Susanna Calkins: The Sign of the Gallows
I love this series set in 1660’s London, featuring former maid turned bookseller Lucy Campion. London has weathered both the plague and the great fire, and the upheaval finds some women able to take work usually reserved for men. While Lucy is not technically a bookseller’s apprentice, she does everything an apprentice would do. In the 1660’s, bookselling also meant publishing, so Lucy works as a typesetter, a sometime writer of murder broadsheets, which were often sold at public executions, as well as working as a seller. Her intelligence and connections to the wealthy Hargreaves family, her former employer, get her into some places the police cannot go. She’s also torn between two suitors – Constable Duncan and Adam Hargreaves.