An enjoyable historical fiction novel. I was transported to Paris in the mid 1850s with the Carbonari (an Italian radical group to which Lord Byron belonged) plotting against the French Emperor, Napoleon III, in an effort to get him to back them in their attempts to...
Velvet Was the Night is more noir than thriller; it seems like an updated Raymond Chandler-esque book. The tone is persistently dark, even bleak, but the reader gets the sense that the point-of-view characters will come through. It is set during the 1970s, a decade in...
The Vigilante Game by Meghan Scott Molin is the third and final book in her Golden Arrow series. It is a humorous contemporary mystery/romantic comedy with diverse characters: a geeky female main character (Michael-Grace), her straight-laced cop boyfriend (Matteo),...
Erika Montgomery, in her debut novel A Summer to Remember, does a superlative job binding multiple points of view and dual timelines, the present and the 1980s. Frankie and her mother, Maeve, run a Hollywood memorabilia shop. Maeve never told Frankie much about...
In Kathleen Basi's new book, A Song for the Road, Miriam Tedesco’s husband and teenage children were killed by a drunk driver who crossed the median. A year later, she’s still in a tailspin, dealing with regrets and loss of faith. The arrival of a bouquet of...
Rising and Other Stories by Gayle Massey is a collection of thirteen short stories to be savored. They deal with loss in one form or another, from the death of a parent to the loss of innocence. The first, “Glass”, deals with a girl’s first experience with racism. The...
Gwen Spencer, a scrappy young woman from the coal belt of the States, fights for a different life. As an orphan, she’s sent to live with an aunt who resents the expense of keeping the child. But Gwen, who’s scrubbed floors and picked up odd bits of coal, manages to...
The Witch's Heart is a marvelous retelling of Norse myths centered around Angrboda, a giantess, Loki's first wife, and the mother of multiple monsters. Should sit beside Madeline Miller's Circe and The Song of Achilles for majestic retellings of mythology from the...
This is a YA fantasy story loosely based on Norse Mythology. The story combines fantasy with a young adult love story in the classic hero’s quest. The protagonist is Hirka, a fifteen-year-old girl who is different from everyone else she knows. She was born without a...
The Bachelor Bargain marks the beginning of a new series of romances by Maddison Michaels. This is the 1890s version of a romantic suspense, set in England where the social mores of the mid-Victorian era were conflicting with the burgeoning of women’s rights and labor...
It was interesting reading Whiskey When We’re Dry in relatively close proximity to Outlawed by Anna North. Outlawed is an amazing speculative Western that really shakes up the Western genre by tackling the patriarchy, gender roles/identity, race, religion, fertility,...
I was sucked into this macabre book from the first page. It’s like The Addams Family meets true crime television. It contains all the elements to draw a reader in. A mother’s obsessive grief leads her to actions that scar her family forever, leaving them dysfunctional...
Set in New Mexico in 1952, Kari Bovée’s Bones of the Redeemed is an excellent historical mystery. Bovée won the 2019 Hillerman Southwest Fiction Award. She writes strong female heroines and writes them well, but Ruby Delgado must be her best yet. Ruby thinks quickly...
Where the Truth Lies is a dark, claustrophobic vision of a small American logging town in Colorado which is caught in a multi-layered web of lies. The novel defines depression and bleakness while dealing with the worst of America: spousal abuse, controlling spouses,...
The classic myths we read in high school tell us of conquests of men and the glory they achieved from this events. A Thousand Ships focuses on the women in a unique perspective, told by Calliope, the goddess of epic poetry as she answers the pleas of a poet for...
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