In her debut novel, Isabella Hammad uses richly-textured prose to invoke the turbulence of the Middle East right after World War I. I recently read Kurt Seyt and Shura by Nermin Bezmen and The Carpet Weaver of Usak by Kathryn Gauci, both of which deal roughly with the...
Set shortly after the Soviet Union imploded, this international intrigue takes FBI agent Jay Porter into Poland. There he’s quickly involved in a case where three men have been found dead on a riverbank. All have a minor genetic deformity: a stub of a sixth finger....
Because I'd read Sara Ackerman’s debut novel, Island of Sweet Pies and Soldiers, I continued with her second novel. Told in the dual, third-person perspectives of Eva Cassidy and Lieutenant Clark Spencer interspersed with real memos, headlines, and military...
In the City by the Lake, Viktor, a half-Jewish Russian emigre, lives a life of quiet desperation as a low-grade mobster in Chicago from 1929 to 1938. Raised in an all-male family (his mother died birthing him), his Weltanschauung is skewed. He’s a tortured character...
I had to read The Chef's Secret because I’ve lived extensively in Italy. I've also read Crystal King’s The Feast of Sorrow and enjoyed her approach to food. Her newest historical novel did not let me down. The descriptions of food were enough to make me...
I was intrigued enough by the title, The Psychology of Time Travel, to pick up Kate Mascaenhas's new book. This is a genre-breaking book combining time travel, science fiction, a “locked room” mystery, with touches of romance. I am sure there are techies out there who...
I started this book and decided I really wasn’t interested in reading a story about F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood at that particular moment, preferring something lighter and fluffier. But I decided to read a few pages, and the next thing I knew I’d finished the...
The San Antonio Romance Authors, fondly known as SARA, took me in when I was a fledgling writer and held my hand through the various revisions of my two novels. Now, we've banded together to create Love Fiesta Style, an anthology of seventeen short stories...
The Forgiving Kind was released by Kensington on January 29, 2019. Immediately, I was drawn to the story because I grew up with a similar hard-scrapple cotton farming family in Texas and picked cotton with my cousins and migrant farm workers. Author Donna...
I have read every single Tony Hillerman book and, being raised in the Southwest, loved how he (and later his daughter Anne Hillerman) captured so beautifully the aura of the land and its people. When I heard Hearts of the Missing had won the Tony Hillerman Prize for...
What Doesn’t Kill You is Aimee Hix’s debut novel. She now has a second out in the same series (Willa Pennington, PI Mysteries), Dark Streets, Cold Suburbs, which I am eager to read. If you like strong female protagonists in detective/mystery series such as Sara...
I was tempted to read this book by its title. Having lived abroad, I have fond memories of Europe and wanted to see if Blackwell’s writing lived up to my memories. The Lost Carousel of Provence is a complex book in multiple points of view in multiple settings and time...
Judith Leyster (1609-1660) was the first female painter admitted to the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke. After her death, her works were attributed to males, and she was essentially lost to the world of art history. A Light of Her Own, the debut novel of Carrie Callaghan,...
An interesting premise with a page-turning plot with multiple twists, superb world-building, an compelling protagonist who often acts in her own best interest because she’s a bit of a smart aleck, and a love interest who is as emotionally tormented as the protagonist all make this a good read.
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