The Avelrow shelf
These books match the feeling and story ingredients you chose. Adjust the mix whenever you like.
Historical
Cormac Ashdown
In 1879 Emerald Harbour, schoolmistress Eleanor Vale is pulled into a murder investigation when Lord Bellweather is shot during Harbour Day and a missing child’s pageant crown conceals a note in her dead brother’s hand. With a dockside stranger warning her that respectable power has buried more than one truth, Eleanor must choose between the obedience that preserved her family name and the evidence that could save a child, expose a town, and burn every reputation built on silence.
Victorian Historical
Isla Bannock
Elspeth Vale was supposed to secure her father’s future with one obedient yes. Instead, she refuses Lord Haverford before a room full of London witnesses—and before dawn a blood-marked ledger appears on the steps of her father’s Belgravia house. The book bears the crest of the Imperial Textile Concern and a warning: if she marries Haverford, the ledger disappears. If she wants to know what her father’s empire truly costs, she must come alone to an abandoned dye house before noon. Elspeth has spent her life learning the rules that keep respectable women safe. Now every rule points back toward silence. Following the ledger means risking family, reputation and the only world she has ever known. Ignoring it may mean becoming part of the machinery it records.
Irish Historical
Branna O'Dwyer
Emerald Harbour, 1882. Schoolmistress Nóra Friel turns a respectable charity concert into an act of rebellion when she sings the forbidden final verse of her father's ballad, exposing the hunger and evictions powerful men prefer unnamed. Arrested into the uneasy custody of Cormac Ó Dálaigh—a childhood friend now working among the very ledgers the town distrusts—Nóra discovers the song may point to proof of stolen relief, illegal evictions and a conspiracy her father died carrying.
Scottish Historical Fiction / Political Saga
Alina MacRae
The Broken Crown Legacy
Power passes through families as surely as memory does. The Broken Crown Legacy is a Scottish political saga about inheritance, divided loyalties and what survives after authority itself begins to fracture.
Scottish Historical Fiction / Historical Romance
Alina MacRae
When Eilidh Ross splits the king’s seal and refuses an order for winter evictions, one act of defiance turns the Scottish town of Inverglass into the beginning of a republic. With soldiers closing the roads and ordinary families forced to choose between obedience and survival, Captain Fraser becomes an uneasy ally in a cause neither of them can control—and a dangerous intimacy neither expected.