In Farleigh Field is a standalone murder mystery with a patina of romance set in Kent involving MI5 operatives and Bletchley Park decoders during World War II. Simply knowing this sold me on the book, and Ms. Bowen delivers on the promise of the premise with an exciting story. She’s really a master of the…
In A Perilous Undertaking, the second book in Deanna Raybourn’s Veronica Speedwell series, Veronica and Stoker are called upon to investigate the murder of an artist. Having just read and loved A Curious Beginning, the first book in the series, I couldn’t wait to see what the pair were going to get up to next….
A Terrible Beauty, the eleventh entry in the Lady Emily series, returns to a pivotal event that occurred prior to the first book: the death of Lady Emily’s first husband Lord Philip Ashton. Over the course of the series Lady Emily has gone from being a recent widow to being a respected Greek scholar, and…
My favorite mystery sub-genre is historical mysteries. I was excited to discover The Secrets of Wishtide, set in 1850s England, a slightly different time period to those I normally read. The book features Mrs. Laetitia Rodd, the widow of an Archdeacon, who does investigations for her barrister brother. The premise sounded intriguing, but I found…
Stories about reincarnation have both fascinated and terrified me ever since I read The Mirror by Marlys Millhiser in high school. Therefore, it was with equal parts trepidation and excitement that I picked up Cat Winter’s Yesternight, a book about a child psychologist investigating claims of reincarnation in post-WWI Oregon. The story is an effective…
I admit that when I heard that Sherry Thomas, one of my favourite and without doubt one of the finest authors of Historical Romance currently writing was going to be shifting genres and embarking on a series of Historical Mysteries, my first thought was to go and curl up in the corner with a box…
The Queen’s Accomplice is the sixth entry in the author’s World War II era mystery series featuring Maggie Hope, a former MIT mathematics graduate student and current secret operative for the British government. Over the course of the series Maggie has moved from working in Winston Churchill’s office to training in Scotland to missions in…
Having previously enjoyed Juliana Gray’s historical romances, I was intrigued when I learned she would be venturing into the sub-genre of historical mysteries with her latest series. It is connected to her Princess in Hiding books by virtue of the fact that the plot of A Most Extraordinary Pursuit revolves around the search for the…
I have a weakness for Film Noir. There’s something about the genre that I have loved since I was a kid (because no one will ever be able to convince me Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is anything but Film Noir in animated form). The trope of the lone wolf investigator confronted by the dangerously beautiful…
Whenever anyone asks what my favorite mystery series is, I respond, without hesitation, the Flavia de Luce series! Set in the early 1950s, the books center around the activities of Flavia de Luce, a pigtailed, twelve-year old with a love of chemistry (poisons in particular) and an uncanny knack for discovering dead bodies. The series…