Historical

Ashley Weaver: Playing it Safe

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Electra McDonnell #3

If Nancy Drew had lived during WWII and had the skills of a safecracker, she might have grown up to be Ashley Weaver’s appealing Electra McDonnell.  Electra, or Ellie, has been trained by her safecracking uncle and in the first book is recruited by the government to put her skills to a more patriotic use.  While Ellie’s past is criminal, her present is in the service of her country, and as the book opens, she’s given an assignment with few details other than “get to know the locals.” read more

Dennis Lehane: Small Mercies

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Dennis Lehane writes like an angel.  His prose, while not flashy, is still beautiful, even while he writes about racial hatred, drug addiction, beat downs and murders.  Through his compelling way of creating character, he reaches in and gives your heart a squeeze, and I think he writes better than anyone about the highways of grief, loss and heartbreak.  It’s one of those miracles of empathy that only the most powerful of writers possess.

While this story is a simple one, in one way, it’s also full of complicated layers and wrong turns. It’s very basically the story of a worried mother looking for her missing daughter.  The mother, the tough as nails Mary Pat Fennessy, lives in South Boston in 1974, just as school busing is about to break the city into riots and protests.  The kids from Southie will be bussed into the black area of Roxbury, and vice versa.  Mary Pat’s 17 year old daughter, Jules, is scheduled to be on the first bus. read more

Erica Ruth Neubauer: Intrigue in Istanbul

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Intrigue in Istanbul is the fourth book in Erica Ruth Neubauer’s Jane Wunderly series, featuring an American war widow in the 1920s.  Each book has a different setting: the first takes place in Egypt, the second at an English country manor, the third on a transatlantic voyage on the sister ship of the Titanic, and the fourth, obviously, in Istanbul.  Neubauer makes great use of the setting in each of her books, and this is no exception.  She takes the reader to Istanbul along with Jane, as her intrepid heroine searches for her missing father as well as a legendary relic.  This is a tribute to Indiana Jones, but with some significant nods to Agatha Christie. read more

Harini Nagendra: Murder Under a Red Moon

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The second novel in Harini Nagendra’s charming series featuring new bride and fledgling detective, Kaveri Murthy, finds Kaveri struggling to get along with her mother in law, Bhargavi.  When Bhargavi asks Kaveri as a favor to look into an embezzlement at her cousin’s husband’s factory, she reluctantly agrees, even though she feels unqualified to take on this job.  When she goes to meet her mother in law’s cousin at the factory, the two women enter the factory, and find the man dead.  Somehow Nagendra manages to make this almost expected death shocking and terrible, and Kaveri is caught up in taking the grieving woman back home and getting her settled. Now that the embezzlement has turned to murder, Kaveri knows she wants to investigate. read more

Jacqueline Winspear: The White Lady

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Jacqueline Winspear’s The White Lady spans two wars. Despite this epic scope, the book has the feel of an intimate character study.  Luckily, the character at the center of the novel, Elinor White, is well worth a look.  As a little girl in Belgium with an British mother and a Belgian father, the book opens as the war begins and little Lini’s father is gone.  Somehow, even as a 10 year old, Elinor knows she will never see her father again, so she, her mother, and her older sister, Ceci, form a tight unit, a unit that becomes much tighter during the German occupation of their little village. When a strange woman asks them to help out, the two girls become a part of the resistance. read more

Lauren Willig: Two Wars and a Wedding

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Lauren Willig’s new novel blooms from one of her recent books, Band of Sisters (2021) which followed a group of Smith College grads as they made their intrepid way to France to lend a hand during WWI in 1917.  Willig became intrigued with their leader and this book’s central character is based on her – another Smith grad who trained in archeology, was denied “dig” time in Greece because of her sex, and turned to humanitarian work and war nursing.

Willig’s fictional creation, Betsy Hayes, has just arrived in Athens in 1896 hoping to excavate.  The classicist in charge tells her to try being a librarian; she finds lodging with a swanky titled Greek woman who knew her father, gets around town on her bicycle, and manages to get on some archaeological tours with the male students.  Along the way she encounters a dashing French Count and falls hard even though (gasp, though not a surprise) he’s inconveniently married.  Ultimately, her frustrations become so great she decides to try war nursing.  Recommended by the Queen of Greece, she heads to the front, in what was the short lived Greco-Turkish war of 1897.  Short lived, but with no shortage of horror. read more

Kristen Loesch: The Last Russian Doll

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The Last Russian Doll is an epic, set both during the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the more recent revolution – the one that abolished the Soviet Union in 1991.  The more present day heroine, Rosie, or Raisa, her actual name, is a British grad student who fled from Russia with her mother to the UK after the murders of her father and sister.  Her mother is now an ancient drunk who rarely gets out of her bed; as the book opens, she dies, but Rosie is headed back to Russia as an assistant to a famous writer (he brings to mind Alexander Solzhenitsyn).  She will be there to help with research, but what she really wants is to solve the mystery of her father’s and sister’s deaths. read more

Charles Todd: The Cliff’s Edge

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It’s been several installments of Charles Todd’s Bess Crawford series since Britain has been at war. Bess herself has been kept busy, often far from home, but The Cliff’s Edge brings her all the way back, finding her restless and unsure of what she will do next. She’s left with only the decision of what color she will pick for new curtains when a letter arrives in the mail, asking for her help. Her cousin Melinda begs for Bess to go oversee the surgery of one of her longtime friends, Lady Beatrice. Hesitant at first, Bess realizes she doesn’t have much else to do, and agrees to go. But what started as a simple overnight watch for a routine surgery quickly gets much more complicated. read more

Darcie Wilde: The Secret of the Lost Pearls

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The Secret of the Lost Pearls is Darcie Wilde’s sixth mystery about Rosalind Thorne, a Regency gentlewoman fallen on hard times after her father abandoned his family.  (But see my note at the end of the review for more about series numbering.)  Rosalind undertakes discreet investigations for gentlewomen in distress, and her cases often involve solving murders.  Readers familiar with the series will know there is a cast of regular characters who help Rosalind with her investigations: most importantly her best friend Alice, a gossip columnist who has become a novelist, Rosalind’s resourceful maid Amelia, and her love interest, the handsome Bow Street Runner Adam Harkness. read more

Anastasia Hastings: Of Manners and Murder

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Of Manners and Murder, the first in Anastasia Hastings’ new series starring an agony aunt heroine, is far from the author’s first book. Anastasia Hastings is one of many pseudonyms for Casey Daniels, a veteran author with dozens of works to her name. Of Manners and Murder reads like it was written by a practiced hand. It opens with Violet, our heroine, discovering that her aunt, Adelia, is the most famous agony aunt in London in 1885. Adelia writes as Miss Hermione and has managed, for years, to keep the truth from everyone, including the two girls living with her. Just as Violet is given this information, Adelia leaves on vacation – and puts Violet in charge of answering her mail. read more