First of all, Happy Valentines Day to all my lovely readers.  I cannot say how much you all mean to me.  Each view is like a pearl and every subscription like a diamond tiara.  All of you make dieting and doing without chocolate on Valentine’s Day (yes, sacrilege!)bearable.

To celebrate today, I want to introduce you to one of my favorite authors — Mary Hart Perry, who is also known as Kathryn Johnson.  After all, anyone with “Hart” in their name couldn’t be more perfect for Valentine’s Day.  She writes lovely fiction in all genres, but lately has been writing these wonderful historicals with just the right amount of mystery and romance woven in.  The thing about her work is that she does the research.  These are real people, with historically correct situtations — that she has embellished, or theorized upon.  They range from Shakespeare to the daughters of Queen Victoria — and a sterner mamma you will never encounter. Here is an interview we did about the first book in her most recent series about Queen Victoria’s daughters.  The third book of which just released a few days ago.

(If you have trouble playing the video interview, you may want to update your Adobe.)

I love the bravery of her characters — especially her heroines.  They stretch the rules to utter breaking points, but always do so in a completely believable way.  If you’re like me, a history buff who gets frazzled when authors take too many liberties with place and time and character, you will not be disappointed.  Kathryn knows her stuff and she does it well.

Not to say that these stories are history in fact, but extrapolations of what might have been — whether it’s theorizing about a voyage Shakespeare may have taken (The Gentleman Poet) or what is going on in the inner sanctum of Queen Victoria’s court, her stories pose possibilities without straining belief.

The Shadow Princess, by Mary Hart Perry

To catch one of history’s most notorious killers, a princess risks losing her family, her life—and her heart…

London, 1888:  A year after Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee terror mounts in the city’s slums.  A killer has butchered two prostitutes, the crimes brutal even by London’s hardened standards.  Rumors of the murders reach Princess Vicky, daughter of Queen Victoria and grieving widow of the German Emperor Frederick III.  When her niece Princess Maud visits, she brings with her even worse news–the Metropolitan Police have a suspect. It’s Vicky’s nephew, Crown Prince Eddy. Desperate to clear her family’s name, Vicky rushes back to England. Detective Inspector Thomas Edmondson believes there is a royal cover-up behind the killings. He will stop at nothing to expose the truth and bring a murderer to justice before he can kill again.  But when Vicky joins him in searching for the man who will become known as Jack the Ripper, neither of them foresee the overpowering attraction that will draw together the royal and the commoner—or the danger their love puts them in.

Read the first two books in the series The Wild Princess and Seducing the Princess.