while decisions about his future are made elsewhere. Angie remains physically free but cannot protect her husband through ordinary means. Her refusal to remain passive creates the suspense beyond the historical outcome itself. 

Harrigan’s background as a former U.S. Service Officer and political science professor supports a premise built around diplomacy, political pressure, and the human consequences of international conflict. The result is historical fiction shaped not only by a well-known crisis but by the private calculations of a newly married couple caught inside it.

This novel belongs on the reading lists of those drawn to historical suspense in which political events are experienced through intimate relationships. The Iranian Hostage Crisis provides the larger framework, but the emotional focus remains on James and Angie as they respond to separation, uncertainty, and pressures neither can fully control. 

The story may also appeal to readers interested in diplomatic history, the Peace Corps, international service, and protagonists whose defining qualities create both their strengths and their dangers. Angie’s competitive nature, first tested in figure skating, gives the novel a heroine who responds to crisis by searching for leverage rather than accepting helplessness. 

Couples separated by military, diplomatic, or government service form another natural audience. James and Angie’s brief marriage is forced to endure a public crisis through profoundly private fear, making their relationship central to the novel rather than incidental to its historical setting.

Historical thriller author JJ Harrigan is a former US Service Officer and political science professor. He scribbles his tales of intrigue on the banks of the St. Croix River in Minnesota, where he lives with his wife, Sandy.

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The defining question in Goodbye Demons is not simply how James survives captivity. It is what happens when Angie applies the fearless logic of an elite athlete to a political crisis in which determination cannot guarantee control. 

Her willingness to gamble once distinguished her on the ice. During the hostage crisis, that same quality may become the only force capable of changing her circumstances—or the decision that destroys the life she is trying to preserve. That tension gives the novel its sharpest edge. 

By connecting a young woman’s competitive ambition, a newlywed marriage, and a defining episode in U.S. diplomatic history, Harrigan creates a story concerned with more than endurance. Goodbye Demons asks readers to consider what action means when every available choice carries a cost.

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Uprising places a young woman between the privileges of her birth and the people suffering under her father’s policies. Set against the unrest of England in 1381, J.E. Rizzo’s novel follows Blanche Fitzjohn as an arranged marriage, an approaching revolt, and heightened senses she cannot fully explain force her to decide where her loyalties belong.

Uprising

J.E. Rizzo

Book One of the Fitzjohn Duology

Genre: Historical Fiction with Speculative and Romantic Elements

Date Published: September 1, 2026

Publisher: Literary Wanderlust

England, 1381 AD: Blanche Fitzjohn is an outcast in her small coastal village. Not only is she the illegitimate daughter of John of Gaunt, the man responsible for her neighbors’ over-taxation, but she possesses strange abilities: hearing sound from miles away and smelling people’s emotions.

She takes solace in her studies with the local wisewoman and in her friendship with Geoff, a groom at the local manor. Until the day Henry of Lancaster, Blanche’s half-brother, brings her news of an arranged marriage to Sir Thomas Prescott, Constable of the Tower of London. Although she smells cruelty on him, Blanche agrees to marry Thomas in the hopes that her influence may help better the lives of Geoff and all England’s villeins.

But soon, the peasants’ discontent turns to revolt. Though her heart is of the people, Blanche’s nobility makes her an enemy to the rebels. To save herself and Henry from the executioner’s ax, Blanche must use every power at her disposal, even those she once considered a curse.

Blanche’s position gives the political conflict an unusually personal shape. She is connected by blood to John of Gaunt and Henry of Lancaster, yet her friendships, sympathies, and daily life bind her to the villeins burdened by noble rule. The coming revolt therefore threatens her from both directions: the ruling class can use her as a political asset, while the rebels may judge her by the family name she cannot escape.

Her heightened hearing and ability to detect emotions through scent add a speculative dimension without removing the story from its medieval setting. Those senses expose cruelty that others can conceal, but they also overwhelm Blanche and mark her as different. Combined with an arranged marriage to a man she already distrusts, they turn questions of consent, duty, and self-preservation into central parts of the historical struggle.

Uprising is well matched to readers who enjoy historical fiction shaped by class conflict, contested loyalties, and women attempting to exercise agency within rigid social systems. The 1381 setting and Blanche’s connection to both the nobility and the villeins will particularly interest those drawn to stories that examine major political events through an intimate, character-centered perspective.

The novel should also appeal to readers comfortable with speculative abilities woven into a recognizable historical world. Blanche’s sensory gifts influence how she understands danger, attraction, and deception, while her relationship with Geoff introduces a romantic conflict divided by rank as sharply as the country itself.

J.E. Rizzo is a life-long history fanatic and writer of historical fiction, and her work can be found in Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The Tudor Times, Tudor Life Magazine, Scary Mommy, and Ultrarunning Magazine. Rizzo won Manuscript Academy’s Agent Choice Award in 2024, and her article Past and Precedence: Abortion Law in the Middle Ages and Its Use to Overturn Roe v. Wade won History Inquiry’s Medieval History Writing Challenge.

By day, Rizzo works in Human Resources—a field offering more than ample opportunity to observe the follies and fancies of humankind. Before her career in HR, Rizzo worked as an opera singer, a professional baker, and a dog walker. These days, when not writing she can be found running ultramarathons through the forests and mountains of New England, knitting, reading, sewing, baking, or performing any number of (what some might call) old-lady hobbies. She also keeps busing caring for her two children and forty-seven houseplants, making her husband carry heavy things and cook her gourmet meals, and rehabilitating her rescue dog and semi-feral ginger cat.

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Blanche’s greatest danger may not be choosing the wrong side, but discovering that neither side fully accepts her. Noble blood makes her suspect among the rebels, while illegitimacy and unusual abilities leave her vulnerable within the world of privilege. Her proposed marriage turns that divided identity into a binding political decision just as England’s social order begins to fracture.

The chapter excerpt sharpens that conflict by showing what duty would cost Blanche personally. Her closeness with Geoff, her desire for her father’s approval, and her awareness that consent is still hers to give pull her in incompatible directions. With the Peasants’ Revolt approaching and the first half of the Fitzjohn Duology opening on September 1, Uprising promises a story in which private choices carry consequences far beyond one household.

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Rathuun: King of the Prairie places a buffalo—not a cowboy, scout, or settler—at the center of a western shaped by violent change. Rathuun survives the grizzly attack that kills his twin, only to grow into the animal every hunter wants to claim as wagons, telegraph lines, railroads, and rifles transform the plains around him. By giving its most dangerous frontier to the creature being pursued, David Fitz-Gerald approaches familiar western history from a strikingly different direction.

Rathuun: King of the Prairie
Author: David Fitz-Gerald

Frontier & Pioneer Western Fiction; US Historical Fiction; Action/Adventure

Date Published: March 20, 2026

With all the swagger of a classic western, a legendary buffalo claims his rightful place among the genre's most iconic heroes. 

Meet Rathuun. Born in an idyllic canyon, tragedy strikes on his first day. A grizzly bear scatters the herd, devours his twin, and leaves him to shiver and die. But the buffalo calf with a white spot on his chin survives. 

The plains are changing fast. Wagons roll west in endless streams. Telegraph wires stretch across the horizon. Locomotives scream down polished rails, slicing through the earth. Extinction seems imminent when everyone wants to kill the biggest buffalo on the prairie. 

Native people shoot arrows and drive herds over cliffs. Hide hunters slaughter millions. An obsessed buffalo assassin is determined to wipe them all out and change the world forever. There's an army of barking rifles, and they're all pointed at Rathuun. 

Will the hunters take Rathuun's head and leave his carcass to rot on the prairie? 

This sweeping epic thunders across the American West, taking listeners to unforgettable western landmarks. If you like classic westerns, thrilling action, and high-stakes historical adventures, grab your copy by the horns.

Welcome to the prairie!

Rathuun’s perspective changes the scale of the traditional western. Telegraph wires, locomotives, wagon traffic, and rifles are not merely signs of expansion here; they are forces closing in on a living creature whose survival has become inseparable from the fate of the prairie itself. The combination of an animal protagonist, a relentless pursuit, and a landscape undergoing permanent transformation gives the novel a distinctive tension. Its classic-western swagger remains intact, but the largest presence on the plains is also the one with the most to lose.

This novel is suited to western readers interested in the land and its wildlife as much as its human conflicts. The buffalo-centered viewpoint should also appeal to those who value survival stories, pursuit narratives, and historical fiction that examines westward expansion through its consequences. Readers drawn to large-scale action, changing frontier landscapes, and protagonists forced to endure overwhelming odds will find Rathuun’s struggle especially compelling.

David Fitz-Gerald writes frontier and pioneer western fiction from the wilds of western Vermont—about as far west as you can get without slipping into New York. 

Though he’s never wrangled beeves to market, Dave was a top hand on his grandfather’s dude ranch in the Adirondack Mountains… before he turned ten. He’s lived most of his life on dirt roads. Whenever he gets the chance, he travels west to recharge his spirit on the windswept prairies. 

He’s an Adirondack 46’er which means that he’s hiked to the top of every mountain in the park. In 2018, Dave completed the 1960s fitness craze by hiking 50 miles in one day. That’s one heck of a long walk, but not nearly as grueling as the iconic trails that he chases in his fiction. 

Even after all these years, Dave still has his head in the clouds like Ken from MY FRIEND FLICKA, and a quiet, self-reliant spirit like Sam from THE TRUMPET OF THE SWAN. That blend of wonder, heart, and spirit runs through the characters he portrays. His editor states he is “exceptionally good at creating real moments between characters”—and readers seem to agree. 

Dave’s breakthrough series, Ghosts Along the Oregon Trail won Chanticleer’s Grand Prize for Book Series. He’s now the author of nearly twenty novels and counting, and as long as there’s coffee in the kitchen, Dave will be plotting one adventurous story after another.

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Rathuun’s strongest hook is also its boldest choice: the legendary figure at the heart of this western is the buffalo being hunted. His fight to survive turns the advance of rails, wires, wagons, and rifles into an immediate threat rather than distant historical scenery. That shift in viewpoint gives the adventure both its momentum and its weight, inviting readers to see the changing prairie through the eyes of the creature who stands to lose it.

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Historical fiction often asks us to remember the events that shaped the modern world, but the most memorable stories also explore the resilience of the people who lived through them. IYSH by Greg Price is a sweeping historical saga that examines courage, perseverance, and the enduring impact of war across multiple decades. Rather than focusing solely on survival, the novel follows the long journey of rebuilding a life after unimaginable loss, offering readers a story that is as much about hope and determination as it is about history.

Fiction

Date Published: 04-17-2025

This book is a great fit for readers who enjoy:

• Historical fiction set during and after World War II
• Sweeping, character-driven stories that span decades
• Themes of courage, resilience, and hope
• Emotional journeys centered on survival and rebuilding
• Fiction inspired by real historical events

Greg Price is a writer, human resource expert and an ordained minister. He has traveled extensively throughout the world and shares his experiences by translating them into literary characters who inspire and motivate the reader. Greg immigrated to the United States from south Africa and currently lives with his wife in Mississippi.

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