Moonraker S Bride

Jailed for stealing food for orphans in her care, Lucy meets a prisoner who marries her before his execution and wills her his fortune, but after her release the real adventure begins.

Born in a mission in China, Lucy Waring now finds herself with 15 small children to feed. How she tackles this task gets her thrown into the grim prison of Chengfu, where she meets a man about to die. He asks her a cryptic riddle, and its mystery echoes through all that befalls Lucy in the months that follow, even when she is brought to England, trying to make a new life with the Gresham family. Unused to English ways, she is constantly in disgrace and is soon involved in the long and bitter feud between the Greshams and the family who live across the valley in the house called Moonrakers. In England Lucy discovers danger, romance, heartache, and mystery as strange events lead her to doubt her own senses. It is only when Lucy returns to China that she finds the answers to the mysteries of her past. It is there, at the moment when all seems lost, that she finally finds where her heart belongs.

Born in a Mission in China, Lucy Waring finds herself with fifteen small children to feed and care for when she is thrown into the grim prison of Chengfu and meets Nicholas Sabine - a man condemned to death. He asks her the same cryptic riddle that Robert Falcon, another 'foreign devil', has asked her only the day before, and the mystery of this riddle echoes through Lucy's when she is brought to England by the Gresham family. Unused to English ways, she is constantly in disgrace and is soon involved in the long and bitter feud between the Greshams and the family who live across the valley in the house called Moonrakers. In England Lucy discovers danger, romance and heartache, and mystery as strange events lead her to doubt her own senses. How could she see a man, long dead, walking in the misty darkness of the valley? Who carried her unconscious into the labyrinth of the Chislehurst Caves and left her to die? It is only when Lucy returns to China, a country now at war, that she finds the answers to the mysteries of her past. It is in China, at the moment when all seems lost, that she at last finds where her heart belongs.

The story of a missionary girl in China who finds love and fortune at the height of the Boxer Rebellion and returns happily to England.

This absorbing and mysterious novel opens in the remote regions of the Himalayas, where the strange and lovely heroine, Jani, has been brought up by a runaway English soldier on the borders of Tibet. Both Jani's past and that of her soldier protector are shrouded in a mystery that grows ever deeper when she is taken away to a new and frightening world - a London orphanage. She becomes one of the family in a Hampshire household. It is here that her past is gradually uncovered, and she becomes locked in a macabre struggle, long prophesied by the High Lama of her Tibetan youth, against the strange and terrifying powers of the Silver Man when she returns to the mountains of Tibet.

New York Times bestselling author Susan Elizabeth Phillips is back with a delightful novel filled with her sassy wit and dazzling charm. He's a reclusive writer whose imagination creates chilling horror novels. She's a down-on-her-luck actress reduced to staging kids' puppet shows. He knows a dozen ways to kill his characters with his bare hands. She knows a dozen ways to kill an audience with laughs. But she's not laughing now. Annie Hewitt has arrived on Peregrine Island in the middle of a snowstorm and at the end of her resources. She's broke, dispirited, but not quite ready to give up. Her red suitcases hold the puppets she uses to make her living: sensible Dilly, spunky Scamp, and Leo, the baddest of bad guys. Her puppets, the romantic novels she loves, and a little bit of courage are all she has left. Annie couldn't be more ill prepared for what she finds when she reaches Moonraker Cottage or for the man who dwells in Harp House, the mysterious mansion that hovers above the cottage. When she was a teenager, he betrayed her in a way she can never forget or forgive. Now they're trapped together on a frozen island along with a lonely widow, a mute little girl, and townspeople who don't know how to mind their own business. Is he the villain she remembers, or has he changed? Her head says no. Her heart says yes. It's going to be a long, hot winter.