Happy Friday, all! After an exciting week of bouncing around the internet, talking about Band of Sisters, I’m reading… The Masque of the Black Tulip. I know, it feels a little silly to admit to reading my own book!  And I don’t, as a general rule.  But for various reasons I needed to re-read the…

Happy Friday, all!  It’s been another jam-packed week of Band of Sisters book events for me, some going late into the night, so I’ve been back to vintage mysteries, because they’re so easy to pick up and put down at odd moments. I gobbled up Charlotte MacLeod’s Janet Rhys and Sarah Kelling series growing up,…

Happy Friday, all!  Don’t you love it when you hoard a new book and when you finally decide to break it out, it turns out to be just the right book at the right time? I loved Louise Miller’s The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living, so I’ve been hanging on to her second book,…

Happy Friday, all! In this week of book launch, I’ve found myself, in the words of the Shakespeare sonnet, “with what I most enjoy contented least”.  Or, in plain English, I couldn’t seem to focus on reading books I know I otherwise would have loved, and it’s entirely not them, it’s me.  So you’ll hear…

I’m in that twitchy stage of just-before-book-launch where I can’t quite settle to anything– so even though I have a pile of new books I would usually be raring to read, I finally gave up and resorted to one of my favorite old comfort reads. That comfort read would be Elsie Lee’s The Spy at…

Happy Friday!  I’ve been venturing out of my comfort reads this week to sample some new books, both a little out of my usual reading orbit. First up was Kristin Contino’s A House Full of Windsor, in which a talk show host who has built her career on being pristine and prepared finds herself strong-armed…

Happy Friday– and happy almost Valentine’s Day! Do you ever have those weeks where you can’t remember for the life of you what you were reading at the beginning of it?  That’s me right now.  But I can tell you that I rediscovered Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence.  I’d forgotten just what fun they were…

Happy Friday, all!  I’ve got brownies baking in the oven, making the whole house smell like chocolate, which seems just about right for a Friday, doesn’t it? I’ve been visiting all sorts of happy comfort reads this week, starting with a re-read of Louise Miller’s The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living, about a Boston…

Happy Friday! I have so many piles of new books, but I’ve been having such fun revisiting old ones. Interviewing Marie Benedict at the Strand about The Mystery of Mrs. Christie inspired me to revisit the early Miss Marples.  I hadn’t realized what a long time it had been since I read them– or how…

It’s very rare that I’m more interested in our own century than others, but this week was one of those exceptions. When I wasn’t compulsively refreshing the New York Times home page, I did pop back a hundred years to spend some soothing time in the mid-century Britain of Patricia Wentworth. The Dower House Mystery,…