Jack Caldwell – White Soup Press

The Last Adventure of the Scarlet Pimpernel by Jack Caldwell

The worlds of Jane Austen and the Baroness Orczy combine in a swashbuckling tale from the author of The Three Colonels.

Captain Frederick Tilney, dashing cavalry officer and rakish heir to Northanger Abbey, is interested only in fencing and carousing. That is, until he meets the girl of his dreams, the lovely and intriguing Violet Blakeney.

However, her father is not convinced of Frederick’s pledge to reform and the officer is banished from Violet’s presence. The baronet has a will of iron, for he is none other than Sir Percy Blakeney—the retired Scarlet Pimpernel!

Now, during the Hundred Days Crisis, an evil from the Pimpernel’s past menaces the Blakeney family while Sir Percy is crippled by age. Frederick must convince the baronet to accept his assistance in accomplishing the impossible—take on an entire country to recuse the girl they both love.

Book Two of the Jane Austen’s Fighting Men Series.

Ruin and Renewal: Volume Three of Crescent City by Jack Caldwell

August 2005. The greatest natural disaster in American history is fast approaching New Orleans. The lives of Elizabeth and William, Marianne and Chris, and Emma and George are turned upside down. Friend, family, stranger, and foe alike will meet their fates as a killer named Katrina tries to drown the Gulf Coast.

From a storm ravaged Gulfport to the miserable Superdome and a desperate Tulane Medical Center, the reader is shown a fuller picture of a story they thought they knew. While First Responders work against time to save the trapped, NOPD captain Richard Fitzwilliam’s quest to apprehend drug-dealer Greg “G-Daddy” Wickham comes to a shocking end.

The survivors must pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. Will bureaucratic bumbling by government officials prove too much for the kindness of strangers to overcome? Will those left in the Crescent City ever find normalcy again?

Elysian Dreams: Volume Two of Crescent City by Jack Caldwell

2004. Emma has married George, but the workaholic surgeon is neglecting his young wife. When she meets the smooth-talking Frank Church, her marriage is endangered. Marianne finds love with Chris and begins a singing career, but a figure out of her past is doing everything in his power to crush her dreams. Elizabeth is successful in business but not in love, and her job puts her face-to-face with William for the first time in five years; the man she almost destroyed, and who still owns her heart.

Meanwhile, NOPD captain Richard Fitzwilliam continues his crusade to bring down the one felon that has eluded him: the drug dealing murderer Greg “G-Daddy” Wickham, now more dangerous than ever.

Everyone is reaching for their own Elysian dream, but for those who dare live on the Gulf Coast, there is a price to pay. The life-giving waters can also be the birthplace of monsters…

Bourbon Street Nights: Volume One of Crescent City by Jack Caldwell

1998. Elizabeth Boudreaux is a daughter of the owner of a small oilfield service company in Chackbay, a small hamlet in the swaps of Louisiana. She is studying journalism at Loyola University in New Orleans. Her roommate is vocal music major Marianne Dashwood, whose divorced mother lives in Jackson, Mississippi. Mari’s friend is Tulane fine arts student Emma Weinberg, who lives in the Uptown neighborhood with her widowed father.

They will meet the men who love them and the men who will break their hearts. Elizabeth is both attracted to and repelled by overconfident graduate student William Darcy, heir to a vast shipping fortune. Marianne is caught in a triangle between the charming John Waguespack and the quiet Chris Breaux. Emma is so busy running other people’s lives she overlooks her life-long friend, Dr. George Katz. Chuck Bingley, from Baton Rouge, is bedeviled by his needy sister, Carrie, and harassed by his dominating mother, Catherine.

Meanwhile, Darcy’s cousin, NOPD Lt. Richard Fitzwilliam is searching the city for his nemesis, drug dealer Greg “G-Daddy” Wickham. All these lives, and many more, will collide in a year of love and friendship, trials and tribulations, tragedy and murder.

The Plains of Chalmette: a Story of Crescent City, by Jack Caldwell

B.R.A.G. Medallion Winner

It is 1814, and America’s second war against Great Britain is going badly. Now the enemy is ready for its knock-out punch. They seek to take New Orleans, and by doing so, control the Mississippi River and North America forever.

Major Matthew Darcy of Baltimore is dispatched to help defend the beleaguered city, and discovers an alien place that does not trust its new countrymen. He also finds forbidden love with a lovely Cajun-Creole lady.

Now, with a devastating invader at the city’s door, Darcy joins General Andrew Jackson’s rag-tag army of backwoodsmen, Creoles, free blacks, and buccaneers in the face of overwhelming odds.