Historical

Peter Blauner: Picture in the Sand

by

This sweeping, enjoyable epic by Peter Blauner isn’t really a mystery, though it has a crime at its center.  Like the Mrs. Pollifax books (which also treasure and honor different cultures), this is an adventure novel, containing a crime.  The premise is this: young Alex, the pride of his Egyptian-American family, accepted into an Ivy League university, had disappeared.  It becomes obvious to his family that he’s joined some kind of radical group somewhere in the Middle East. He refuses to communicate with his parents, but then his grandfather, Ali, reaches out to him and it’s this connection that Alex chooses to pursue. read more

Joyce St. Anthony: Death on a Deadline

by

It’s 1942, and Irene Ingram is managing The Progress Herald while her Dad is covering the front lines.  She’s in tiny Progress, Pennsylvania, and everyone in town is in a state of excitement at the news that Clark Gable will possibly be attending the war bond rally at their county fair.  The sensible and skeptical Irene is not so sure about it, though, and the book starts with her trying to get to the truth of the Clark Gable rumor.

This is a bit of a different take on a WWII mystery.  Many of the books are set in Europe, where the war was a daily and deadly occurrence.  However, the war reached its fingers everywhere, and even tiny Progress feels the impact.  Sweethearts, brothers and husbands are away; there’s shortages of almost everything; women are working in places they hadn’t before, like the newspaper.  St. Anthony brings the war home with her chapter epigraphs in the form of newspaper headlines, detailing the sinking of ships and lives lost all over the globe, and some even close to home.  The U.S. was not inviolable, as Pearl Harbor proved. read more

Tasha Alexander: Secrets of the Nile

by

The annual return of Lady Emily – wherever she may journey – is always something to celebrate. In this outing, Tasha Alexander’s 16th, Lady Emily and the dashing Colin have chosen to accompany Colin’s mother on a trip down the Nile.  The host, Lord Deeley, is an admirer of Lady Hargreaves, Colin’s mother, as well as an old friend, and joining the expedition is Colin’s daughter Kat.  Emily has a slightly prickly relationship with both women, one she tries very hard to set right. read more

Andrea Penrose: Murder at the Serpentine Bridge

by

Murder at the Serpentine Bridge is the sixth installment in Andrea Penrose’s Wrexford and Sloane Regency mystery series.  As the book opens, in 1814, the two protagonists, the Earl of Wrexford and Lady Charlotte Sloane, are a newly married couple, and Charlotte is trying to get used to life as a countess, while inwardly rebelling against the restrictions of Regency high society.

Wrexford is a man of science, a brilliant chemist, who relies on logic and deductive reasoning to solve crimes.  Charlotte is a satirical cartoonist who uses the pseudonym A.J. Quill.  She had eloped with her drawing teacher when she was very young, and scandalized her family.  Now that her first husband is dead and she is married to Wrexford, she is finally accepted back into polite society.  In contrast to Wrexford, she uses her intuition and artist’s eye to solve murders.  The two complement each other very well.  At first I wondered if the series would not be as compelling now that the two of them are married, but I am happy to say I was wrong.  Wrexford and Charlotte make a great couple, and the witty dialogue which was a strength of the earlier novels is still there. read more

Susan Elia MacNeal: Mother Daughter Traitor Spy

by

In her Maggie Hope series, Susan MacNeal has seemed to be more and more interested in the US side of the outbreak of WWII (see The Hollywood Spy, 2021).  In this novel, a standalone, she pursues that interest, creating a terrifying account of Nazism in America in 1940.  Her central characters, mother and daughter Vi and Veronica, kick off the action with Veronica’s graduation from Hunter College in New York.  Veronica is looking forward to an internship at Mademoiselle magazine, but thanks to an unfortunate turn of events the internship is rescinded. She and her mother, along with her Pasadena based Uncle Walter (in town for her graduation from Hunter) make plans to move to California.  Uncle Walter is willing to let the women live in his beach house. read more

Amanda Flower: Because I Could Not Stop For Death

by

Amanda Flower’s charming historical mystery is set in the household of Emily Dickinson and her family around 1855.  The main character is not Emily herself (though she is a strong second) but the new maid in the Dickinson household, Willa Noble.  One of the more fascinating aspects of this novel is Flower’s simple ability to put the reader into a different mindset.  Willa, who has always been poor, is grateful for the work and for a roof over her head.  Her simple expectations are so different from the highly enlarged expectations of the early 21st century. read more

Vanessa Riley: Murder in Westminster

by

Sometimes all it takes is a small change in point of view to make a huge difference.  Vanessa Riley’s lively historical mystery set in 1806 London sets itself apart from the several other Regency historicals out there at the moment, simply by creating a black main character.  At the time the black population in London numbered up to 20,000, out of a population of about one million.  They were referred to as Blackamoors and included Africans and East and West Indians.  (Riley’s notes at the back of the book are invaluable.) read more

Allison Montclair: The Unkept Woman

by

This series goes from strength to strength. Set in just post WWII London, Iris Sparks and Gwen Bainbridge run The Right Sort, a marriage bureau (apparently something that existed at the time). Iris worked in intelligence during the war, and Gwen, a daughter of privilege, is a bereaved widow who lives with her in-laws and young son as they have had her declared mentally incompetent.  The two find solace and purpose in running a business together, and my only actual quibble with this book was that there was really none of the marriage bureau in the plot (or very little). read more

Nev March: Peril at the Exposition

by

I am a huge fan of Nev March’s first book in this series, Murder in Old Bombay, but I am a little sad she moved her main characters and newlyweds Jim Agnihotri and Diana Framji from Bombay to Boston.  They are wonderful, vivid characters with an interesting relationship, and in many ways this is Diana’s book, while the first book belonged to Jim.  As the book opens Jim is letting Diana know that he’s heading to Chicago on a job – he works for the Dupree detective agency – and that he’ll be gone awhile.  That’s really all she knows. read more

Dianne Freeman: A Bride’s Guide to Marriage and Murder

by

I knew from Dianne Freeman’s first book that this was a special series, and the subsequent books have done absolutely nothing to change my initial opinion.  In this installment, she manages to carry off the wedding of the main character without destroying the interest and tension in the novel.  I can think of other series where a wedding can prove to be a disaster for the characters and only one other historical series, Tasha Alexander’s Lady Emily books, where that was not the case.  So, bravo to Ms. Freeman right off the bat, before I even got to the heart of the book (the wedding happens at the very beginning). read more