Unmasked is the first in Carol Potenza's new De-Exinct Zoo Mystery Series. Veterinarian Milly Smith trained in Siberia and now works in Pleistocene BioPark, a zoo dedicated by resurrected extinct megafauna (giant short-faced bears, dire wolves, smilodons, mammoths,...
The Fugitive Colours is Nancy Bilyeau’s sequel to The Blue, a historical thriller set in the 1760s. Genevieve Planché is an artist who, as she tries to pursue a career in the arts, finds that men control the art world. Genevieve must live with actions that occurred in...
The Blue is a historical thriller set in France and England in mid 18th century. Porcelain is a huge commodity, so much so that the obsession over porcelain brings to mind the Dutch obsession with tulips a century earlier. Britain and France are duking it out over the...
The Embroidered Book, a historical fantasy, follows the Hapsburg girls, Maria Carolina and Marie Antoinette from childhood to becoming monarchs of Naples and France respectively. This is a well-researched volume which takes the history of these two women and binds it...
As someone who's lived around the world, I know firsthand how cultures can collide, and the book, A Court at Constantinople, does a great job showing just that. After the Crimean War (1853 to 1856), Turkey wants to expand its international reputation and is selling...
Hester is a marvelous, sensual tale which envisions a young Scottish immigrant, Isobel Gamble, as she arrives in Salem, Massachusetts. When abandoned there by her husband, she mets and falls immediately in love with the just-out-of-college Nathaniel Hawthorne. As...
I always enjoy Luanne Castle’s poetry and its connection to our past and to nature. Our Wolves is a bit of a departure from that, but one I thoroughly enjoyed. Here, Castle subverts the old fairy tale, “Little Red Riding Hood” and, though a unique combination of...
Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint is fascinating. Author Durkee is honest about his abuse of Adderall and alcohol while consumed with his obsession with finding the definitive portrait of William...
I enjoyed Night of Fire. Its structure is somewhat akin to A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan in that it is a series of short stories bound together by a rather subtle common thread, in the case of Night of Fire, a rooming house going up in flames, one floor...
Set in San Francisco during the Great Depression, The View from Half Dome is the story of sixteen-year-old Isabel Dickinson. After her longshoreman father dies on the docks, she and her family (her mother, a teenaged brother James, and a nine-year-old sister) move to...
Lightning Strike is the eighteenth of twenty Cork O’Connor mysteries, a new-to-me mystery series. I started with #18 because it’s the prequel to the rest of the series. I recently read Krueger’s extraordinary novel, Ordinary Grace, which is a beautifully-written...
I raced through Hyacinth in one evening. Regency historical romance tends to bog down in descriptions of the ton and its rigid social mores and not have a lot of pizzazz, so I really welcomed a novel with a neuro-divergent heroine with an aversion to touch and a...
Downfall is a fast-paced novel set in New York City in the 1980s. It is something of a mashup of a police procedural and character-driven fiction and includes the points of view of the two detectives, a physician, Richard Shepard, whose father is murdered, and the...
Bloodlines is the fourth of a trilogy that has turned into a five-book series, The Shadow of the Raven. I have not read books one through four, but as I’ve read all of Bernard Cornwell’s The Warrior Chronicles, I had no trouble following the storyline and characters....
Silver in the Bone by Alexandra Bracken is the first in a series of Arthurian legend-inspired Young Adult fantasies set in contemporary Boston and Avalon. I found Bracken has written less a retelling of the Arthurian legends and more used them as a springboard into a...
Hang the Moon blends true events in American history with the English Tudor dynasty with King Henry VIII and his multiple wives and his daughter who becomes Queen Elizabeth I. The names of the characters reflect this background: Seymour, Jane, Tom, Eddie, etc. “Duke”...
Play the Fool is billed as a thriller, but in reality it’s more of a women’s fiction with a mystery thrown in. Katie True is a strong female protagonist, but at times her actions border on sheer stupidity. She’s failed an attempt to live in Chicago and come home to...
Janie Whitman, the protagonist in First Course, undergoes a life-changing twenty-four hours. First, she loses her job in Chicago and the boyfriend/boss there breaks up with her. Then, hard on those happenings, her parents die in a plane crash, and her sister, Alyssa,...
The Lockhart Women by Mary Camarillo doesn’t read as a debut novel. She captures the epitome of a modern dysfunctional family. Stranded through the novel is the television coverage of the 1994-1995 O.J. Simpson murder and later his robbery trials, and each woman...
Annie Beyers, the main character of Kelley McNeil’s debut novel, A Day Like This, seemingly has everything she wants in life: a beautiful yellow farmhouse, a loving spouse, and an adorable daughter, Hannah. When she takes Hannah to the pediatrician, Annie is involved...
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