Sex with Presidents
The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House
More Books by Eleanor Herman
Sex with the Queen
In royal courts bristling with testosterone—swashbuckling generals, polished courtiers, and virile cardinals—how did repressed regal ladies find happiness?
- Anne Boleyn flirted with courtiers; Catherine Howard slept with one. Henry VIII had both of them beheaded.
- Catherine the Great had her idiot husband murdered and ruled the Russian empire with a long list of sexy young favorites.
- Marie Antoinette fell in love with the handsome Swedish count Axel Fersen, who tried valiantly to rescue her from the guillotine.
- Princess Diana gave up her palace bodyguard to enjoy countless love affairs, which tragically led to her early death.
In this impeccably researched, scandalously readable follow-up to her New York Times bestseller Sex with Kings, Eleanor Herman reveals the truth about what has historically gone on behind the closed door of the queen's boudoir.
Sex with Kings
From the dawn of time, power has been a mighty aphrodisiac. With diaries, personal letters, and diplomatic dispatches, Eleanor Herman's trailblazing research reveals the dynamics of sex and power, rivalry and revenge, at the most brilliant courts of Europe. Wickedly witty and endlessly entertaining, Sex with Kings is a chapter of women's history that has remained unwritten -- until now.
The Royal Art of Poison
A hugely entertaining work of pop history that traces the use of poison as a political - and cosmetic - tool in the royal courts of Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the Kremlin today.
The Story of Poison is the story of power. For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by rivals to their station. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns, and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. Servants licked the royal family's spoons, tried on their underpants, and tested their chamber pots.
Ironically, royals terrified of poison were unknowingly poisoning themselves daily with their cosmetics, medications, and filthy living conditions. Women wore makeup made with mercury and lead. Men rubbed turds on their bald spots. Phsyicians presribed mercury enemas, arsenic skin creams, drinks of lead filings, and potions of human fat and skull, fresh from the executioner. The most gorgeous palaces were little better than filthy latrines.
In The Royal Art of Poison, New York Times bestselling author Eleanor Herman combines her unique access to royal archives with cutting-edge forensic discoveries to tell the true story of Europe's glittering palaces: one of medical bafflement, poisonous cosmetics, festering illness, and, sometimes, murder. Along the way, she analyzes the suspicious deaths of some of the most famous royals in history.
Dawn of Legends: Book Four
AS HUMANS AND MONSTERS CLASH AND ROYAL BLOOD FLOWS, A NEW AGE WILL DAWN….
As the threads of fate draw Alexander closer to his destiny, an exiled queen will meet a runaway princess, a young sorceress will set the final path of her heart and generals will choose their final battles. Before the light of victory can shine, enemies must become allies, Death must be tamed and hearts must break.
Who will rise and who will die? All is revealed in the epic finale to New York Times bestselling author Eleanor Herman’s rich and fantastical Blood of Gods and Royals series.
Reign of Serpents: Book Three
AS THE END OF AN AGE APPROACHES, BLOOD SOAKS THE EARTH, TWISTED PROPHECIES WIELD IMMEASURABLE POWER AND TYRANTS DEMAND IMPOSSIBLE SACRIFICES.
Prince Alexander of Macedon's mind has been touched by an incomprehensible evil, even as his betrothed travels from afar to unite their kingdoms against a terrible darkness that threatens both realms: the Spirit Eaters.
From the distant shores of Illyria to a small deserted island, the deadly consequences of Smoke Blood magic loom and lost civilizations emerge to reveal the existence of a weapon that may do the impossible--kill the last living god. As magic rises and warriors clash, the fate of all Macedon rests in the hands of the unstable prince and those whose loyalty can no longer be trusted.
Empire of Dust: Book Two
In Macedon, war rises like smoke, forbidden romance blooms and ancient magic tempered with rage threatens to turn an empire to dust
After winning his first battle, Prince Alexander fights to become the ruler his kingdom demands—but the line between leader and tyrant blurs with each new threat.
Meanwhile, Hephaestion, cast aside by Alexander for killing the wrong man, must conceal the devastating secret of a divine prophecy from Katerina even as the two of them are thrust together on a dangerous mission to Egypt.
The warrior, Jacob, determined to forget his first love, vows to eradicate the ancient Blood Magics and believes that royal prisoner Cynane holds the key to Macedon's undoing.
And in chains, the Persian princess Zofia still longs to find the Spirit Eaters, but first must grapple with the secrets of her handsome—and deadly—captor.
New York Times bestselling author Eleanor Herman entwines the real scandals of history with epic fantasy to reimagine the world's most brilliant ruler, Alexander the Great, in the second book of the Blood of Gods and Royals series.
Legacy of Kings: Book One
Imagine a time when the gods turn a blind eye to the agony of men, when the last of the hellions roam the plains and evil stirs beyond the edges of the map. A time when cities burn, and in their ashes, empires rise.
Alexander, Macedonia’s sixteen-year-old heir, is on the brink of discovering his fated role in conquering the known world but finds himself drawn to newcomer Katerina, who must navigate the dark secrets of court life while hiding her own mission: kill the Queen. But Kat’s first love, Jacob, will go to unthinkable lengths to win her, even if it means competing for her heart with Hephaestion, a murderer sheltered by the prince. And far across the sea, Zofia, a Persian princess and Alexander’s unmet fiancée, wants to alter her destiny by seeking the famed and deadly Spirit Eaters.
Weaving fantasy with the salacious and fascinating details of real history, New York Times bestselling author Eleanor Herman reimagines the greatest emperor the world has ever known: Alexander the Great, in the first book of the Blood of Gods and Royals series.
Voice of Gods – ebook Prequel to Legacy of Kings
As the end of an age approaches, gods whisper horrors, families scheme for power and one woman may hold the secret to a lost legacy.
At nineteen, Ada of Caria yearns to take the Snake Blood throne from her mad older siblings. She seeks the help of a young orphaned girl named Helen, the first True Oracle to have walked the earth in more than three hundred years.
Helen may be able to channel the voice of the gods, but she hates her gift and will do anything to get rid of it—even lie to her best friend, Myrtale, the priestess-princess of Epirus who is destined to marry King Philip II of Macedon even though she loves another.
And in the shadows lurks a handsome green-eyed stranger who has more at stake—and more to lose—than anyone could possibly imagine.
Amid jealousy and heartbreak, torrid affairs and secret rendezvous, it is spoken by the gods that either Helen or Myrtale—newly named Olympias—will carry the destiny of the known world within her womb.
The prequel to Legacy of Kings, Voice of Gods traces the intricate web of love and betrayal that led up to the birth of history's most powerful leader, Alexander the Great.
King Peggy
King Peggy chronicles the astonishing journey of American secretary, Peggielene Bartels, who suddenly finds herself king to a town of 7,000 people on Ghana's central coast, half a world away. Upon arriving for her crowning ceremony in beautiful Otuam, she discovers the dire reality: there's no running water, no doctor, no high school, and many of the village elders are stealing the town's funds. To make matters worse, her uncle (the late king) sits in a morgue awaiting a proper funeral in the royal palace, which is in ruins. Peggy's first two years as king of Otuam unfold in a way that is stranger than fiction. In the end, a deeply traditional African town is uplifted by the ambitions of its decidedly modern female king, and Peggy is herself transformed, from an ordinary secretary to the heart and hope of her community.
Mistress of the Vatican
Eleanor Herman, the talented author of the New York Times bestselling Sex with Kings and Sex with the Queen goes behind the sacred doors of the Catholic Church in Mistress of the Vatican, a scintillating biography of a powerful yet little-known woman whose remarkable story is ripe with secrets, sex, passion, and ambition. For almost four centuries this astonishing story of a woman’s absolute power over the Vatican has been successfully buried—until now.
Murder in the Garden of God
On April 17, 1581, shots ring out in a Roman garden and a young man falls dead in an ambush. Within days, a powerful baron weds the lovely widow. Everyone knows the baron ordered the hit. But how much did the victim’s wife know? Vittoria Accoramboni, the most beautiful girl in Rome, chafed under the financial limitations of her husband’s family. She waited eight years for Pope Gregory XIII to die so that her husband’s uncle, Cardinal Montalto, could become the new pope and bring the family untold power and riches. But Pope Gregory seemed like he was never going to die. Had she grown tired of waiting? When the pope finally does die in 1585, Cardinal Montalto indeed becomes the new Vicar of Christ, Sixtus V. Within minutes of his election the mild-mannered, doddering old man becomes a wrathful spirit unleashing a torrent of revenge across Italy on all those involved in his nephew’s murder. Rich in the descriptions of contemporary sources, this riveting true story transports the readers into the beauty and brutality of a lost era and an intriguing tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.
Please visit Crux Publishing for ways to purchase: http://cruxpublishing.co.uk/murder-garden-god/.