Olive The Lionheart

"Brad Ricca’s Olive MacLeod is my favorite sort of woman from history—bold and unconventional, utterly unsinkable—and her story is so full of adventure and acts of courage, it’s hard to believe she actually lived. And yet she did! Brad Ricca has found a heroine for the ages, and written her tale with a winning combination of accuracy and imagination." — Paula McLain, author of Love and Ruin and The Paris Wife From the Edgar-nominated author of the bestselling Mrs. Sherlock Holmes comes the true story of a woman's quest to Africa in the 1900s to find her missing fiancé, and the adventure that ensues. In 1910, Olive MacLeod, a thirty-year-old, redheaded Scottish aristocrat, received word that her fiancé, the famous naturalist Boyd Alexander, was missing in Africa. So she went to find him. Olive the Lionheart is the thrilling true story of her astonishing journey. In jungles, swamps, cities, and deserts, Olive and her two companions, the Talbots, come face-to-face with cobras and crocodiles, wise native chiefs, a murderous leopard cult, a haunted forest, and even two adorable lion cubs that she adopts as her own. Making her way in a pair of ill-fitting boots, Olive awakens to the many forces around her, from shadowy colonial powers to an invisible Islamic warlord who may hold the key to Boyd’s disappearance. As these secrets begin to unravel, all of Olive’s assumptions prove wrong and she is forced to confront the darkest, most shocking secret of all: why she really came to Africa in the first place. Drawing on Olive’s own letters and secret diaries, Olive the Lionheart is a love story that defies all boundaries, set against the backdrop of a beautiful, unconquerable Africa. This book is not for sale in the United Kingdom.

True Raiders is The Lost City of Z meets The Da Vinci Code, from critically acclaimed author Brad Ricca. This book tells the untold true story of Monty Parker, a British rogue nobleman who, after being dared to do so by Ava Astor, the so-called “most beautiful woman in the world,” headed a secret 1909 expedition to find the fabled Ark of the Covenant. Like a real-life version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, this incredible story of adventure and mystery has almost been completely forgotten today. In 1908, Monty is approached by a strange Finnish scholar named Valter Juvelius who claims to have discovered a secret code in the Bible that reveals the location of the Ark. Monty assembles a ragtag group of blueblood adventurers, a renowned psychic, and a Franciscan father, to engage in a secret excavation just outside the city walls of Jerusalem. Using recently uncovered records from the original expedition and several newly translated sources, True Raiders is the first retelling of this group’s adventures– in the space between fact and faith, science and romance.

Nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime! This is the shocking and amazing true story of the first female U.S. District Attorney and traveling detective who found missing 18-year-old Ruth Cruger when the entire NYPD had given up. Mrs. Sherlock Holmes tells the true story of Grace Humiston, the lawyer, detective, and first woman U.S. District Attorney who turned her back on New York society life to become one of the nation's greatest crime-fighters during an era when women were still not allowed to vote. After agreeing to take the sensational case of missing eighteen-year-old Ruth Cruger, Grace and her partner, the hard-boiled detective Julius J. Kron, navigated a dangerous web of secret boyfriends, two-faced cops, underground tunnels, rumors of white slavery, and a mysterious pale man, in a desperate race against time. Brad Ricca's Mrs. Sherlock Holmes is the first-ever narrative biography of this singular woman the press nicknamed after fiction's greatest detective. Her poignant story reveals important clues about missing girls, the media, and the real truth of crime stories. Mrs. Sherlock Holmes is a nominee for the 2018 Edgar Awards for Best Fact Crime.

In time for the 75th anniversary of the Man of Steel, comes the first comprehensive literary biography of Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, creators of the DC Comics superhero Superman and the inspiration for Michael Chabon's Kavalier and Clay Drawing on ten years of research in the trenches of Cleveland libraries, boarded-up high schools, and secret, private collections, and a love of comic books, Brad Ricca's Super Boys is the first ever full biography about Superman's creators. Among scores of new discoveries, the book reveals the first stories and pictures ever published by the two, where the first Superman story really came from, the real inspiration for Lois Lane, the template for Superman's costume, and much, much more. Super Boys also tracks the boys' unknown, often mysterious lives after they left Superman, including Siegel's secret work during World War II and never-before-seen work from Shuster. Super Boys explains, finally, what exactly happened with the infamous check for $130 that pulled Superman away from his creators—and gave control of the character to the publisher. Ricca also uncovers the true nature of Jerry's father's death, a crime that has always remained a mystery. Super Boys is the story of a long friendship between boys who grew to be men and the standard that would be impossible for both of them to live up to.

Beautifully adapted and rendered through piercing illustrations by acclaimed creators Brad Ricca and Courtney Sieh, Nellie Bly’s complete, true-to-life 19th-century investigation of Blackwell Asylum captures a groundbreaking moment in history and reveals a haunting and timely glimpse at the starting point for conversations on mental health. “I said I could and I would. And I did.” While working for Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper in 1887, Nellie Bly began an undercover investigation into the local Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island. Intent on seeing what life was like on the inside, Bly fooled trained physicians into thinking she was insane—a task too easily achieved—and had herself committed. In her ten days at the asylum, Bly witnessed horrifying conditions: the food was inedible, the women were forced into labor for the staff, the nurses and doctors were cruel or indifferent, and many of the women held there had no mental disorder of any kind. Now adapted into graphic novel form by Brad​ Ricca and vividly rendered with beautiful and haunting illustrations by Courtney Sieh, Bly’s bold venture is given new life and meaning. Her fearless investigation into the living conditions at the Blackwell Asylum forever changed the field of journalism. A timely reminder to take notice of forgotten populations, Ten Days in a Mad-House warns us what happens when we look away.

Here is an America of absences, monsters, perfect sandwiches, and opposites. Here Sasquatch hides in Sears at Christmas. The night sky remembers a dog that died in orbit, compliments of the Soviets. And here, in the beginning, a five-foot-four human girl was sniffed for by hounds that stayed on Earth.

A breathtaking and sweeping epic of a family at its breaking point, Devil’s Brood shows how Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine—two monumental figures once bound by all-consuming love—became the bitterest of adversaries... A.D. 1172. Henry II’s three eldest sons conspire against him and align themselves with his greatest enemy, King Louis of France, but it’s Eleanor of Aquitaine’s involvement in the plot to overthrow her husband that proves to be the harshest betrayal. As a royal family collapses and a marriage ends in all but name, the clash between these two strong-willed and passionate souls will have far-reaching and devastating consequences throughout Christendom.

When her boyfriend goes missing and a woman turns up dead, Charlotte must connect the dots for herself before she becomes the suspect, or the next victim. Charlotte, a mid-thirties Long Island woman, has felt so alone since her promising career in neuroscience imploded. But she has an online support group; she has Rachel, a friend who has seen her through the worst of it; and now she also has Peter, a mysterious new boyfriend who has asked that their budding romance remain a total secret. That is why she is too scared to report his disappearance to the authorities when he van­ishes without a word. Weeks later, police contact her to make an ID on a body, and she fears the worst for her missing beau. Instead, she arrives at the morgue and feels a terrible relief when she sees a woman she has never met on the table in front of her. But relief is replaced by confusion, then terror, when Charlotte realizes she has become a person of interest. Why did Jane Doe have Charlotte listed as her emergency contact? Was it revenge or a warning? And where exactly does Peter factor into all this? As Charlotte becomes the prime murder suspect, she enters into a race against the clock to find out the truth about the dead woman and the connections they shared. But what she discovers is beyond anything she could have ever imagined.