Millie Turner is the envy of 1908 New York. She nabbed the catch of her season, marrying devastatingly handsome financier Charles Turner. They’ve moved to Oyster Bay, Long Island, and live in a house Millie inherited, which is now decorated too ostentatiously for her liking—there’s a taxidermied zebra!—but what Charles wants, Charles gets. Millie is nervously but happily hosting a lavish party when suddenly everything changes—she wakes up to a freezing, dark house, with the party over and the guests gone. Nobody will tell her what ’s happened, but she slowly learns that after a crime was committed at the party, she took a weeks-long “rest cure”—a drug-induced sleep prescribed at her husband’s wishes. Millie has had a terrible upset, they say, and since hysteria “can lead to immoral behavior [and] make you ungovernable,” there’s no time to waste: she must enter an institution. Thus begins Millie’s fight for her life. The first-person narrative, told from the young woman’s point of view, is both shocking and exciting, moving from grand ballrooms to flophouses and from shady business dealings to the honesty of pure love. A lengthy court battle will keep readers deliciously on edge in James’s (The Woman in the Castello, 2023) shocking and gripping drama.
Romance
Readers in search of a classic mystery need look no further, and if you have a fascination with San Francisco, as I do, then you’re doubly in luck. Capri Sanzio is the granddaughter of one of the City’s most famous serial killers: William “Overkill Bill” Sanzio, who’s now deceased. So named because “he bashed his three victims on the head, stabbed them to death, then sliced their throats after the fact.” A thorough kind of guy. Capri’s parents are shamed by their relationship to Bill, but Capri—who believes he was innocent—has a far more complicated response: she runs a highly successful business providing tours related to San Francisco’s serial killers (with herself, as Bill’s granddaughter, one of the prime attractions). But suddenly there’s a copycat of Bill murdering San Francisco women—one of whom is closely related to Capri—and the cops have made it clear that Capri or her daughter (herself a doctoral student in criminology) are their two prime suspects. With excursions from high society to the working class, and richly detailed portraits of San Francisco, this fascinating, fast-paced novel should find a broad readership. More, please?
At first, Finding Mr. Write reads like hearty rom-com fare: Daphne McFadden, a struggling writer who can’t get an agent, hires a dishy man to pose as the author of her book. She wants to hate “Zane Remington” but can’t, and complications ensue, not to mention increasingly lingering looks. While the enjoyable rom-com type misunderstandings and drama continue throughout the book, there’s also more here. Crime and mystery come into play when Daphne’s publisher and the book’s rabid fans get ever closer to finding out that Zane isn’t really the author of the wildly popular “dark zombie thriller with a teen girl protagonist,” and Daphne worries about her legal future. There’s also a lot to absorb about the economics, biases, and general messed-up-edness of the publishing industry, with an overworked publicist, one in a long string of underpaid young women, one of the tale’s quiet heroes. This well-plotted look at a maybe-romance and the bizarro world writers inhabit is a fun mix of mystery and romance, and well worth a read.
Whenever you love a book—that would be me and the first book in this series, The Mimicking of Known Successes—you can only approach the next installation with some trepidation. So I’m happy to report that this book more than lives up to my expectations—although it’s important to read the books in order. It’s set against a rather simple mystery: 17 students and staff members are missing from Valdegeld, the Oxbridge-like university where Pleiti is a professor. This is a space opera and a detective story, a romance and a cozy mystery, with the investigation led by Mossa, Pleiti’s lover and a detective, who in this story explicitly asks Pleiti for her help. Set in part on Giant, the huge rings that surround Jupiter and where many humans have settled, this narrative includes a lengthy trip to far-off Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. The pleasures in this book are many. There’s the growing relationship between the two women, especially Pleiti’s worries that Mossa may not have feelings as strong as she does. There’s the brilliant world-building, with special attention to the far-off settlements the two women seek out, revealing the fascinating means of travel and the many smaller, human communities scattered across the vast planet. Finally, there are ruminations from Pleiti about the aim of returning to Earth, her research area, and the hints of political dissent. Brilliant on all counts.
Nelly Sawyer’s father is a Kentucky horse breeder and the richest Black man in America. The family is in prohibition-era Chicago for Nelly’s coming out, when she’s expected to meet the country’s most eligible young Black men and find one to marry. She doesn’t fit in at the events, disdains the whole charade, and just wants to be alone to grieve the recent death of her brother. She’s also eager to pursue a career in journalism, not easy for a woman, let alone a Black woman who’s been raised in genteel isolation. Outside the cotillion and other events are no better, as white Chicagoans take the young woman for a servant. Nelly is soon distracted, though, when she’s surprised by potential love interests: Jay Shorey, a mysterious, beautifully dressed speakeasy manager, and the more suitable, at least in society’s view, Tomás Escalante y Roche, a Marquis who is this season’s catch. When Nelly is challenged to find and identify the dangerous Mayor of Maxwell Street to keep the newspaper job she’s threatened with losing, both men and Nelly herself are thrown into a vicious game of deceit that adds high suspense and sometimes terrible danger to the politics-laden season. An evocative and thought-provoking debut, and just look at that cover!
Devil-may-care heiress Ruby Vaughn has just sent the latest of her boss’s housekeepers running, with the woman on the way out muttering something about “a den of sin and vice.” Ruby does like to knock back a few drinks and scarcely cares about propriety, having planned, while a nurse during the Great War, to set up home with her fellow nurse and lover, Tamsyn. When that antiquarian-bookseller boss announces, “I’ve been thinking,” Ruby knows it doesn’t usually bode well, but this time there’s an upside. The trip he wants her to undertake, delivering mysterious books to a Ruan Kivell in Cornwall, brings her back in contact with Tamsyn, now Lady Chenoweth. Penryth Hall, Tamsyn’s miserable home with her abusive husband, only makes Ruby long all the more for the life she could have had with Tamsyn. When awful Lord Chenoweth is found dead, his body slashed as though by animals, the area’s depths of superstition and past misdeeds begin to reveal themselves, as do the powers of Ruan, the local Pellar, a powerful folk healer. Ruby refuses to believe in the curse that the locals say Chenoweth perished from, pursuing instead the help of the fledgling science of forensics to figure out what happened and restore Tamsyn’s happiness. This debut won the Mystery Writers of America/Minotaur First Crime Novel Competition, a well-deserved honor for a book whose gutsy main character and immersive world-building will remind readers of Margaret Dove in Evie Hawtrey’s And By Fire.
An absolute delight, wonderfully written and with enough plot to keep the reader zooming through the book then quickly asking for more. Regency London is the setting and the twin Colebrook sisters, Lady Augusta (Gus) and Lady Julia, are our amateur detectives. Unusual for women of this period, they were left with personal incomes by their late father, allowing them independence and the ability to thumb their noses at their useless younger brother. In their early forties and unmarried, the two can’t bear the injustices they see heaped on the women around them, and Gus is determined to do something. When word reaches them that a friend’s goddaughter has been locked away by her husband with the intent to kill her—as she’s unable to have children—the sisters head off to spring her from her country house. Along the way, they pair up with an old interest of Gus’s, Lord Evan Belford, back from exile in Australia—it’s a long story—and hotter than ever. What’s unusually successful about this book is that instead of focusing on one case, the sisters take on a series, including one case in which Gus, disguised as a man, infiltrates a brothel. While their identities as detectives grow, several themes emerge, including Julia’s struggle with breast cancer, their need to surrender their home to their brother and his fiancé, and, of course, what to do with Lord Belford. The Regency era, feminism, and romance all work together to create a book that will delight many. And how about that cover?
Christian fiction readers and those who enjoy a chilling, tense thriller will relish the trip to Night Hollow, a desolate part of rural Kentucky that locals call “the holler.” Set deep in Appalachian hills, the holler is darker than its surroundings, in both meager daylight and social conditions. It’s particularly bad for women, but the holler keeps all its residents in its sad grip, while outsiders leave the poverty and crime to continue providing it stays contained. That ends when the FBI shows up to investigate the murder of several local women who’ve been found beaten and with their eyes removed and eyelids sewn shut (a process that happens “offstage,” thankfully). Two very different protagonists lead the story: FBI psychologist Violet Rainwater, who’s a product of her mother’s lengthy abduction and rape years ago and struggles to face the current crime’s echoes of that past, and John Orlando, a detective whose FBI-agent wife’s killing may have a link to the Blind Eye Killer, as the media has dubbed the area’s monster. Patch offers spiritual insights via believer John’s kind advice and support of atheist Violet, with the religious theme taking a back seat to the characters’ personalities and the layered mysteries that swirl in the holler. The scary ending, which also has a great twist, will leave readers ready for more from Patch.
It’s hard to pull off a novel that attempts to have equal footing in two genres—never mind three—and typically one of the genres ends up taking on a minor role. Just think of all those unrequited romances lurking in the background of crime novels, sometimes through a whole series. But The Mimicking of Known Successes, a work of speculative fiction, a traditional mystery, and a romance is a walloping success. Earth is no longer a livable planet, and humans have long been settled on a colony located on the far outskirts of Jupiter, itself a gas giant. The worldbuilding here—how can humans survive in such an inhospitable environment?—is both subtle and fascinating. Layer over that a very traditional, academic, British mystery—think Gaudy Night—add a heart-felt romance, and you have one of the most unusual mysteries of the year. Terse and reserved, Investigator Mossa is seeking a man who’s gone missing, she doesn’t buy the notion that he committed suicide. He’s an academic, so the search takes her back to her university and Pleiti, an old girlfriend who’s now a professor researching the possibility of humans returning to Earth. Together they set out to find the missing academic, save themselves from death, and maybe even help rescue Earth from a calamity. Older is the author of the Centenal Cycle Trilogy. This would be a great choice for a book group.
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