Never Name the Dead, though the first in a series, may join the ranks of Native American books along the veins of Tony Hillerman and Anne Hillerman’s Leaphorn/Chee mysteries. I was entranced by the aspects of Kiowa culture found in this novel. All her life, Mud, a...
Dead and Gondola is the first in the Christie Bookshop series. Ellie Christy has recently returned to her family home in Last Word, Colorado, where she and her sister, Meg, run the family’s history bookshop, the Book Chalet. They are the fifth generation in the book...
The Darnells, a husband and wife team of Egyptologists, combine scholarship, suspense, and adventure in Egypt's Golden Couple. I have always been fascinated by Egyptology, so I particularly enjoyed this book. Like The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking...
Duplicity by Shawn Wilson is the second of Brick Kavanagh mysteries series. Kavanagh, recovering from his prior case, has spent three months in Ireland and is just returning to Washington, DC. This novel relies too much on back history and descriptions of the local...
When her mother dies of cancer, Mari Lennox accepts a grant to go to Japan to document the Yanagi Inn. She's reluctant to accept the grant so soon after her mother's death, but at her sister's urging, she goes ahead with her plans. As her father was an expatriate...
A Fearsome Moonlight Black reads like a memoir. At the end of the book, in the author’s notes, Putnam states, essentially, that the novel is a memoir based on his early years as a policeman with an added fictional love interest, so this qualifies as "autofiction,"...
Having read Barbara Linn Probst first two novels, I was excited to read her third, The Color of Ice. Probst’s brand is writing about art and the ups-and-downs of an artist’s life, and The Color of Ice continues her explorations of those themes. Coming from an artistic...
Symbol Maker’s Daughter is a historical romance set in the time just before the emergence of Henry Tudor who will become King Henry VII, the sovereign who ends the War of the Roses, forms the Tudor dynasty, and becomes the father of Henry VIII. The protagonist is...
Sweet Slow Sizzle, being a romance, is heavy on the romance, but this one is one of the slowest slow-burn love stories I’ve ever read. If not for the hot thoughts the two lovebirds have for each other, you might even call it a simmer. Hunky half-Hawaiian Jojo Williams...
Art history graduate student Cate Adamson struggles to place herself in the male-dominated world of art history. Her doctoral advisor, the misogynistic Professor Herat Jones, has not only turned down every dissertation topic she’s broached, but has given her scut work...
Set in the late 1990s, Many Are Invited starts as a sort of buddy story. The two male leads, Steve and John, both in their mid thirties, work for the phone company trying to resolve the Y2K problem of what will happen to the world’s computer systems when 12/31/1999...
I have been on a bit of a horror binge (and I rarely read horror) starting with Kris Waldheer’s retelling of Frankenstein, Unnatural Creatures, told from the points of view of three women in Victor Frankenstein's life; followed by Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein;...
It’s been years since I’ve read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, an amazingly masculine novel though authored by a very young female. You might get a bit more out of Unnatural Causes if you’ve read Frankenstein recently, but the book stands well on its own. Unnatural...
Julia Phillips’s debut novel, Disappearing Earth, is structured somewhat akin to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Phillips writes multiple story lines each with its own narrator, and the full account plays out over the course of a year. It opens with...
Author Jeannée Sacken draws upon her experience as an international photojournalist to heighten reality in Double Exposure, the sequel to Behind the Lens. Annie Hawkins Green is a veteran photojournalist embedded during wars around the world. She’s dropped her married...
Landslide is author Sikes’s debut novel and the start of a series involving U.S. Marine veteran Mason Hackett. After being deployed in Iraq and losing his best friend in a disastrous military maneuver, he moves to London, goes to business school, and tries to start...
Set in East Texas in the second decade of the 1900s, this novel depicts the events of the era (racial discrimination, discrimination against Catholics and foreigners, the 1918 and 1919 flu pandemics, poverty, the Ku Klux Klan, white supremacy, and social upheaval) as...
In Blue Desert, Alice George, a headstrong young woman of sixteen, is trapped by the societal constraints of Edwardian England and a family that doesn't understand her. In 1910 her father moves the family to Morocco, and her life finally changes. On a drive with her...
Spirit Daughters continues author Carole Potenza’s Nicky Matthews Mystery series. I’ve read every Tony Hillerman mystery and, having been raised in the Southwest, love how he (and later his daughter Anne Hillerman) captured so beautifully the aura of the land and its...
Sign of the Eight is a teen/young adult epic fantasy. I felt at times it was closer to horror than fantasy with vampirelike creatures from the past, Tristan Nightsworn and Martha von Falkenstein, arising from a lake and feeding on humans. He is the messenger of doom;...
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