Not being overly fond of gothic novels, I rarely read them. Somehow, though, I ended up reading two in close proximity. The first, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, is a gem studded with literary references and chock-full of twists and turns and a strong...
The Thirteenth Tale is a gothic mystery packed with family secrets and twists that keep the reader guessing. The elderly Vida Winter, the world’s most famous living author, asks an unknown young author, Margaret Lea, to write her biography. Notorious for feeding the...
A Stopover in Venice, per its blurb, should have had everything I enjoy in a novel: a woman rediscovering herself as her marriage winds down; a sojourn in Venice, one of my favorite cities; and art and art history. It ended up being a mixed bag. It was a difficult...
The Seed Keeper is a multi-generational saga told from the points of view of four different women. The primary story is that of Rosalie Iron Wing, who is orphaned young and sent to foster care. There, she meets Gaby Makespeace, forming a friendship that lasts decades....
I enjoyed reading the first in Carol Potenza’s mystery series, String of Lies, and found I liked the second, Echo of Lies, just as much. Potenza writes of strong female protagonists who don’t need to be rescued—my kind of women. The newest protagonist, Francie Cortez,...
Minor Black Figures is an interesting blend of politics, art, and LGBTQI issues. Wyeth, a young Black artist, was raised by a distant White mother and absent Black father. He worries constantly about how people perceive him and his art. He’s having trouble painting...
After her husband’s death, the protagonist of Brenda Barker's Next Chapter, Brenda decides to write the book her spouse, Maynard, always disparaged. She married him, a rodeo cowboy turned construction worker, because he offered stability. Now, he’s dead, their only...
I enjoy reading about art and artists (especially women artists and their struggles for recognition in the male-oriented art world), so I was particularly drawn to this book. The Woman Who Painted the Seasons is the fictional biography of Lena Krassner (who renames...
Knowing that Susan Bernhard has a new book (Westerly) coming out on June 1, 2026, I decided to reread her marvelous debut novel, Winter Loon, before reading the new one. In Winter Loon, Wes Ballott watches his mother die in a frozen lake in Minnesota. After that...
As a physician, I enjoy reading books dealing with medical issues and/or medical ethics, especially if the author gets the "medical stuff" right without too many glaring errors. In Midwives, author Bohjalian does just that. He takes an experienced midwife,...
In Illusion of Truth, the third in the Detective Emily Hunter mystery series, author James L'Etoile continues the story of Emily Hunter as she solves a crime spree that affects her—and someone she loves—directly. One of the things I like best about this series...
The Nickel Boys, a multi-award winning novel (Pulitzer Prize, Kirkus Prize, National Book Award Nominee, etc etc etc), deserves every accolade. It is based on events that occurred in a reform school in Tennessee that for 111 years abused and neglected boys sentenced...
Tom Clavin brings to life another episode in the American Wild West during the late nineteenth century, this time focusing on the Daltons. The Last Outlaws deals with the Dalton gang (later becoming the Doolin-Dalton gang) that cut a reign of terror from Kansas and...
Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras is semi-autobiographical fiction in the vein of Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and is a masterful debut novel set in Columbia during the time it was controlled by 128 paramilitary groups, including Pablo...
I read the first two in Daniel Hecht’s Cree Black series, City of Masks and Land of Echoes, which are genre-bending mixes of mystery, paranormal, horror, and ghost stories. Cree Black is a Harvard-trained clinical psychologist who works for a company that investigates...
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