His historical mysteries include The Pale Blue Eye, Mr. Timothy, The Black Tower, The School of Night, and Roosevelt's Beast,[4] and they have been translated into 11 languages.

[11][12][13] His 2006 novel The Pale Blue Eye is a murder mystery set at West Point in 1830, where the young Edgar Allan Poe was a cadet.

[14][15][16][17][18] Bayard's fifth novel, The Black Tower (Morrow), set in Paris in 1818, follows the real-life detective Eugène François Vidocq as he investigates the mystery surrounding Marie Antoinette's son.

[19][20][21] His novel The School of Night (2010) shuttles between modern-day Washington, D.C., and Elizabethan England, where a group of scholars including Walter Ralegh, Christopher Marlowe, and the scientist Thomas Harriot explore dangerous questions.

[24] It tells of an action adventure involving Theodore Roosevelt and his son, Kermit, through Brazil's Da Dúvida River circa 1914.