Fiction and Non-Fiction by Ethard Wendel Van Stee

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The Boy King            The Boy Who Would Be King

This collection of seven plays will stir your love of story and language. A feast for the ears, it represents Mr. Van Stee’s best dramatic writing over thirteen years. The plays are well-suited to stage production as well as to dramatic reading. Book club readers will enjoy taking the various parts and discussing the plays afterwards. Readers will be rewarded by the entertaining plots and the richness of the dialogue.
The Monks of Arden

The Monks of Arden

In the year 1269, Prince Edward kidnapped the newborn offspring of the last prince of Wales Llewellyn ap Gwynedd. Edward named him Penfelyn, the boy with fair hair. Being the older son, Penfelyn grew up as heir apparent to the English throne, but the plan unraveled when a bizarre secret was revealed and the course of Pen’s life changed forever. Going his own way, he accepted four, young female wards to be his pupils. Tutors and martial arts masters trained them to become highly polished warrior women. Upon completion of their education, Pen and the four young women formed a band calling themselves the Monks of Arden. They championed the poor and brought down the treacherous illegitimate sons of the Earl of Lancaster. In the course of their adventures throughout Europe they came to recognize a great unmet need among the people. There they left their imprint, which was ultimately lost to history beneath the shroud of the Black Death. Their great contribution was only resurrected in the twenty-first century when archaeologists uncovered a codex, The History, beneath the ruins of Beaudesert Castle.
     
Madimi

 

Madimi

Roger Bacon and Thomas of Lincoln create an illuminated manuscript that shakes the world of religion and morality. Fear of being labeled a heretic drives Bacon to transcribe his words in an enigmatic code.  Dr. John Dee  breaks the code and the book lives on to exert a mysterious influence on all who possess it.

 
     
The Hangman

The Hangman, An Amy Elizabeth Fletcher Mystery. Amy Elizabeth Fletcher and Detective Inspector Dundas send a dozen murderers to the gallows. All were hanged by Albert Henry Godfrin, a decent man not unaffected by doing his public duty. As the years pass he begins to see himself as a contract killer licensed by the Crown, eating away at his emotional stability
     
The Bloodstone

The Bloodstone, An Amy Elizabeth Fletcher Mystery. Amy Elizabeth Fletcher, granddaughter of Frances Emily Steele, studies criminal investigation under the tutelage of Drs. Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Bell and develops a keen eye for crime scene investigation. As Special Forensic Investigator for Scotland Yard, she joins forces with old friend Detective Inspector Thomas Dundas to solve nine of the most horrific crimes ever committed in London and East Anglia at the turn of the 20th century.
     
Moira's Scythe

Moira's Scythe is a saga that begins in antebellum North Carolina. The Braithewaite and Brandt clans struggle against the elements and against each other to tame a rugged wilderness that fights back at every turn. Chattel slavery looms large in their lives as the settlement Jonathan's Landing grows to become the town of Wisharton. The corrupt seed of the Brandt line gnaws at the heart of the family from the 18th century through the 20th when it is finally exorcised in a shocking conclusion.
     
The Remarkable Life

The Remarkable Life of Frances Emily Steele recounts the adventures of a young woman, granddaughter of Frances Knox McDermott Brandt and patriarch William Marsden Brandt, who escapes from the social straitjacket of the 19th century to find her way in a man's world.
     
A Woman Of No Means

A Woman of No Means, a companion to The Remarkable Life, is the second installment in the adventures of an emancipated young woman
     
I Didn't Come From Nowhere

I

I Didn't Come From Nowhere is Mr. Van Stee's first book of non-fiction and tells the life story of Marie Cheek Johnson (1902-1996), daughter of a slave. To touch her hand was to forge a link to one of the darkest periods in the history of our republic. She was a force for good throughout her long life with an immense strength of character nurtured by her preacher-businessman father.
     
This I Need To Know

This I Need To Know is an expanded set of notes to accompany college courses in creative writing and lectures on the dramatists of 5th-century Athens taught by the author. The Appendices include the original plays Oedipus on 11th Street and Cannibals, based on The Oresteia of Aeschylus,

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