Reviews

Sarah Stewart Taylor: The Drowning Sea

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The third novel in Sarah Stewart Taylor’s Maggie D’Arcy series finds Maggie at a crossroads.  Formerly a Long Island cop, she’s now unemployed, and in Ireland with her daughter, on holiday with her boyfriend, Connor and his son. The first novel was Maggie’s journey backwards: she looked for the killer of her cousin, who had disappeared in Ireland twenty years before.  The second novel finds her investigating a crime that begins on a Long Island beach but has roots in Ireland.  This third novel finds her firmly in Ireland, planning to move there, and deciding what she should do as far as a new career.  As the book makes obvious, she very much misses police work and hates being on the outside looking in (this is a clue to her eventual decision, but it’s hardly a spoiler). read more

Sulari Gentill: The Woman in the Library

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This odd, endearing and weirdly tricky book is a meta meditation on the traditional detective story.  Playing off of Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library, author Sulari Gentill yanks this classic into the present.  In Christie’s Body the corpse of an apparently unknown young woman appears in the library of a private home.  In Gentill’s update, four young people are sitting near each other in the Boston Public library.  The main character, Freddie (or Winifred), a mystery writer, is working on a new book and she’s observed the others sitting near her, giving them nicknames as she slots them into a possible book.  Freud girl, Heroic Chin and Handsome Man have all invaded her imagination, when their real iterations hear a blood-curdling scream. read more

Siena Sterling: Tell Us No Secrets

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Set at a girl’s boarding school in 1970, Siena Sterling’s debut novel was immediately attractive to me, as a 1977 graduate of a girl’s boarding school myself.  There is no doubt Ms. Sterling attended boarding school as the details are pretty much spot on. Happily, I had a much better experience than the four girls in the novel, Abby, Zoey, Cassidy and Karen. Boarding school is a time of intense bonding – girls are there from the ages of 14 to 17 or 18 – and as that coincides with the surge of adolescence and self discovery, the friendships formed during that time of your life often prove to be the most indelible. read more

Catherine Lloyd: Miss Morton and The English House Party Murder

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This charming first in a series has some kissing cousins – it bears a resemblance to Dianne Freeman’s Lady Harleigh series and to Darcie Wilde’s Rosalind Thorne books.  Set in the same time period, 1830’s Britain, this book has a vivid, fast paced story telling style that makes it difficult to put down.  Young Lady Caroline Morton has been disgraced by her father’s bankruptcy and suicide, so she’s left her aunt’s household and is – gasp – earning a wage as the companion of Mrs. Frogerton, a forthright, wealthy widow who is sending her daughter, Dorothy, out into the wilds of the London “season.” read more

Juliet Blackwell: The Paris Showroom

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This is not a mystery, but an historical novel by the talented Juliet Blackwell, who has two cozy series to her credit as well as several novels.  This novel is set in a now very familiar time period: WWII.  Blackwell’s story takes place in occupied France, and she has a slightly different and original twist to her story.  The main characters are Capucine, a fan maker, and her estranged daughter, Mathilde.  The two live lives that haven’t intersected much, but this is not only the story of Mathilde’s growth from a callow, privileged young woman into something much more, but the story of Capucine, a true flapper in every way, who is now being held prisoner by the Nazis on the top floor of a Paris department store. read more

Brian Klingborg: Wild Prey

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This is the second novel about Inspector Lu Fei, who works in a small town outside of Harbin, China.  The charm of the first novel, Thief of Souls, were the inner workings of a small town Chinese police department and the lives of the officers, including and especially Lu Fei, who is an incredibly appealing character.  In Wild Prey Lu Fei remains appealing, but the topic Klingborg has chosen to spotlight is far more difficult.  The first novel was a serial killer story; this one focuses on the illegal (and immoral) killing of rare animals for food. read more

Stacey Halls: Mrs. England

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If a publisher is going to send an anglophile like myself a book titled “Mrs. England,” well, I’m going to read it.  I was not disappointed, and I was instantly immersed in the story of Norland nanny Ruby May, a 1904 graduate of the now famous school (the nannies trained there are hired by royal families today).  In 1904 the school was new, and the idea of any training or learning about childcare was a novelty, as were the distinctive uniforms the Norland nannies wore (and still wear to this day.) read more

Kathleen Marple Kalb: A Fatal Overture

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A Fatal Overture is the third in Kathleen Marple Kalb’s wonderful mystery series set in New York City at the turn of the 20th century, featuring opera singer Ella Shane, a mezzo soprano “trouser diva,” known for singing male roles.  Ella, the daughter of an Irish father and a Jewish mother, grew up in a tenement on the Lower East Side and was orphaned at an early age.  The trauma of finding her mother’s body, frozen to death in their tiny room, has never truly left Ella.  After being raised by her aunt on her father’s side of the family, Ella found a mentor, a famous opera singer, who discovered she had a great voice, and so, by the time the series begins, Ella has also become famous.  She owns her own company and lives in a brownstone on Washington Square with her cousin Tommy, the son of the aunt who brought her up.  Tommy, a former champion boxer, is a closeted gay man who manages her career and helps her fend off unwelcome admirers. read more

Erica Ruth Neubauer: Danger on the Atlantic

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Danger on the Atlantic is the third novel in Erica Ruth Neubauer’s series set in the 1920s, featuring American war widow Jane Wunderly and the handsome, enigmatic Englishman Redvers, the only man who might change Jane’s mind about remarriage.  As readers of the previous two books, Murder at the Mena House and Murder at Wedgefield Manor, will know, Jane was traumatized by her abusive first marriage and still has scars on her back.  She was relieved when her husband was killed in World War I.  For years she has refused to consider the thought of another marriage.  Then she met Redvers while working on a case in Egypt in the first book of the series, and their relationship has developed steadily through the next two books.  She cannot deny her attraction to Redvers, but she is still fearful about marriage, even though she knows he is nothing like her first husband. read more

Jess Montgomery: The Echoes

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This is the kind of book you read with a lump in your throat.  Jess Montgomery’s portrayal of 1920’s Ohio is so deeply felt, so evocative, so redolent of history and memory and shared experience, that to read one of these books is to be completely immersed, while at the same time feeling all of the human experience. Montgomery covers it all – birth, death and everything in between.  This novel seemed to me to be the most focused of her books plot wise, and that seemed to give this story an extra intensity. read more