Month: August 2013

Anna Lee Huber: The Anatomist’s Wife

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Like Tasha Alexander’s debut (And Only to Deceive), Anna Lee Huber’s novel has a unique and memorable premise.  Young, widowed Lady Darby is staying with her sister and her husband at their castle in Scotland.  She’s recovering not from the loss of her husband, but from the slings and arrows thrown her way by disapproving members of high society.  Lady Darby was married, as the title suggests, to an anatomist, and being a skilled painter it’s thought (but not proven) that she did the drawings for his anatomy guide.  In 1830 or thereabouts, that was a scandal of the highest order.  There’s more to the story but I don’t want to give away details that Huber has been at pains to tease out throughout the story. read more

D.E. Johnson: Detroit Shuffle

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D.E. Johnson’s fourth novel in his dark chronicle of 1912 Detroit and the frequently unlucky life of protagonist Will Anderson is also a look at the Women’s Suffrage movement.  These novels are tight and move quickly, with lots of action sequences – this has a notable section set in an actual salt mine – that keep the pages flying even if, as I do, you frequently feel squeamish about what’s happening to Will.

detroitshuffleIn the last novel, Detroit Breakdown, Will went undercover in the giant Eloise mental hospital where his girlfriend’s brother was a resident.  This has left him with some residual issues, and it’s left his girlfriend, Elizabeth, not only with a mother who has dementia at home but her brother Robert and his friend Francis, both of whom seem to suffer from, at the very least, some form of Asperger’s. read more

Julia Keller: Bitter River

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Julia Keller’s first novel was a knockout, and this second book in the series may even be better.  She brings an amazingly assured voice to her storytelling, reminiscent very much of Sharyn McCrumb’s classic ballad novels.  The thing is, McCrumb wrote those after she’d cut her teeth on her (admittedly great fun) Elizabeth McPherson books.  While Keller has been a journalist and has written a non-fiction book, she plunged into novel writing full speed ahead with the first in this series, A Killing in the Hills. read more

William Kent Krueger: Tamarack County

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Despite the fact that it’s a few days before Christmas, and the snow is deep on the ground, things are pretty hot in Tamarack County. The book seems to take its temperature from series protagonist Cork O’Connor’s son Stephen, who is burning with teenage lust for his new girlfriend Marlee, even though their gropes toward fulfillment are twice interrupted by macabre and possibly deadly attacks. With love interest Rainy out of town indefinitely, Cork finds himself eyeing the prettier women he encounters with appreciative, if somewhat impure, thoughts.  Even daughter Anne, the putative novitiate nun, has apparently renounced her long cherished vocation for, well, that same old thing. read more