Welcome back to Fresh Fiction! Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, and your book, MOON WATER?  Hi! Many thanks to Fresh Fiction for the warm welcome. Career-wise, I’m a family nurse practitioner and a long-time nursing educator. In 2015, I switched from writing nursing research articles and texts to writing novels. Creating meaningful historical fiction is the more difficult yet most rewarding writing I’ve ever done. It is an art form that requires a significant amount of time and skill to develop, especially if you want to write literary fiction. While completing my first novel, The Wiregrass, I knew I had a good story, but needed help with designing the infrastructure supporting the story. Consequently, I began taking creative writing classes with a New York Times bestselling author. The classes were difficult but incredibly valuable.  Hopefully, what I learned is evident in Moon Water, a stand-alone sequel to The Wiregrass. Interestingly, the classes also made me a more astute reader of fiction as well. In Moon Water, the protagonist, sixteen-year-old Nettie, comes home to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and gets hit with sucker punches coming from all directions. Her boyfriend since grade school wants to…

Thanks for stopping by Fresh Fiction! Can you tell us about your new series, Devil You Know, and the first book, How to Love a Duke in Ten Days? Thank you so much for having me! In the Devil You Know Series, I wanted to celebrate those fierce female friendships that so many of us rely on. Alexandra Lane, Cecelia Teague, and Francesca Cavendish meet at a boarding school and realize they’re girls who want to enjoy all of the pleasures that men are allowed and women are denied. They form the Red Rogues Society, a club where they sneak away and wear trousers, drink port, smoke cigars, and read newspapers. Their bond is secured by a secret, and they vow they’ll do anything for their life-long sisterhood, including never marry. In HOW TO LOVE A DUKE IN TEN DAYS, Lady Alexandra Lane has lived with a painful secret for a decade. She’s paid a villain to keep that secret safe, and now her money has run out. When she is offered salvation in the form of a marriage of convenience to a scarred, reclusive Duke, she realizes they’ll both have to learn how to trust before they can ever…

Complex as its luxurious brocaded gowns in rich colors, the Renaissance abounds in stories of intrigue, political maneuvering, lust, and murder, and features larger-than-life historical figures.  In this month’s column, we will look at four novels exploring this world of splendor and violence. We begin with THE VATICAN PRINCESS by C.W. Gortner, which features one of the Renaissance’s most fascinating characters, Lucrezia Borgia.  This novel, narrated in her own voice, deals with the central portion of her life, after her father, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, becomes Pope Alexander VI.  The beautiful Lucrezia and her brothers Cesare and Juan are stars of the Papal court–but also pawns in the political power games that seek to maintain the Borgias as the dominant family of Renaissance Italy. Her first marriage is annulled when the winds of fortune change, after which she is allied to a Prince of Naples.  His later death, and the convoluted scheming between marriages, lead to charges by her enemies that she was involved in murder and even incest. A third marriage to the Duke of Ferrara, scion of the equally powerful d’Este family, finally provides a measure of stability for a girl who has been forced to survive in a…