Historical

I can’t think of a more delicious way to allocate your book buying budget than to buy a Tasha Alexander novel.  Alexander, who began this Victorian series with her central character of Lady Emily falling in love with her recently dead husband after the fact, has only continued to spice up her characters.  Lady Emily’s love of all things Greek and the scholarly attributes that come with her passion make her a believable investigative partner for her husband, Colin Hargreaves, who works undercover for the crown. read more

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

This is a fun mix of romance, mystery and a cracking good ghost story.  I enjoyed the fact that the author unabashedly buys into the whole ghost paradigm – there’s not an ounce of irony here, which serves to make her ghost far more scary. Set just after WWI, the main character is a young woman at Somerville College, Oxford, part of an illustrious group of women who were the first to get a university education at Oxford.  In real life their numbers included Dorothy L. Sayers and Vera Brittain, author of the classic memoir of WWI, Testament of Youth. read more

Loren Estleman has written a lot of books, but many of them have been in one or another of his excellent series, so when he writes one that isn’t, it’s news. Actually The Confessions of Al Capone more resembles one of his westerns or Detroit novels than an Amos Walker effort because it’s a historical saga that uses a fictional character to portray a period of high lawlessness and great social change, seasoned with the presence of actual figures and events.

The set up is typical masterful Estleman – a low level F.B.I functionary, Peter Vasco, is one day brusquely summoned to the highest level of power, J. Edgar Hoover himself. Peter assumes he’s going to be canned, but in fact he learns that Hoover has groomed him for a long cherished ambition, to once and for all learn the secrets of Al Capone. Scarface is greatly diminished in 1944, in exile in Florida, having been paroled from his tax evasion prison rap, riddled with syphilis and waiting to die. Hoover’s plan is masterful, if manipulative, and Peter is uniquely equipped to carry it out. He’s an almost priest, having left the seminary just short of graduation, and thus equipped to travel down to Miami, masquerade as a padre and hear the addled Al’s final confessions. His entree to the tightly controlled Capone household is his own father, once a driver for Capone in Chicago and now a fishing boat owner in Fort Lauderdale. Peter’s relationship with both his father and the church for which he’s to pose as a father is conflicted, so there’s a lot of soul searching involved with his pursuit of Capone, but he’s also glad, in these war years when Al’s racketeer colleagues have turned to black market profiteering, to be able to do something to help the war effort. read more

This is a totally charming book, and MacNeal is deservingly nominated for both an Edgar and a Dilys this year (and probably an Anthony and an Agatha, though I am not always the best predictor).  Set during WWII, this is the second book in the Maggie Hope series.  Featuring a fledgling spy (Maggie) fresh from Churchill’s office and spy school, she was an abysmal failure at the physical aspects of her training, presenting a conundrum for her handlers.  She tells a friend it was terrible, like gym class every day, and if there aren’t a lot of readers nodding their heads in recognition over that comment, I’ve misjudged the mystery reading public. read more

This fascinating little volume, set during England’s Civil War in 1644, is surprisingly zippy. I love historical novels but I have to say “zippy” is not always the applicable word. It’s unusual also in that it’s written by a man but features a female protagonist, and not just any female, but a midwife, the most female of all professions.

Any concerns you might have about not being very knowledgeable about Oliver Cromwell’s revolution to understand the story can be set aside – while this setting is the book’s backdrop, Thomas’ main concern is character and plot, just like any other able novelist. His central character, Bridget Hodgeson, is a wealthy and well known midwife in the city of York, a city being besieged by rebels but still in the hands of the King’s forces. read more

This is another fun entry in Rhys Bowen’s delightful Lady Georgie series, about the travails of a young woman in the 1930’s who is 35^th in line to the throne.  There are references to “Great Grandmother” Victoria and the horrors of Mrs. Simpson.  My favorite in this series, A Royal Pain, involves Queen Mary’s request for Georgie’s help in quashing the romance between Mrs. Simpson and the (then) Prince Edward.

The tone of these novels is lighter and funnier than Bowen’s Molly Murphy series, but like that series, the action revolves around a strong female lead.  Georgie is impoverished and forced to eke out a living in various “lady like” occupations, none of them very remunerative.  In this novel she is rescued from the gloom of her ancestral Scottish castle by an ad asking for a hostess at a country house party. read more

Jennings has a note at the end of this novel about the source of her title – it’s from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: “…most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom unless the writing be erased.”  Jennings skills as a novelist are somewhat similar to Charles Dickens skills, so this is an appropriate quote in many ways.  Her Dickensian talents lie in her ability to create an entire universe within her pages, bulging with characters, none of them – from the central character of Tom Tyler down to a briefly met matron in a bomb shelter – forgettable. read more

“Constantinople was like an exotic dream full of spice and music and beauty—the scent of cardamom blew through the streets like a fresh wind—but at the same time, it had a distinct and surprising European feel.”

Reading a Tasha Alexander book is simply pure pleasure. Four books into her series about Lady Emily Ashton—widowed in the first novel, now happily married in the fourth—she’s managed to keep her historical formula fresh by changing the location with each book. In the last, Lady Emily was in Vienna; in this novel, she’s in Constantinople visiting harems. Emily and her new husband, Colin Hargreaves, have made the journey to Constantinople on the Orient Express—a lavishly described journey that has one little hiccup in the form of Sir Richard St. Clare. Emily and Colin join Sir Richard for dinner one night, and he tells them his sad story—he lived a life of roaming adventure with his young family, until his wife was murdered and his young daughter kidnaped. His son is still living but Sir Richard’s desire to find his missing daughter has never dimmed. During the course of the dinner, Sir Richard passes out and must be removed from the dining car. The next day, he discovers some papers have been stolen, and Emily has a hard time forgetting his plight, though Colin does his best to get her to try. read more