The Kingmaker's Spy
(2026)(The first book in the Blood of the Bear series)
A novel by Augusta Gosling
England, 1451
At fourteen, Alice Neville hides behind a tapestry and overhears a secret Neville family council. When she is discovered, she does not cower. She threatens them all with treason.
They could silence her.
Instead, they send her to the Countess of Salisbury.
Under the formidable Countess’s tutelage, Alice learns to watch, to listen, to lie—to become invisible. She is a weapon forged in shadow, shaped to serve the Neville family’s ambitions. But when she meets Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, married, powerful, and utterly forbidden, Alice discovers that the greatest danger is not enemy spies or Lancastrian plots.
It is her own treacherous heart.
From the blood-soaked fields of St Albans, where Richard claims his first great victory, to the glittering deception of the Burgundian court, Alice walks a knife’s edge between duty and desire. She gathers secrets in dockside taverns, infiltrates the Queen’s own palace, and risks everything to protect the man she loves.
But Richard Neville is no gentle knight from a ballad.
He is ruthless, ambitious and willing to let a town burn if it serves his purpose.
And Alice is willing to let him.
When her intelligence fails—when her father, Lord Fauconberg, is captured because of information she provided—Alice learns that the price of this game is paid in blood. Not hers. The blood of those she loves.
But she cannot walk away.
She follows her father and brother to Calais, into Richard’s domain. He tries to resist her. To protect her honour, her reputation, her future. But Alice is no meek maiden waiting to be saved. When she threatens to give herself to the first sailor on the Calais docks if he will not have her, his restraint finally shatters.
In a rented room at the White Hart inn, arranged by her half-brother Thomas, they cross a line that can never be uncrossed.
She is the woman history overlooked.
This is the story it kept hidden.
Some secrets are worth dying for.
Some loves are worth the fall.
And some fires, once lit, can never be extinguished.
The Kingmaker’s Spy is the first book in a sweeping five-book saga of forbidden love, political intrigue, and devastating passion set against the brutal beauty of the Wars of the Roses—historically grounded, with the silences of history filled by the truths it never recorded.
Genre: Historical Romance
At fourteen, Alice Neville hides behind a tapestry and overhears a secret Neville family council. When she is discovered, she does not cower. She threatens them all with treason.
They could silence her.
Instead, they send her to the Countess of Salisbury.
Under the formidable Countess’s tutelage, Alice learns to watch, to listen, to lie—to become invisible. She is a weapon forged in shadow, shaped to serve the Neville family’s ambitions. But when she meets Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, married, powerful, and utterly forbidden, Alice discovers that the greatest danger is not enemy spies or Lancastrian plots.
It is her own treacherous heart.
From the blood-soaked fields of St Albans, where Richard claims his first great victory, to the glittering deception of the Burgundian court, Alice walks a knife’s edge between duty and desire. She gathers secrets in dockside taverns, infiltrates the Queen’s own palace, and risks everything to protect the man she loves.
But Richard Neville is no gentle knight from a ballad.
He is ruthless, ambitious and willing to let a town burn if it serves his purpose.
And Alice is willing to let him.
When her intelligence fails—when her father, Lord Fauconberg, is captured because of information she provided—Alice learns that the price of this game is paid in blood. Not hers. The blood of those she loves.
But she cannot walk away.
She follows her father and brother to Calais, into Richard’s domain. He tries to resist her. To protect her honour, her reputation, her future. But Alice is no meek maiden waiting to be saved. When she threatens to give herself to the first sailor on the Calais docks if he will not have her, his restraint finally shatters.
In a rented room at the White Hart inn, arranged by her half-brother Thomas, they cross a line that can never be uncrossed.
She is the woman history overlooked.
This is the story it kept hidden.
Some secrets are worth dying for.
Some loves are worth the fall.
And some fires, once lit, can never be extinguished.
The Kingmaker’s Spy is the first book in a sweeping five-book saga of forbidden love, political intrigue, and devastating passion set against the brutal beauty of the Wars of the Roses—historically grounded, with the silences of history filled by the truths it never recorded.
Genre: Historical Romance