The Steel Rose (The Boar King’s Honor Trilogy Book 2) by Nancy Northcott and Meet the Author #Books #Historical #Romance

I’ve loved stories spanning generations since London by Edward Rutherfurd, and this series sounds as interesting.

The Steel Rose (The Boar King’s Honor Trilogy Book 2) by Nancy Northcott released in April in the Historical Fantasy/Romantic Fantasy genre.

T he Boar King’s Honor Trilogy

A wizard’s misplaced trust

A king wrongly blamed for murder

A bloodline cursed until they clear the king’s name

Book 2: The Steel Rose

Amelia Mainwaring, a magically Gifted seer, is desperate to rescue the souls of her dead father and brother, who are trapped in a shadowy, wraith-filled land between life and death as the latest victims of their family curse. Lifting the curse requires clearing the name of King Richard III, who was wrongly accused of his nephews’ murder because of a mistake made by Amelia’s ancestor.

In London to seek help from a wizard scholar, Julian Winfield, Amelia has disturbing visions that warn of Napoleon Bonaparte’s escape from Elba and renewed war in Europe. A magical artifact fuels growing French support for Bonaparte. Can Amelia and Julian recover the artifact and deprive him of its power in time to avert the coming battles?

Their quest takes them from the crowded ballrooms of the London Season to the bloody field of Waterloo, demanding all of their courage, guile, and magical skill. Can they recover the artifact and stop Bonaparte? Or will all their hopes, along with Amanda’s father and brother, be doomed as a battle-weary Europe is once again engulfed in the flames of war?

The Steel Rose is the second book in the time-traveling, history-spanning fantasy series The Boar King’s Honor, from Nancy Northcott (Outcast Station, The Herald of Day).

Universal Link: readerlinks.com/l/1794929

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Steel-Rose-Kings-Honor-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B092V1RYLC

Amazon CA: https://www.amazon.ca/Steel-Rose-Kings-Honor-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B092V1RYLC

Amazon AU: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/1645540863

Author Bio:

Nancy Northcott’s childhood ambition was to grow up and become Wonder Woman. Around fourth grade, she realized it was too late to acquire Amazon genes, but she still loved comic books, science fiction, fantasy, history, and romance. She combines the emotion and high stakes, and sometimes the magic, she loves in the books she writes.

She has written freelance articles and taught at the college level. Her most popular course was on science fiction, fantasy, and society. She has also given presentations on the Wars of the Roses and Richard III to university classes studying Shakespeare’s play about Richard III. Reviewers have described her books as melding fantasy, romance, and suspense. Library Journal gave her debut novel, Renegade, a starred review, calling it “genre fiction at its best.”

In addition to the historical fantasy Boar King’s Honor trilogy, Nancy writes the Light Mage Wars paranormal romances, the Arachnid Files romantic suspense novellas, and the Lethal Webs romantic spy adventures. With Jeanne Adams, she cowrites the Outcast Station science fiction mysteries.

Married since 1987, Nancy and her husband have one son, a bossy dog, and a house full of books.

One Story, Three Books

by Nancy Northcott

Hi, Viviana, and thanks for having me!
You asked about the series as a whole and how the story correlates across the three novels. The storyline that ties the trilogy together follows the efforts of a family to lift their blood curse. According to the trilogy’s backstory, which braids historical fact, theories, and imagination, their problems began early in the reign of Richard III.
In the autumn of 1483, a wizard named Edmund Mainwaring magically helped agents of his liege lord, the Duke of Buckingham, sneak into and out of the Tower of London unnoticed. Edmund didn’t know that those agents’ mission was to kill King Richard’s nephews who were housed there. Those boys were the sons of the king’s late brother, Edward IV, but couldn’t inherit the throne after their father died because evidence came to light proving their parents’ marriage bigamous. The boys were therefore declared bastards and ineligible to rule. That left Edward IV’s younger brother, Richard, then Duke of Gloucester, as the next Yorkist male heir.
Because the political situation was unsettled, King Richard housed his nephews in the Tower to keep them from being used to further any plots. We think of the Tower of London as a prison, but it was also a royal residence. A new king traditionally spent the night before his coronation at the Tower, with the coronation procession beginning there and ending at Westminster. So placing the boys there for safekeeping allowed King Richard to house them in both comfort and security.
Neither the king nor Edmund knew Buckingham had designs on the crown for himself. Wanting all rival claimants removed, he had the boys killed and raised a rebellion against Richard III.
Horrified at what he had abetted, Edmund threw himself on the king’s mercy. Noting the chaotic political climate, the king told Edmund to keep silent until King Richard gave him leave to speak. Matters did not settle down, however, and the king went off to Bosworth Field, where he me his fate two years later without ever allowing Edmund to reveal the truth.
The Tudors who followed King Richard blamed him for his nephews’ deaths and anything else they could. If Edmund had spoken up then, he would’ve been branded a traitor and the truth would’ve been suppressed. Tormented by guilt, Edmund wrote a confession and hid it away for his son to publish when it was safe to do so. Edmund soon realized, to his dismay, that his son cared far less for the honor and reputation of a long-dead king than Edmund did. Edmund thus cursed his family, condemning the heirs or his line to not rest in life or death until the king’s name was cleared. After they die, their souls are trapped in a wraith-infested shadowland between the worlds of the living and the dead. Only Richard III’s vindication will release them.

Each book in the Boar King’s Honor trilogy follows the efforts of that generation of Mainwarings to lift the family curse. The first book, The Herald of Day, sets up the murders of the boys in the Tower and provides background on the reign of Richard III, the controversy surrounding him, and Edmund’s efforts to atone for his tragic mistake.
The second book, The Steel Rose, offers a closer look at the bigamous marriage of Edward IV and the reasons Richard III was deemed the true heir. Having been so labeled, did he have a motive to kill his nephews? If the heroine, a seer descended from Edmund, can prove he did not, will that lift the curse? Can she locate proof King Richard’s right to rule?
In the concluding book The King’s Champion, matters come to a head with regard to the family curse. The Mainwarings have one last, slender hope of vindicating Richard III and freeing their kinsmen’s souls.
If you’re looking at those plot summaries and thinking each is awfully thin to be the basis of a novel, you would be right. The Mainwaring plot is actually the secondary plot in each book. I decided to explain it first since it’s the unifying element in the trilogy.
The Mainwarings’ quest to save their kinsmen’s souls in each book is set against a larger plot focusing on a cataclysmic upheaval the hero and heroine must help set right. The Herald of Day has an alternate history plot. A power-hungry wizard has figured out how to change history to create a dictatorship of the magically Gifted. The heroine, an untrained seer, works with the Mainwaring heir of her generation to save the true timeline before the grim changes become permanent.
The Steel Rose mostly takes place between Napoleon’s escape from Elba and the Battle of Waterloo. Bonaparte bankrupted France, but his countrymen are streaming to his banner. The magically Gifted hero and heroine must find the magical artifact that’s drawing Frenchmen to his cause and steal it in hopes that will undercut his support and stop him from plunging a battle-weary Europe back into war.
The action in The King’s Champion is set in the early days of World War II, when Britain stood alone in the face of the Nazi threat. The book opens with the Dunkirk evacuation and concludes during the Blitz. The heroine and the hero, both seers, must use their Gifts to avert a threatened invasion. Meanwhile, time is running out for them to lift the curse and free the trapped souls of their family. The two stories truly come together here, and I hope readers will find the ending satisfying.