Tag: Best historical fiction novels
Champagne Chronicles: The Pin That Won 007
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, Lily Bollinger had already conquered the American market and secured the coveted Royal Warrant. She was the undisputed “Grand Dame” of Aÿ, a woman who had steered her champagne house through the darkest days of the Nazi occupation with little more than a bicycle, a prayer, and a resolve made of tempered steel. But the world was changing. The era of stiff, post-war tradition was giving way to the high-octane, jet-set glamour of the 1960s. The bubbles were shifting, and Lily knew that to remain the “toast of London,” she had to find a way to stay three steps ahead of the curve.
Her nephew, Christian Bizot, came to her with a vision that sounded, in Lily’s own sharp-witted words, a bit “cockamamie.” He believed that the world’s most famous secret agent—the man every man wanted to be and every woman wanted to be with—should abandon his varied spirits and drink only one champagne: Bollinger. At the time, James Bond was a rising cinematic phenomenon, a symbol of modern masculinity and lethal sophistication. Christian saw the marketing potential, but Lily saw a strategic challenge that would define the future of her house.
CHAMPAGNE CHRONICLES: 🍾 The Widow, The Weinführer, and the War
Setting: 1941 | Aÿ, France
The heavy thud of jackboots on the parquet floors of the Bollinger estate was a sound that made the very air feel filthy. For Lily Bollinger, the Occupation was not a political abstract; it was a physical infestation of her home. Her husband, Jacques, the man who had steered the Bollinger empire through the Great War and the Depression, was gone. He had left her a widow in a world turned gray, standing alone against a tide of field-gray uniforms.
Behind the enemy lines of her own house, Nazi soldiers had seized the west wing. They brought with them a suffocating stench that no amount of ventilation could scrub away: the smell of cheap tobacco, stale grease, and the chemical sting of petroleum jelly used to buff their boots. But the true face of the threat arrived in the form of Herr Otto Klaebisch, the Weinführer.
⛏️ The Great Bust: From Silver King to Solitude at the Matchless Mine
In my historical novel, Silver Echoes, the protagonist, Silver Dollar Tabor, spends her life trying to escape the shadow of her famous parents, but she can never truly escape the powerful, volatile element that defines her family’s existence: silver.
The story of the Tabor family is the definitive American tragedy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a tale that begins with unimaginable wealth, forged from the mountains of Colorado, and ends in a legendary, heartbreaking vigil in a frozen, one-room cabin. This is the story of the rise and the catastrophic fall of the Silver King, and how that crash left Baby Doe Tabor and Silver Dollar Tabor with nothing but a crumbling promise—the Matchless Mine.
Diamond Jim Part II: The Night the Underworld Exploded
Last time in Rebecca's SPOTLIGHT, we followed Silver Dollar Tabor as she landed a performing job on the grandest, most dangerous stage in Prohibition Chicago: Colosimo’s Café. She was performing for the vice king, Diamond Jim Colosimo, and witnessing the brewing power struggle with his protégé, Johnny Torrio, over the fortune to be made from bootlegging. We also explored the warning sign embodied by fellow singer, Dale Winter, whose marriage to Colosimo helped seal his fate. Now, we shine the searchlight on the moment the underworld exploded, and how Silver Dollar survived the violence that gave rise to the legendary Chicago Outfit.
