Historical Adventures

Howard loved the panoramas of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance history, which his imagination populated with daring adventurers who rival Conan and Kull for valor and brawn. Crusaders clash with Saracens in the Holy Land of Richard the Lion-Hearted and Saladin … mercenaries hire their swords to the highest bidder in the Europe of Henry VIII and the Borgias … cannons thunder on the Spanish Main as gold-crazed buccaneers swarm over besieged treasure galleons – and in the swirl of battle, Howard’s fighting men and women loom tall.

Cormac Fitzgeoffrey

“Hate! – and the glutting of vengeance!” is the battle cry of Cormac Fitzgeoffrey, a half-Irish, half-Norman man of war who follows Richard the Lion-Hearted to 12th Century Palestine – Outremer – under the banners of the Third Crusade. Even Richard voices admiration for Cormac’s skill with sword and battle-axe, a prowess direly tested when Cormac single-handedly invades the enemy stronghold of Saladin the Great. His quest: to rescue a beautiful Persian slave. And more peril awaits further east, in the castle called the Gate of the Devil, where Cormac crosses blades with fellow outlaws from a hundred lands to seize the glittering, lethal Blood of Belshazzar.

Dark Agnes

“Proud, poor, beautiful, her flaming red hair cascading onto her shoulders, Agnes de la Fere faces an arranged marriage to a brutal husband in 16th Century France. Cutting short the ceremony with a dagger-stroke, Agnes flees to escape her abusive father and follow the guidon of Guiscard de Clisson, a mercenary captain bound for the warring states of Renaissance Italy. Dark Agnes’ instinctive skill in combat wins her the name of Sword Woman. That skill is tested on the coast of France, where she foils a plot by Britain’s devious Cardinal Wolsey to undermine the French king, and again in the benighted alleys of Chartres, as she faces the vengeance of an executed sorcerer who will not die.

Black Terence Vulmea

In the age of Henry Morgan, Captain Blood, and the other legendary pirates of the Red Brotherhood, Black Vulmea is the most audacious of all, a hulking Irish buccaneer who charts the hazardous course of treasure in the West Indies and the Americas. Wrecked off the Gulf Coast, he embarks across miles of wilderness, pursued by Indians, to stake his life in a deadly game to win the fabled jewels of Montezuma. Hunted by cannibals in a ruined treasure city on the remote jungle coast of South America, he faces his greatest challenge when he is beseeched for mercy by an English sea captain whom he has sworn to kill.

Wolfshead

De Montour of Normandy is on a mission for a French duke when his trail takes him through the haunted, gloom-enshrouded forest of Villefere. There he meets a mysterious stranger from whom he inherits the horrid curse of the werewolf. Under the full moon, he finds himself possessed by a savage, bestial spirit from the dawn of time. De Montour roams the world to elude the pursuing evil spirit, fleeing at last to a remote African outpost. But the wolf-spectre always hovers close at hand, ready to transform him into a murderous beast. Small wonder that the face of De Montour is that of a man who has gazed into the maw of Hell.