When Jessie Sands' partner, Mark, points her toward a newspaper article about two men seemingly having died in the former home of an international movie star and Hollywood sex symbol, Jessie gets into her Ford truck and breaks into the grounds, to find a house constructed entirely in pink, right down to the deserted heart-shaped swimming pool. She is intrigued. There has to be something she can do with this house, something spectacular, a project she can really devote body and soul to. But has the former occupant really left and what about all those beautiful girls who are about to die?

A British aristocrat murders his children's nanny, mistaking her in the dark for his wife, and disappears, never to be seen again. For forty years the British press will look for him. There will be 'sightings', there will be leads, but the police will eventually close the case when he is officially declared dead. For many, the whole affair was the best and most addictive of mysteries, based on a tragedy, and before that on a turbulent marriage between a breathtakingly handsome, elegant and noble gambler and an inept, and possibly insane, social climber. But for his wife, it was the most...

The love story of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra of Russia has long been considered a fairytale romance with a startlingly tragic ending, when the entire Imperial Romanov Family was shot and bayoneted to death by a Bolshevik firing squad in a cellar in Ekaterinburg on July 17, 1918. Nicholas and Alexandra were famously devoted to each other, writing each other cooing notes daily, but successive tides of political, military, and then revolutionary, history swept them away. At least that is the received wisdom, but the truth is somewhat more complicated. Tsar Nicholas never wanted to be...

As the 'Funeral Bride, ' Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt marries Tsar Nicholas II only a week after the premature death of his father, Tsar Alexander III. Already dismissed out of hand by the court, Alexandra has to further contend with the continuing ambition of her mother-in-law, the Dowager-Empress Minnie, who has no intention of ceding imperial precedence to the new Empress or of giving up one inch of her power and influence over her emotionally-dependent son, the new Tsar. Nevertheless, Empress Alexandra is determined to stamp her authority on Russia as a whole and on Nicholas in...

Empress Alexandra is triumphant. After producing four daughters, who are regarded as of no consequence by her mother-in-law, Dowager-Empress Minnie, and the court, she has at last given birth to a son and heir, the Tsarevich Alexei. This success, after so many years of praying, hoping and despairing, will not ensure her popularity in Russia, but it will at least convince everyone that Alix has fulfilled her primary duty as an Empress, which should in turn gain her more freedom to live as she wishes amid her cozy little family and away from the burdens and responsibilities imposed upon her by...