Severn House

G.M. Malliet: Death in Cornwall

by

I was (am) a giant fan of Malliet’s Max Tudor series.  I had always been aware of the St. Just series, but had never read one, and I am now a giant fan of this series as well.  There are really very few practitioners of the traditional British detective novel working at the moment, and Malliet is one of the best.  Her novels are very much golden age in pattern, with a series detective, a fast paced and tidy narrative, and in this case, a setting to die for – the Cornish coast.

Using a trope beloved of novelists from Agatha Christie to Deborah Crombie to Louise Penny, St. Just is on vacation with his fiancée (the wittily named Portia De’Ath – I hope she keeps her maiden name!) Like Crombie’s Duncan and Penny’s Gamache, St. Just seems to be the calm center of the storm.  It made it completely believable that the local constabulary would turn to him for advice. read more

Susanna Calkins: The Sign of the Gallows

by

I love this series set in 1660’s London, featuring former maid turned bookseller Lucy Campion.  London has weathered both the plague and the great fire, and the upheaval finds some women able to take work usually reserved for men.  While Lucy is not technically a bookseller’s apprentice, she does everything an apprentice would do.  In the 1660’s, bookselling also meant publishing, so Lucy works as a typesetter, a sometime writer of murder broadsheets, which were often sold at public executions, as well as working as a seller.  Her intelligence and connections to the wealthy Hargreaves family, her former employer, get her into some places the police cannot go. She’s also torn between two suitors – Constable Duncan and Adam Hargreaves. read more

E.J. Copperman: Inherit the Shoes

by

This is a delicious, funny, perfect book.  Copperman, a seasoned series veteran (Haunted Guest House, Asberger’s, Mysterious Detective, Agent to the Paws, and, as Jeff Cohen, Aaron Tucker and Double Feature) brings all his writing expertise to the table in Inherit the Shoes.  Lawyer Sandy Moss has just moved to California from New Jersey to start over.  On her first day at her new law firm she’s told to sit still and be quiet (she’s new to defense, she’s come from the prosecutor’s side of the table), and, instead of being quiet, she speaks up. read more