"Historical fiction doesn't get any better than this."
—Booklist

THE PARIS DEADLINE

Named one of the top 10 crime novels of 2012 by J. Kingston Pierce of Kirkus Reviews!

Newspaper reporter Toby Keats, a veteran of the Great War and the only American in Paris who doesn't know Hemingway, has lived a quiet life—until one day he comes into possession of a rare eighteenth-century automate, a very strange and somewhat scandalous mechanical duck. Highly sought after by an enigmatic American banker, European criminals, and the charming young American Elsie Short, the duck is rumored to hold the key to opening a new frontier in weapons technology for the German army, now beginning to threaten Europe once more. Haunted with his nightmarish past in the War, Toby pursues the truth behind the duck.

"The best 'code and cipher' novel I've ever read, a wonderful historical thriller!"
—John Lescroart, author of THE THIRTEENTH JUROR and BETRAYAL

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Historical fiction—telling dramatic stories about real people and events from the past—may be our oldest literary genre.

In the Western tradition, historical fiction probably begins with the Iliad. After that it is a very rich field indeed: Shakespeare wrote history plays, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote historical fiction, War and Peace is an epic historical novel.

Max Byrd's acclaimed historical novels concern both real and invented characters. The settings are authentic, the story-telling dramatic. The Associated Press says that his novel Grant, about the last years of Ulysses S. Grant, "is typical of what Byrd does so well—combine a minimum of fictional characters with splendid research, vivid imagination, and above all, historical accuracy to portray a truthful profile of a famous American."

View Max in conversation with Cokie Roberts at the National Archives about the book First of Hearts (Willowbank Books).