dysfunctional family

Sarah Stewart Taylor: Agony Hill

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Series debut

Sarah Stewart Taylor starts a new series with Agony Hill, following Detective Franklin Warren as he tries to start his life over again. Set in the tiny Vermont town of Bethany in the 1960s, the novel immediately plunges the reader into small town, rustic life, and realities of the struggling farmers there. The characters are rich, and each of the three point of view characters especially get filled out into living, breathing people.

When Warren arrives in town, he gets little time to settle in, or even unpack. Immediately, there is a barn fire up on Agony Hill. At first, it seems like a clear-cut suicide. The victim, Hugh Weber, was always one for making statements, and he was deeply against the highway set to go through town. The barn was latched from the inside, too. With no alternate exits, it seems clear that Weber got drunk and took his ideals a little too far. read more

Anna Lee Huber: A Deceptive Composition

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Lady Darby #12

This enjoyable series centers on unconventional artist Lady Darby, aka Kiera Gage, who still carries her first husband’s title, though she’s since remarried one Sebastian Gage. That first husband was cruel, forcing her to use her artistic skills as an anatomical illustrator to sketch as he dissected corpses, an extremely disreputable occupation for a woman in the 1830s.  Fortunately for her, his passing left her free to marry her dishy second husband and have a baby with him.  She now uses those skills as a society portraitist, but it’s her eye that makes this series original, detecting colors and relevant details others would miss. It’s her incredible powers of observation that makes her such a valuable assistant to her husband, an operative for the crown. read more