24 Days of Holiday Giveaways: Day 10

Day 10 winners: Congratulations to Susannah and Jordana!

Day 10 and it’s time to dip our toes in the historical waters of the Thames 🙂

My historical romantic suspense, A Dangerous Madness, is my bestselling book (although DARK HORSE is close behind) and it follows the exciting events of the investigation that takes place over the week between the time the prime minister is shot and the trial of his assassin. The story dips into the conspiracies surrounding his murder, and while I choose one possible conspiracy, I can honestly say there are PLENTY of other candidates for the job.

In A Dangerous Madness, I took a real event, used the real people involved in the crime, and only my heroine and hero and their friends are fictional, but I’ve stuck to the facts of the matter as much as possible. Do you like learning about or digging deeper into non-fiction through a fictional account, or do you prefer your fiction to not touch on actual events? (I have to also say, I include a detailed Author’s Note at the end of the book which gives readers the facts, and the few incidents I took fictional license.)

Two randomly-drawn commenters will each win an e-copy of A Dangerous Madness.

22 thoughts on “24 Days of Holiday Giveaways: Day 10

  1. Sandra

    Yay. Finally a chance to win a book I dont already have. Dangerous Madness was the first book of yours I read. I got it from the library and loved it so I bought almost everything else.

  2. Ellen

    I love this book! It is fascinating to learn about real historical events this way. There are so many details that don’t make it into our history books.

    1. Michelle Diener Post author

      It is fun to write, as well, Ellen. I really enjoyed my research, and I spent a day with a friend in London, running from place to place to make sure all the distances were doable in the time I gave my characters 🙂

  3. Kareni

    With historical fiction, I appreciate an author’s note that details what part of the story is based on historical fact. I manage to learn some interesting tidbits that way.

    1. Michelle Diener Post author

      My most historically accurate book is Daughter of the Sky, where I really only changed one (minor) event in the sequence of what really happened. But I stuck pretty close to the real thing in A Dangerous Madness, too!

  4. J.Lee Conaway

    I enjoyed “A Dangerous Madness” and I liked that it was, in a way, a peek behind the scenes of a real historical event. What made it so interesting, IMO, was the familiar characters. I really love when the characters you met in one book come back for an encore performance. I would be thrilled if you brought them back in another book.

  5. Luzhelena Werner

    I’ve never been into the Regency period in books but I must confess that after the Class 5 series I went looking into your other books and found this series which I enjoyed very much. Are you planning in revisiting these characters again?

  6. Sara

    This sounds like a very interesting book! I’ve only read your science function books and enjoyed them. I’m excited to try this one too! Thanks

  7. Esther M

    I got Dangerous Madness when the book went free last year. For historical works, it’s often interesting to see the author’s take on how real events can affect fictional characters caught up in those times. Sometimes, the attraction is in the characterization. In the historical novels by Patrick O’Brian, I find the ones that he based on real events (e.g. the ones based on naval accounts like Cochrane’s) more interesting than the earlier novels that were more generally written I. The period. In these books, it’s the fidelity of characters and their portrayals (naturalists and physicians, espionage, and political movements ) that lend to the interest of the book.

    1. Michelle Diener Post author

      Esther, I’m a big fan of Patrick O’Brian’s work. And while I was researching a book set on a British ship during the Napoleonic Wars, I came across a lot of incidents which I recognized from his novels.

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