The Pirate Queen – Queen Elizabeth I, her Pirate-Adventurers & the Dawn of Empire (HarperCollins July 2007) www.the-pirate-queen.com

Unlike most histories about Queen Elizabeth I, The Pirate Queen concentrates on Elizabeth I as monarch and heiress to a weakened realm. A question I had long asked myself was 'how did Elizabeth I transform England from a minor island country into a naissant world power?'. Or did she?

In The Pirate Queen I explore Elizabeth's genius as a financial wizard, and how she and her merchant and gentlemen adventurers were able to make England a great nation despite the odds. For more information and reviews, please go to:

http://www.the-pirate-queen.com/

		The Sancy Blood Diamond – Power Greed, and the Cursed History of one of the World’s Most Coveted Gems. (John Wiley & Sons, 2004)
www.thesancydiamond.com

This is the only complete 600-year history of the Sancy Diamond written to date. The Sancy is one of the world’s ten most famous jewels, and until now, its past has been alternatively shrouded in misconception and mystery. Based primarily on original sources, I take the reader through the diamond’s long history and four royal crown jewel collections. Stolen from India in the fourteenth century, the Sancy diamond was the largest white diamond in Europe until 1661, and the most concentrated form of wealth. I solve the diamond’s two disappearances – the 125-year missing history after the defeat of Charles the Bold and its twenty-odd year disappearance prompted by the greed of Napoleon Bonaparte. For more details, reviews, or how to purchase this book, see my website http://www.thesancydiamond.com/

		France the Crossroads of Europe (Dillon Press, Simon & Schuster, 1984, as Susan Balerdi)

As part of Dillon Press’s Discovering Our Heritage Series, this was a non-fiction book used widely in schools and libraries across North America as a teaching aid to children 12-14. It focused on what it was like for their contemporaries to grow up, in this instance, in France. Other selected books in the series included Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Korea, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden. I was also commissioned to write an update of France and a book entitled Great Britain: The World’s Oldest Democracy, but these were not published due to the sale and subsequent closure of Simon & Schuster’s Dillon Press/Macmillan imprints to Pearson Group