Those of you who’ve been following me for a while know that I’ve been working on a novel set in both Revolutionary France and Spanish Colonial Louisiana for…way too long now. But I can finally tell you when you can read it–it will release in in May of 2024 from Chrism Press!

New Orleans, 1795. In the wake of The Terror of the French Revolution, Alix de Morainville Carpentier—a former lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, now married to her gardener—seeks peace and security in the Spanish colony of Louisiana. But her journey into the man-eating swamp called Attakapas reopens the wounds of her former life in France and forces her to reckon with the choices that saved her life at the cost of her honor—and perhaps her soul.

Based on Strange True Stories of Louisiana by George Washington Cable (1888), To Crown with Liberty contrasts the death of the Old World in Revolutionary France—from rural Normandy to the court of Versailles and the September Massacres that launched The Terror—with the wilderness of Spanish Louisiana, where a new civilization is just beginning to emerge. It follows the political and religious cataclysm that turns a quest for liberty, equality, and fraternity into a nightmare where the price of dissent is blood. The budding New World offers no real reprieve, as the slave trade perpetuates the systems of oppression that sparked the Revolution. Yet despite her deep scars of trauma and loss, Alix de Morainville still strives to find a home where she can truly be free.