Dobrenica Urban Fantasy Series

Coronets and Steel;

The Prisoner of Zenda meets Brigadoon

Second, corrected edition begins with grad student and fencing enthusiast Kim Murray in Europe, trying to find her grandmother’s missing family, when she sees her first ghost. Not that she knows that it’s a ghost. There’s a lot she doesn’t know, because her grandmother never talked about her past.

Two days into her stay in Vienna, Austria, she comes across a handsome European guy who acts like he knows her. Intrigued, she breaks her usual rule and goes to have a drink…and ends up somewhere in Eastern Europe—mistaken for another woman, who is supposed to be marrying the crown prince of a tiny country on the border of Russia.

And that’s only the beginning of her adventures. Mistaken identities, masquerade balls, duels with actual swords, and secret societies of kids resisting invaders with comic books keep Kim constantly on the run—and then there are the ghosts. And the handsome guy. Make that two…

First edition: DAW Books, September 2010


Blood Spirits Coming Feb. 2025

Kim decides the only way to fix the disaster she left behind in Dobrenica is to go back. What she finds there is far more strange and dangerous than she ever imagined. Not just politics and personalities but ghosts and magic, murder and mystery, ballroom dancing and moonlit sleigh chases await her. Once again Kim has to take sword in hand as she tries to make peace. She risks her heart when she finds love, but there can be no happiness without trust. And truth. Only . . . whose truth?

Here is a book trailer for Blood Spirits, made by Karen Osborne.

First edition: DAW Books, September 2011


Revenant Eve; DAW Books, November 2012

Amazon, print | Audio book | Barnes and Noble

Kim is happily planning her wedding when she finds herself pulled two centuries back in time. It’s 1795, the rise of Napoleon, and Kim is now a guardian spirit for a twelve-year-old kid who will either become Kim’s ancestor . . . or the timeline will alter and Kim will vanish, along with Dobrenica. What? Yes, the child called Aurelie de Mascarenhas must get to Dobrenica, or more than the Dsaret family will vanish.

Kim hates time travel conundrums, and knows nothing about kids. How is she going to guide a kid born on Saint-Domingue, with whom she has nothing in common?

From Jamaica to England to the Paris of the early 1800s, Kim and Aurelie travel, sharing adventures and learning more about Vrajhus, the Blessing, and the Nasdrafus than is known in Dobrenica’s modern times. Along the way to wedding bells or annihilation, Kim makes a shocking discovery . . .

(With story connections to Danse de la Folie.)


Regency Era Stories and Jane Austen Fanfiction

Danse de la Folie, Book View Cafe, September 2012

Book View Cafe | Kindle | Nook | Kobo | paperback at Amazon | Audio book (delightful pro voice) | trade paperback at Bookshop.org

A light-hearted Regency folly, starring Miss Clarissa Harlowe who wants a quiet life-but falls in love with a smuggler, the marquess of St. Tarval. St. Tarval’s sister, Lady Kitty, is determined to write a dramatic Gothic to save her brother’s mortgaged estate-if she can reach London. Clarissa’s much-pursued cousin, Mr. Philip Devereaux, is inexplicably intrigued by Lady Kitty, who is doing her best to encourage the match between him and Clarissa, except that Clarissa is now betrothed to . . . Lord Wilburfolde. And so the madness of changing partners begins in the dance of love.


Rondo Allegro
Rondo Allegro; Book View Cafe, September 2014

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Amazon paperback | Kobo |
Nook | audio book (extraordinary pro voice) trade paperback art Bookshop.org

In 1799, all of Europe is at war. In Palermo, sixteen-year-old singer-in-training Anna Maria Ludovisi is married by her dying father to Captain Henry Duncannon, the Perennial Bachelor. Minutes after the wedding he sets sail.

The threat of French invasion causes Anna to flee to Paris. At the end of the Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte is transforming France; Anna must transform herself into a professional singer in order to survive.

in 1805, Anna’s opera company is traveling through Spain when events bring the long-missing Captain Duncannon and his forgotten wife back together again, as the English, Spanish, and French fleets converge for battle off the Cape of Trafalgar.

For Henry Duncannon as well as Anna, everything changes: the demands of war, the obligation of family, the meaning of love, and the concept of home. Can they find a new life together?


FairWinds
Fair Winds and Homeward Sail; Spring 2015

Kindle

One Jane Austen’s best-loved books is Persuasion, and of the characters in it, among the most popular are Sophy and Admiral and Croft, dashing Frederick Wentworth’s sister and brother in law.

In this short novel, Sherwood Smith takes a look at what the Wentworths’ lives might have been like before they met the Elliots, and Sophy’s view of Anne Elliot’s and Frederick Wentworth’s stormy relationship—and how she might have had a hand in bringing about that happy ending.


Miss Eleanor Tinley: or, The Reluctant Heroine; Twelve Tower Books, August 2016

Kindle

Eleanor Tilney is little more than a plot device in Jane Austen’s tale, whose first half scintillates so brightly, but whose second half hints at the brilliance to come. In this, another of Sherwood Smith’s Jane Austen novellas, Eleanor gets a voice, and a romance, as we see Catherine through hers and Henry’s eyes.


Poignant
The Poignant Sting; Spring 2015

Kindle

This novella-length homage to Jane Austen’s Emma was inspired by a single line in the novel that makes Miss Bates, for one moment, startlingly prescient. Supposing Miss Bates really could hear others’ thoughts? A look at three marriages in Highbury with a touch of magic and wonder.


HenryandFanny
Henry and Fanny: An Alternate Ending to Mansfield Park; Spring 2015

Kindle

One of the longest-running debates about Jane Austen’s work has been the problematical ending of Mansfield Park. As I have stated in my review is that part of the problem is how the narrative stops abruptly in Book Three, Chapter XVII. Here Austen’s narrator takes the stage to issue a long summary of what happened, after all those brilliant pages of immersing readers in the minds of the characters and their world.

When I read James Austen-Leigh’s memoir about his famous aunt in which he reported sister Cassandra begging Jane for a different ending, I got the courage to join the host of other authors who love to play in Jane Austen’s world, and take up the story from that point and offer a new ending, solving that problem, plus some others.


Monkeys
The Dancing Monkeys; Spring 2015

Kindle

One of three long novella-length stories I’ve written about Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. This story accepts the ending that Jane Austen wrote, and follows a bitter Henry Crawford wandering the world after his failure at winning Fanny Price. An unexpected encounter with an equally bitter Captain Wentworth, during a sea battle with the French, brings about changes for both gentlemen . . .