Ladies Fish & Gentlemen

Ana's mother always insisted on the proprieties for young ladies, but she never prepared her daughter for surviving an assassination attempt. It is 1560, and seventeen-year-old Ana has barely stepped ashore in the New World when she and her brother are attacked in the streets of Los Cristobal.

Separated from her family and stranded in a city she does not understand, Ana finds an unlikely ally in Eustaquio de Sonza, a red-haired footpad whose first instinct after saving her life is to ransom her back to her grandfather.

Los Cristobal is no ordinary colony. Five European powers uneasily share a city built atop mysteries far older than any of them. Governors scheme for advantage. Thieves and mercenaries haunt the markets. Native peoples watch the newcomers carving kingdoms from their lands. And beneath the streets lies the Abyss, a vast underground world filled with remnants of something no living civilization fully understands.

Someone wants Ana and her brother dead. Finding out why draws Ana and Eustaquio into a struggle involving her family's buried secrets, an ancient enemy, impossible artifacts, and powers that Europeans can only describe as sorcery.

Fortunately, Ana is discovering that being a proper young lady and being helpless are not remotely the same thing. Sometimes a young lady must do some very unladylike things to stay alive.

Ladies, Fish & Gentlemen is a character-driven historical fantasy adventure set in an alternate sixteenth-century North America, blending swashbuckling action, political intrigue, dangerous friendships, lost civilizations, and supernatural mystery. It is the first novel in the Ladies of Los Cristobal series.