Books with author D. Roberts

Life’s a Beach Until Someone Gets Hurt…Leaving London behind, Ally Wescott finds herself running the B&B her grandfather left her in his will.The small village of Westford is quiet, quaint and picturesque and the locals seem to all know each other. Part of her craves the busy life she left behind, because just how interesting can a sleepy coastal community get?She’s about to learn the hard way…The body of a young woman washes up on the beach by her B&B, and suddenly she’s thrust into the middle of a murder investigation.Who was she? How did she come to be out there alone? And most importantly, who killed her?With the rekindled friendships of Fran and Lewis and a suitably handsome detective to pull information from (and keep her distracted!), she’s determined to get answers… Even if the killer might be closer to home than one might think.Beaches and Bodies is Book One to the Westford Bay B&B Cozy Mystery Series. If you want to read the prequel - Bakeries and Bones, here it is: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075KLPDDZ Ally and her wonderful group of friends live in the United Kingdom, so please note that this book contains British terminology and British spellings.

After Colin Gordon evicts Hangelore’s Pirates and saves the lamsons from slavery, the Peschal Alliance are desperate for new resources. Pirates raid the Federation’s fringes and explore further afield as Hazilsor searches for his new fiefdom. Word reaches Sankarah of the raids, and Admiral Dalkasan orders Cambridge to send help. Henry Fraser sends Colin with Cambridge’s latest ship and support to help the devastated victims.A Pirate scouting party finds Earth, a world ripe for the picking. Suhmarlin Hazilsor sets out to gain the new world. Hazilsor plans to use Earth to replace his lost base in Hangelore.Meanwhile, the Federation sends Colin on an aggressive search and destroy mission to end the Pirate threat. When he visits Hangelore, it shocks Colin to discover the lamsons erected statues of him in their parks and gardens. Colin makes new friends and solves a long-standing problem for his adopted home. Can he save Earth from Hazilsor?

Originally published in 1827, Roberts’ Guide for Butlers and Other Household Staff was a handbook for servants to perform their duties more efficiently and thoughtfully. Roberts gives a plethora of information about household duties of a butler like:• How to dress suitably for work• Regulations for the dinner table• Directions for cleaning tea trays• Giving Britannia metal a brilliant polish• Preserving fruits for the year• Addressing and behaving properly around your employer• And many more insightsRoberts provides information on how to make the best-tasting lemonade; preserving good wine for years; not passing judgments on the other servants; never letting your master ring the bell for you twice; cleaning dirty tables with a mix of milk, turpentine, and sweet oil; rubbing off rust with salad oil and lime; and other useful tidbits for the curious butler. This is a fascinating look behind the scenes of household help and will delight any nineteenth century enthusiast.

‘A heartwarming and thought-provoking story of grief, redemption and reinvention in our modern world.’ Imogen Clark, bestselling author of Where The Story StartsYou can’t have a rainbow, without a little rain…When a stranger saves Luke’s life, he knows he’s been given a second chance. He’s going to make it count – and, determined to live each day to its fullest, he starts by saying yes to everything life has to offer.Slowly but surely, Luke learns that a little bit of blue-sky thinking can go a long way, and things start to look up.But when Luke’s new resolve is tested, will he return to his old ways? Or can one fateful moment truly save a life?A life-affirming story about a man who is given a second chance, perfect for fans of Mike Gayle and Imogen Clark.

Famed adventure writer David Roberts retraces the route of the legendary Domínguez-Escalante expedition.In July 1776 a pair of Franciscan friars, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, were charged by the governor of New Mexico with discovering a route across the unknown Southwest to the new Spanish colony in California. They had other goals as well, some of them secret: converting the indigenous natives along the way to the true faith, discovering a semi-mythical paradise known as Teguayó, hunting for sources of gold and silver, and paving the way for Spanish settlements from Santa Fe to Monterey.In strict terms, the expedition failed. Running out of food and beset by an early winter, the twelve-man team gave up in what is now western Utah. The retreat to Santa Fe became an ordeal of survival. The men were reduced to eating their own horses while they searched for a crossing of the raging Colorado River in Glen Canyon. Seven months after setting out, Domínguez and Escalante staggered back to Santa Fe. Yet in the course of their 1,700-mile voyage, the explorers discovered more land unknown to Europeans than Lewis and Clark would encounter a quarter-century later.Other writers, using Escalante’s brilliant and quirky diary as a guide, have retraced the expedition route, but David Roberts is the first to dig beneath its pages to question and ponder every turn of the team’s decision-making and motivation. Roberts weaves the personal and the historical narratives into a gripping journey of discovery through the magnificent American Southwest. 1 map; 8 pages of photographs

An award-winning author and veteran mountain climber takes us deep into the Southwest backcountry to uncover secrets of its ancient inhabitants.In this thrilling story of intellectual and archaeological discovery, David Roberts recounts his last twenty years of far-flung exploits in search of spectacular prehistoric ruins and rock art panels known to very few modern travelers. His adventures range across Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado, and illuminate the mysteries of the Ancestral Puebloans and their contemporary neighbors the Mogollon and Fremont, as well as of the more recent Navajo and Comanche. 16 pages of illustrations

At the low-water bridge below Tom Miller Dam, west of downtown Austin, during the summer of his tenth or eleventh year, Ken Roberts had his first encounter with cedar choppers. On his way to the bridge for a leisurely afternoon of fishing, he suddenly found himself facing a group of boys who clearly came from a different place and culture than the middle-class, suburban community he was accustomed to. Rather, “. . . they looked hard—tanned, skinny, dirty. These were not kids you would see in Austin.” When Roberts’s fishing companion curtly refused the strangers’ offer to sell them a stringer of bluegills, the three boys went away, only to reappear moments later, one of them carrying a club. Roberts and his friend made a hasty retreat. This encounter provoked in the author the question, “Who are these people?” The Cedar Choppers: Life on the Edge of Nothing is his thoughtful, entertaining, and informative answer. Based on oral history interviews with several generations of cedar choppers and those who knew them, this book weaves together the lively, gritty story of these largely Scots-Irish migrants with roots in Appalachia who settled on the west side of the Balcones Fault during the mid-nineteenth century, subsisting mainly on hunting, trapping, moonshining, and, by the early twentieth century, cutting, transporting, and selling cedar fence posts and charcoal. The emergence of Austin as a major metropolitan area, especially after the 1950s, soon brought the cedar choppers and their hillbilly lifestyle into direct confrontation with the gentrified urban population east of the Balcones Fault. This clash of cultures, which provided the setting for Roberts’s encounter as a young boy, propels this first book-length treatment of the cedar choppers, their clans, their culture and mores, and their longing for a way of life that is rapidly disappearing.

Colin Gordon is a man on a mission. When Colin is on his way to fulfill a promise to join the Federation Navy his party is attacked by Mercenaries intent on killing him. After loyal troops rescue Colin, the Navy ships him off to Cambridge, the human colony world. He must work undercover to foil a plot to undermine the Federation Navy and then he’s given command of a small but powerful Cobra Class Patrol Boat. While on a patrol with another Cobra, Colin captures and convinces his first Pirate to join the Federation cause. At the same time Colin rescues slaves and stops multiple attacks on a Star System, further cementing his reputation within the Federation. Colin must battle impossible odds against Pirates who are intent on capturing Cambridge and ultimately, he must save the Federation itself.

His two companions dead, food and supplies vanished in a crevasse, Douglas Mawson was still one hundred miles from camp. On January 17, 1913, alone and near starvation, Douglas Mawson, leader of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, was hauling a sledge to get back to base camp. The dogs were gone. Now Mawson himself plunged through a snow bridge, dangling over an abyss by the sledge harness. A line of poetry gave him the will to haul himself back to the surface. Mawson was sometimes reduced to crawling, and one night he discovered that the soles of his feet had completely detached from the flesh beneath. On February 8, when he staggered back to base, his features unrecognizably skeletal, the first teammate to reach him blurted out, “Which one are you?” This thrilling and almost unbelievable account establishes Mawson in his rightful place as one of the greatest polar explorers and expedition leaders. It is illustrated by a trove of Frank Hurley’s famous Antarctic photographs, many never before published in the United States. 24 pages of illustrations

A New York Times best-selling illustrator turns his talents to a lavish history of the women’s suffrage movement in the U.K. and the U.S. just in time for the hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment.Imprisonment, hunger strikes, suffrajitsu — the decades-long fight for women’s right to vote was at times a ferocious one. Acclaimed artist David Roberts gives these important, socially transformative times their due in a colorfully illustrated history that includes many of the important faces of the movement in portraiture and scenes that both dignify and enliven. He has created a timely and thoroughly engaging resource in his first turn as nonfiction author-illustrator. Suffragette: The Battle for Equality follows the trajectory of the movement in the U.K. and visits some key figures and moments in the United States as it presents the stories of Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Emmeline Pankhurst, Ida B. Wells, Susan B. Anthony, and many more heroic women and men — making it a perfect gift for young readers of today. Dr. Crystal Feimster of Yale’s Department of African American Studies contributes a foreword that speaks to the relationship and differences between the British and American suffrage efforts.