For thirty years, two branches of the same royal family tore England apart over a single crown. Conn Iggulden’s Wars of the Roses series turns that bloody, tangled family feud into four fast-moving novels, following the rise and fall of kings, queens, earls and spies from the 1440s to the field of Bosworth. If you…

Gordianus the Finder makes his living asking questions that powerful Romans would rather not hear answered. Across Steven Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa series, he is hired by Cicero, threatened by Crassus, recruited by Pompey, and summoned by Julius Caesar, and his investigations take him from the law courts of Rome to the Nile and back.…

The Courtney novels are one of the great family sagas in popular fiction. Across more than three centuries, from pirate-hunting privateers in the 1660s to safari hunters in the 1980s, Wilbur Smith follows one sprawling family through wars, gold rushes, sieges, and revolutions, mostly across Africa but reaching as far as India, America, and Europe.…

Bernie Gunther is a Berlin detective who spends his career trying to stay honest in a country that no longer values honesty. He is a former homicide cop, a private eye, a reluctant SS officer, a prisoner of war, and a man on the run, and across fourteen novels Philip Kerr uses him to walk…

Brother Cadfael is a Welsh monk with a past. Before he took his vows at Shrewsbury Abbey, he was a crusader, a sailor, and a soldier, and he brings everything he learned in the world to the quiet work of his herb garden and, far more often than his prior would like, to solving murders.…

In May 1942, with the Second World War at its height, an alien invasion fleet arrives to conquer Earth. The invaders expected to find a planet of knights on horseback. Instead, they find tanks, radar, and a species a few short years away from the atomic bomb. Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar saga follows that collision across…