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The Series Book Awards recognize emerging new talent and outstanding works in Genre Fiction (and now Non-Fiction). The Grand Prize Winner, David Fitz-Gerald’s Series, Ghosts Along the Oregon Trail will be promoted for years to come in our annual Hall of Fame article, as well as be featured on the Series contest page year ’round!

The best part about being a Chanticleer Int’l Book Award Winner is the love and attention you get all year ‘round!

While these Award Winning Series are all Multi-book sagas, we are going to showcase the most important part of a Series. The beginning. Having a good start makes it memorable. The first book is the foundation, laying the first stitches into what later becomes a whole tapestry, telling their story.

Join us in celebrating the 2023 First Place Series Winners!

John J. Spearman – FitzDuncan

Introducing Casimir “Caz” FitzDuncan, a resident of the medieval kingdom of Aquileia. He makes his living retrieving things when the law will not help.

A woman has come to him, seeking his assistance in escaping a contract to marry a nobleman with a foul reputation. After their meeting, she is kidnapped not far from his residence.

Caz is accused of abducting her and forced to investigate her disappearance. Aided by his friend Freddy, Lord Rawlinsford, and Freddy’s mysterious cousin Lucy, Caz works to find the kidnapper.

Be careful Caz, the closer you get to finding the truth, the more tangled you are in a web designed specifically to trap you.

In this fantasy adventure book series you will be whisked away in a medieval time of magical realism, masters of sword fighting, and action & adventure that won’t allow you to put the book down.

Will Caz be able to rescue an innocent victim and save himself when skill with a sword is not enough?

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James Hutson-Wiley – The Sugar Merchant

When Thomas’s family is annihilated in a raid, his life changes forever. Wandering for days, starving and hopeless, he is rescued by a monk and is taken to live at the abbey of Eynsham. There he receives a curious education, training to be a scholar, a merchant and a spy. His mission: to develop commerce in Muslim lands and dispatch vital information to the Holy See.

His perilous adventures during the 11th century’s commercial revolution will take him far from his cloistered life to the great trading cities of Almeria, Amalfi, Alexandria and Cairo.

But the world in which he lives is chaotic. Struggling with love and loss, faith and fortune, can Thomas carry out his secret mission before conflict overtakes him?

Spanning the tumultuous medieval worlds of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, The Sugar Merchant is a tale of clashing cultures, massive economic change and one man’s determination to fulfil his destiny.

From Chanticleer: 2019 Chaucer 1st Place Winner

Narrated by a boy who grows up in a monastery and is trained to be a spy, The Sugar Merchant is set in the late 11th Century when the Great Crusades were on the verge of erupting in Europe and the Middle East.

When Thomas is forced to flee after rebels attack his family, he is finally discovered, ragged and starving, by a giant of a man named Leofric. Taken under the wing of the monks at Eynsham Abbey, Thomas is educated while accepting the strict discipline of the Benedictine order. In his late teens, he is surprised and disappointed to learn he will not join the Order but will be employed as an agent and spy. His task will be to find, secretly copy and send back manuscripts written by Islamic scholars. These documents contain knowledge that the Catholic Church needs to maintain its control.

Accompanied by Leofric, who taught him the arts of war based on his own checkered past as a mercenary, Thomas travels to Spain, to the city of Granada (called Gharnatah at the time). His travels will take him through the known Catholic realms and beyond, and, paradoxically, afford him the chance to meet, befriend and be aided in the abbey’s mission by good men of other faiths, both Muslim and Jew. As a cover for his work for Eynsham, he adopts a persona as a merchant of sukkar, or sugar, a commodity that will soon have excellent trading value. When a beautiful Muslim girl crosses his path, all that he has been taught will come into question as he strives to do what he believes to be right.

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Alice McVeigh – Susan: A Jane Austen Prequel

Sixteen-year-old Susan Smithson – pretty but poor, clever but capricious – has just been expelled from a school for young ladies in London.

At the mansion of the formidable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, she attracts a raffish young nobleman. But, at the first hint of scandal, her guardian dispatches her to her uncle Collins’ rectory in Kent, where her sensible cousin Alicia lives and “where nothing ever happens.”

Here Susan mischievously inspires the local squire to put on a play, with consequences no one could possibly have foreseen. What with the unexpected arrival of Frank Churchill, Alicia’s falling in love and a tumultuous elopement, rural Kent will surely never seem safe again…

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Tom Burkhalter – Everything We Had

November 1941: War is coming to the Pacific.

In Europe, the Nazis are triumphant. England is under siege by air and sea. France has fallen to the Nazi Wehrmacht, which in turn fell on Soviet Russia. The Red Army is reeling in full retreat, with the Nazis at the gates of Moscow itself.

In the Pacific, Japan has been at war with China since 1937. Her war industries depend upon imports of scrap metal and oil from what are now the Allied nations. When an embargo is placed on imports to Japan, they are left with a year’s supply of oil to supply their armed forces.

Japan surrounds American possessions in the Philippines on three sides. The US Army is making a desperate, last-minute attempt to reinforce the Philippines garrison, but the clock is ticking for the Japanese, with their oil running out. The armed forces of Imperial Japan may attack the Philippines at any moment.

Two brothers, Jack and Charlie Davis, are pilots in the US Army Air Forces. They are part of the reinforcements sent to the Far Eastern Air Force, charged with air defense of the Philippines.

For Jack and Charlie, in a time when the US is on the brink of world war, a simple question must soon be answered: what will I do when the Japanese come?

From Chanticleer:

Everything We Had, book one of Tom Burkhalter’s No Merciful War series is an inexorable thrill that will grip readers tight. It starts with a poker game, through which a main character’s luck soon becomes evident. But will that luck hold out?

Jack—the poker player—and Charlie—Jack’s older brother—have been separated by war, even though that war has yet to be declared. Everything We Had focuses more on the machinations leading up to US involvement in World War II than on actual combat. The gears of war that have so many young men caught in them move with gradual but inevitable force, and so Everything We Had takes a more thoughtful approach to a historic moment in time.

Connecting with the characters is a gradual process as you get to know the intricacies that make up their individual personalities. This sets the reader up to feel the emotions of the characters as they face an uncertain fate, and throughout the book the author’s clear and methodical research shines with details such as specific views, locations, and—most notably—comprehensive descriptions of the airplanes Jack and Charlie pilot. This allows the reader to become deeply familiar with the motivations of the characters and the capabilities of the airplanes they fly.

The importance of their family gradually emerges, too, through their mother’s letters and their memories of their father who flew racing planes. The more readers learn, the more attachment they feel to these characters, giving weight to the growing danger they face.

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Dave Lager – Ro’s Handle

An overzealous rookie cop. A biased old-boys club. Will she have to shoot her way in? Ro Delahanty never let her dream of becoming a cop out of her sights. Between years of black-belt judo lessons and sharpshooting championships, she thought she could handle anything the academy threw her way. But as the only female rookie on the force, she soon discovers it’ll take a warrior’s determination to get out from behind the desk and into the action.

Knowing she’ll have to work twice as hard for half the respect, she refuses to let distractions like a new boyfriend block her target. And her sacrifices will be well worth it if she can secure a “handle” that brands her as an equal instead of the butt of a joke. When a simple field assignment spirals into a heavily-armed hostage standoff, will Ro and her trusty Sig Sauer P229 .357 aim true or will she miss the shot she’s trained her whole life to take?

Ro’s Handle is the first book in the gritty Ro Delahanty police procedural series. If you like tenacious heroines, crime scene drama, and high-octane shootouts, then you’ll love David Lager’s torn-from-the-headlines tale. Buy Ro’s Handle and test your aim on a straight-shooting criminal case today!

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Jode Millman – Hooker Avenue

2022 Clue 1st Place Winner

Being a Good Samaritan is hazardous.

Amid a violent Hudson Valley thunderstorm, Jessie Martin discovers a woman lying unconscious in a roadside ditch. The badly beaten victim, Lissie Sexton, a local prostitute, claims she’s escaped the attack of a killer.

Jessie’s more than a casual driver who passes by; she’s a criminal-defense attorney. And Lissie is more than an ordinary hooker. She’s the key witness in a cold case under investigation by Jessie’s estranged longtime friend, Detective Ebony Jones.

And now Ebony can’t find her witness. Jessie’s new boss has sent Lissie into hiding. If Jessie reveals Lissie’s location she compromises her client, her firm and her professional ethics. If she doesn’t, she risks alienating not just Ebony but the entire police department backing her.

A simple act of compassion forces Jessie to choose between her duty and her friend.

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Mark A. Gibson – A Song that Never Ends

Home.

For over three hundred years, that’s what the Hamilton family has called a shrinking swath of farmland in the Appalachian foothills of South Carolina.

Home.

That’s the failing tobacco farm where Walter and Maggie Hamilton choose to raise their three children. Walter has big plans to make the farm more profitable, but his plans are interrupted by World War II and family heartbreak. Walter returns from the war a changed man and finds Maggie, too, has changed, neither of them for the better. But at least their family is together again at…

Home.

More than anything, that’s where their eight-year-old son, Jimmy Hamilton, wants to be. However, after an unspeakable tragedy, he’s sent away from the only life he’s ever known to live with a kindly uncle in North Carolina.

Home.

That’s where Jimmy is finally going to be, unless fate has plans of its own…

A Song that Never Ends is the first installment of the Hamilton Place series, an epic family saga extending from the Great Depression to present day. Through war and peace, love and loss, triumph and tragedy, follow the Hamilton family on their journey from a run-down farm in South Carolina, through the jungles of Vietnam, to the top of the world in New York City, and beyond the gardens of stone at Arlington.

From Chanticleer:

A Song That Never Ends, the first volume of a two part series by Mark A. Gibson, opens a dramatic fictional saga of the Hamilton family from the late 1930s Depression era, to 1967 and the Vietnam conflict. Here against the backdrop of a South Carolina tobacco farm, we come to witness a family in turmoil.

The calm and reserved Walter Hamilton and his rebellious, impulsive wife Maggie strive to build a life and raise a family. But the couple is tested by a series of misfortunes—miscarriages and stillbirths, and Walter’s enlistment during WWII leaving him with guilt-induced PTSD as he deals with the memory of fallen comrades.

At the center of this heartfelt story is James, the middle child, who at the tender age of eight is forced from his home due to a horrific accident and sent to live with a widower uncle.

James proves to be an extremely intelligent and talented youngster who longs for a connection to his family. In the meantime, he learns from his gracious uncle to deal with dire situations and unexpected circumstances in life, as well as the importance of having a charitable heart. Under the tutelage of this kind, caring, and nurturing man, the story begins to evolve into a coming-of-age tale.

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