Cleopatra does a remarkable job piecing together the story of a woman from the first century BCE about whom very little is actually known. Schiff pulls together many early sources, extrapolates as many facts as she possibly can, then pieces them into a coherent vision...
I LOVE Elif Shafak’s work and am working my way through her twelve novels. With every read I find a new favorite, but There Are Rivers in the Sky is my all-favorite so far. The book opens in 630 BCE, in Ninevah, the capital of the ancient Assyrian Empire along the...
As I have been with so many other authors, I am slowly working my way through Ann Patchett’s oeuvre, starting years ago with Bel Canto. Whistler ties with Tom Lake as my—so far—all-time favorites of her works. Tom Lake is a quiet story. Whistler tells of a family...
I have been slowly working my way through Larry McMurtry’s oeuvre. The Berrybender Narratives brings together the four volumes of the epic story of the American West: Sin Killer, The Wandering Hill, Sorrow’s River, and Folly and Glory. In these books, he sets the...
Poison is about the intertwined fates of a Spanish commoner and a queen born on the same day and year. Set in 1692, the bicentennial of Columbus’s discovery of America, it features the worst of Spanish life at the time: the dreaded Inquisition. Spain is now a bankrupt...
Winter Counts is a gritty multi-award winning mystery set on South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation and written by an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota nation. I enjoy both thrillers and Native American novels, so this was right up my alley. The hero (or...
As always, I love books about art, art history, and Italy, so I enjoyed reading The Secret Courtesan. Mia Harding is an art historian sent from the States to certify a fellow art historian’s identification of a statue called “The Estasi” (the Ecstasy) as being by a...
Edge of the Fall is a genre-bending blend of adventure, psychological thriller, and wilderness survival. Dr. Ian Sizemore, dealing with chronic pain and depressed after the deaths of his wife and daughter, is driving in the mountains during a snowstorm when he spies...
The Painter’s Apprentice is set in Venice in 1510. A master gilder sends his daughter, Maria, from home to apprentice under Master Trevisan, a well-known painter. Her father does this for two reasons: to get her away from her illicit lover, Cristiano, (who’s been...
The Painter of Time opens with an unknown man painting, then slowly moves in to reveal that he is an art restorer, a man with a quiet life and deeply instilled habits. Chapter Two introduces a second character, MacKenzie, a female artist, as she begins her day at the...
I was drawn to the Clarissa Bell mystery series because of the blurb’s comparison to the Amelia Peabody mystery series also set in Egypt. The Clarissa Bell series is set somewhat later (the 1920s) and carries the post-World War II paranoia about spies and various...
Liberty Street is a dual-time line, dual POV novel chronicling the abuses done to women in the fictional Mercer Women’s Prison. In the 1960s timeline, Emily Radcliffe is an editorial assistant at Chatelaine magazine, mentored by her boss, feminist Doris Anderson. An...
I loved Susan Donovan Bernhard’s debut novel, Winter Loon, because of its rich characterization and flawless prose. When I learned she has a new book coming out, I was thrilled. As in Winter Loon, in Westerly Bernhard writes of family secrets. She also uses a...
Blood Hollow is the fourth in the now twenty-two volume set of Cork O’Connor private eye mystery series. Here, Krueger handles multiple intersecting plot lines and potential villains with aplomb. The beautiful, but drunk, daughter of a wealthy townsperson drives away...
Black Butterfly is a psychological thriller with paranormal overtones. In it, a young artist, Emily, is avoiding dealing with psychological issues in her past, not even fully opening up to her therapist. She has to prepare for an upcoming exhibition, so when her art...
In Always and Forever, the female protagonist, Suzanne, is a woman pushing thirty who has always loved Jay, but due to pressure from her mother, has never been able to express those feelings and has contented herself with being best buds with him. They both...
This book is one of the most intriguing I have ever read. Having spent time in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I am always interested in learning more of the cultures there, and The Underground Girls delves into a phenomenon I never knew existed. Sons are prized in...
In The Last Road Trip, Mary Blake Bulloch convinces four of her sorority sisters to redo their college trip which was cut short by a disaster twenty years earlier. Each woman is dealing with her own crisis of some sort—divorce, terminal illness, death of a beloved...
In the Great Quiet opens with the Oklahoma land rush of 1893. An independent young woman, Minnie Hoopes, plans to stake a claim, hoping for land to call her own. When her claim is challenged by two outlaws, Minnie soon has their blood on her hands. She choses to...
When the local lumber company wants to harvest trees from the protected two-hundred-acre expanse of ancient great white pines near the town of Aurora, Minnesota, an environmental extremist, the Eco-Warrior, responds by setting explosives to bring down the mill and...
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