Candace Robb: A Twisted Vengeance
The second novel in Candace Robb’s Kate Clifford series finds the feisty Kate dealing with her mother moving in next door, bringing along with her some “beguines” or women who live a religious life but not in a convent. They devoted themselves to charitable work. Kate is wary of her Mother’s newfound earnest faith and of her mother in general, and with good reason, as Robb teases out more of Kate’s family backstory throughout the book.
Kate has an assorted household that includes a giant, earless baker and former soldier, Berend, and two wolfhounds who accompany her everywhere. She also has a tumble of children, none of them hers, but all of them with ties to her family. She loves them all and it makes for a busy, active household.
Laura Joh Rowland is well known to mystery fans as the author of the Sano Ichiro mysteries set in 17th century Japan. She’s also taken on Charlotte Bronte in other novels, and here she creates a new character, photographer Sarah Bain, who lives in Victorian London at the same time as Jack the Ripper. While there are many, many books about Jack the Ripper—the fact that he was never found will always be fuel for speculation—he’s almost like Sherlock Holmes in that the permutations and impressions of his life (and crimes) are varied and plentiful, and the interpretations can range from the dull to the nutty to the creative. Rowland goes for the creative.
Nancy Herriman has taken a very specific time and place and brought it to life. Her central series character, Celia Davis, British born, has served as a nurse in the Crimea. Through marriage, she’s ended up in 1867 San Francisco, as the man she married was a hot blooded Irishman looking to make his fortune in the gold rush. He has vanished – he may be dead, or he may not be dead, but Celia is running a clinic on her own and serving as guardian to her cousin, Barbara, who is slightly crippled as well as half Chinese. In 1867 San Francisco, being Chinese was far more of an impediment than being crippled.
This is a terrific debut novel, set in Springfield, Illinois in 1837. Abraham Lincoln, newly minted lawyer, arrives in town looking for a place to stay. He ends up sharing the bed (a common practice at the time) of one Joshua Speed, who is running the general store in town. Speed and Lincoln became lifelong friends; his brother, James was named U.S. Attorney General by President Lincoln. When this book takes place, however, Lincoln’s presidency is far in the future, though the character traits that assured his greatness are hinted at here.
At this point in Tasha Alexander’s career, now eleven novels in to her Lady Emily series, you’re either all in or all out. I am all in as Lady Emily makes her way around Victorian Europe solving crimes with the help of her dashing husband, Colin Hargreaves. As most loyal readers will know, Lady Emily was widowed in the first novel, And Only to Deceive, falling in love with her husband only after the fact. She ends up mirroring and following his passion for the classical world.
Maureen Jennings is known far and wide—and deservedly so—for her Inspector Murdoch mysteries, set in Victorian Toronto, But she’s also now written four installments in the equally excellent Detective Inspector Tom Tyler mysteries, set in a tiny Shrosphire village during the heart of the war. One of the books was about Land Girls; one about a munitions factory explosion; one about a hospital for the war wounded. In this novel she has settled deeply into Tom Tyler’s life and his assignment in Ludlow, as he gets used to being divorced and missing the love of his life, who is abroad doing secret war work.
I’ve read other books by Sarah Zettel, a.k.a. Darcie Wilde, but this one is by far my favorite. I loved the setting – (mostly) 1817 London, with a brief prologue in 1812 – and the milieu, to any lover of Jane Austen novels, is a somewhat familiar one, as are the straightened circumstances of the heroine, Rosalind Thorne. Back in 1812, Rosalind comes home dreamily from a dance where she’s almost declared her love for young Devon, only to wake up and find her sister fleeing the house in the middle of the night with their father.
Thriller writer Andrew Gross has turned his sights to a topic closer to him personally, the Holocaust. While I almost feel I have read, seen and learned everything about the Holocaust, this book provides a fresh look at this hellish time in human history and reminds us that as humans we are capable of devastating cruelty. The balance Gross brings to his novel – a balance between storytelling and what is obviously deeply felt history – is really very well handled. I could not put this book down nor could I stop thinking about it.
I haven’t picked up a Barbara Cleverly novel in a couple years, despite being a huge fan of the earlier books in this series, which are set in India during the British Raj. Her central character, Joe Sandilands, has since made his way back through Europe and is now back home in London working for Scotland Yard. But enough time had elapsed for me not to compare the books set in India to this one, which is set in Oxford in 1933.
Candace Robb returns with a new series set in 1399 York, featuring a true badass, Kate Clifford. Kate has a rich backstory, fleshed out throughout the book while she veers from crisis to crisis. She’s a widow who moved to York from Scotland for safety’s sake, but as York at that time was a hotbed of political intrigue, nowhere is really safe. She’s lost her twin brother who “talks” to her (kind of like Hamish in Charles Todd’s Ian Rutledge books) and she’s looking after two wards, her dead husband’s bastards, now bereft of their mother. It’s an uneasy alliance.