Tag:

Historical

Review

Secrets of Rose Briar Hall

by Henrietta Thornton

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.

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Review

Agony Hill

by Brian Kenney

A classic mystery that pulls the reader in and doesn’t let go until there’s a resolution. It’s the mid-1960s, and Franklin Warren arrives in small-town Bethany, Vermont to join the state troopers as a detective. It’s a time of change: as young men head to Canada to escape the draft, the state is developing highways that, many fear, will change Vermont irrevocably, while the echoes of the Cold War continue to reverberate. Warren is also escaping his own demons, a tragic occurrence he left behind in Boston but is unable to forget. But before he can unpack—literally!—he’s called to investigate a fire; Hugh Weber, a hippie farmer, has burnt down his barn and likely killed himself, although evidence of suicide is scant. Warren digs deep into the community, from Weber’s widow to Warren’s elderly next-door-neighbor, a retired intelligence agent. Secrets abound, but which one will unveil the murderer? Fans of Kay Jennings and Jeff Carson will appreciate this new series by the author of The Drowning Sea.

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Review

The Last Note of Warning

by Henrietta Thornton

Fans of Schellman’s previous two books in this exciting series, Last Call at the Nightingale (2022) and The Last Drop of Hemlock (2023), will find this trilogy closer a satisfying end to the roller coaster of Vivian Kelly’s life as a seamstress by day, flapper at a queer-friendly speakeasy by night. Vivian now delivers dresses to her boss’s wealthy clients, waiting around mansions until the clients deign to join her for a last check on their new dresses’ fit. On one such visit, Vivian is invited by the gentleman of the house to sit a while and warm up, during which time he’s called away. She then finds him dead, and as she’s the only person around, she’s on the hook for the killing. She’s given a week to find the real killer, with the police seemingly aware that she probably didn’t do the crime but happy to have a handy suspect to charge. The tumultuous week forms the bulk of the book, and sees our hero display her signature moxie, smarts, and the love she hides for her family and her police-officer paramour, their relationship troubled by his family ties to the commissioner who’s happy to put Vivian away. Life among the haves and have nots of the Roaring Twenties is a heady setting and Vivian a character well worth getting to know—you can enjoy this without having read the previous two books, but do yourself a favor and add them to your library’s hold list anyway!

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Review

A Killing on the Hill

by Jeff Ayers

Dugoni (One Last Kill, Her Deadly Game) takes a detour into Seattle’s past in his latest legal thriller. In 1933, in a world worried about the rise of a German Chancellor named Adolf Hitler and the United States feeling the crunch of the Great Depression, a young man named William “Shoe” Shumacher leaves home to take a position at one of Seattle’s newspapers. Shoe receives assistance from a homicide detective and is given special access to a murder at a social club. A former boxer named Frankie Ray is killed by the club owner, George Miller, who claims self-defense. Shoe begins to suspect there is more to the story as he writes his daily updates for the Seattle Daily Star. Dugoni juggles a compelling crime story with a sweet romantic tale as Shoe falls for a young woman who works at a bakery, and they begin to fall in love, even as he spends every day in the courtroom watching the case unfold. The case is compelling, the characters are stellar, and the prose takes the reader back to a time when DNA and technology were not available to make a slam-dunk prosecution. Is it too early to say that this will be remembered as the best legal thriller of the year?

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Review

The Atlas Maneuver

by Jeff Ayers

Berry’s talent for mixing nonstop action with history is in full swing in his latest. Cotton receives what seems like a simple assignment: protect a woman named Kelly Austin. When he rescues her from a kidnapping attempt, he learns that Kelly is not her real name, and before plastic surgery that was necessary due to an accident, she had a torrid past with Cotton. The truth of her background and why she is being hunted will separately take Cotton and his lady love, Cassiopeia, on a global chase that will make them unable to trust anyone but themselves. How does the creation of cryptocurrency tie in with the plundering of a vast treasure by Japan near the end of WWII? The answers will surprise and even shock even die-hard Berry fans. The truth of the Atlas Maneuver, if it comes to pass, will change the world’s economic future forever. One of the best features of Berry’s novels is the writer’s note, in which he breaks down the facts behind the fiction, and it’s essential reading since everything in this thriller seems all too real. Whether you are a long-time reader of Cotton’s adventures or a newcomer, this book is terrific.

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Review

A Murder Most French

by Brian Kenney

Hard to imagine, but this sophomore offering in the American in Paris series, set in 1950, is even better than the debut (Mastering the Art of French Murder). It is wonderfully detailed in its description of Paris during the Occupation and subsequent Liberation; rich in characterization, especially of the larger-than-life Julia Child (Les oeufés brouilles with fresh tarragon! Magnifique!) and her buddy, the intrepid expat and amateur investigator Tabitha Knight; and driven by a strong mystery that takes us from L‘Ecole de Cordon Bleu to the unsettling world of the Paris catacombs. Did I forget the suave Inspecteur Merveille of the ocean-gray eyes, whom Tabitha is, I assure you, in no way attracted to? In this volume, the crime comes in the form of rare and expensive bottles of wine that have been poisoned with cyanide then delivered as presents to unwitting recipients. To unearth the criminal, Tabitha must learn about France’s wine industry and the efforts to hide the best vintages from looting by the Germans, all while managing to work with Merveille, who has little more than disdain for Mademoiselle Knight. The end comes as a quick surprise. A perfect match for fans of cozies, traditional mysteries, or fiction set in the post-war years.

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Review

Neferura

by Brian Kenney

With a doctorate in Egyptology, it would have been easy for Malayna Evans to have fallen down the bottomless hole of historical detail. But instead, this is a beautifully balanced novel, rich in the experiences of life in the backstabbing court of Pharaoh Hatshepsut while also focused on the engaging and ultimately tragic life of her daughter, Neferura, princess and high priestess of Kemet. Neferura lives to support the people, but she is often distracted by court machinations, especially those of her misogynistic half-brother, Thutmose, who wants to end her mother’s rule, become Pharaoh, marry Neferura, and produce an heir. Neferura’s interior thinking is powerfully engaging, and setting the novel largely among women, whose struggles to lead are always under scrutiny, is incredibly refreshing. But Neferura’s own story feels nearly revolutionary: to survive, she befriends the wisewoman, a much-tattooed priestess of sorts, who is in touch with a network of women who devote themselves to supporting Neferura, even to the point of risking their own lives. Add to this several standout characters, such as Neferura’s life-long tutor who helps guide her actions, and you have a cadre ready to protest their princess. Powerful and poignant, this is a treat for fans of historical mysteries.

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Review

What Cannot be Said

by Henrietta Thornton

Atonement and The Secret Garden float to mind as children in an isolated English idyll come upon a frightening scene. Out for a walk, two young brothers find a mother and daughter dead, posed in a way that’s so peaceful it’s sinister. Magistrate Sir Henry Lovejoy, a friend of the series’ main character, Sebastian St. Cyr, is called, and the scene is all too familiar to him: it’s how his wife and daughter were found murdered years before. A man was hanged for that crime. As more killings occur with frightening speed over the coming days, others speculate that a “copyist” is at work while Lovejoy fears that the wrong man was executed. Lady McInnis, the current day’s victim, was politically active, lending an intriguing angle to the story. She lobbied the government to improve the conditions of working children, some of whose sad lives are featured here; a side plot regarding workhouse babies being unscrupulously fostered for pay paints a grim portrait of early 19th-century England. In the end, the social elements and the murder mysteries knit well together to create a satisfying whodunit with a dash of historical fact.

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Review

On the Horns of Death

by Brian Kenney

A wonderful sojourn into Ancient Crete of 1450 BC, told through the life of 16-year-old bull leaper Martis. In many ways, Martis is a classic teen, trying to understand the world around her and what her place in it will be. She’s also fiercely independent—training to be a bull leaper without initially telling her mother, for example—and resists many of the traditional female roles, like marriage and motherhood, that her peers are taking up. In this second novel in the series, Martis discovers the corpse of Duzi, one of her fellow bull leapers. He was murdered to look like he was gouged by a bull, when in fact he was knifed and left to die in a bullpen. Martis rebels against the wishes of her mother, as well as those of Tinos, the administrator of Knossos and the High Priestess’s consort, and takes on the investigation into Duzi’s death, a death that is followed by others, all related to the world of the bull leapers. Martis has to move quickly, with little help from the adults around her, to stop the growing violence. Kuhns does a great job of weaving Minoan civilization throughout the book, from religious practices to food preparation, from clothes and make-up to day-to-day life. Young adults will find much to enjoy in this novel as well.

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Review

The Murder of Mr. Ma

by Brian Kenney

A high-energy, rambunctious tale that shares much with Sherlock Holmes—the Guy Ritchie versions, that is—as well as traditional Chinese gong’an crime fiction, in which government magistrates solve criminal cases. It’s London, 1924 and Judge Dee Ren Jie, known as Judge Dee, has just arrived in the country to investigate the murder of a colleague whom he knew during World War I, when both served with the Chinese Labour Corps. No less a personage than Bertrand Russell introduces the Judge to Lao She, a retiring London academic who quickly becomes Dee’s sidekick—they are introduced in a prison breakout, it’s complicated—and the two set off to locate the victim’s family. One murder soon becomes two, then more, all performed with the distinctive butterfly sword, putting yet more pressure on Judge Dee to find the perpetrator before he or she tries to murder him. The authors do a wonderful job of depicting the bustling London of the ‘20s, the Chinese community and the relentless racism and stereotypes it is a victim of, and absolutely fabulous displays of martial arts. There’s word that Dr. Dee may be returning to solve another case; here’s hoping he does!

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