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,…

Happy New Year!  Here’s wishing everyone a joyful, healthy, happy, book-filled 2021  I’m so looking forward to sharing the journey of the coming year with all of you– and piles of books, of course. Over the past couple of weeks, while I’ve been largely off-line with my family, I’ve discovered a new to me 1970s…

I have not quite wrapped my head around the fact that we’re just one week away from Christmas– although the snow we had in New York this week certainly set the scene properly! With the snow falling, it seemed like a good time for some comfort reads: Mary Stewart’s Touch Not the Cat, involving telepathy…

There are times when you just need to go back to an old favorite book, and this was one of them. This week, I cozied up with Trisha Ashley’s Twelve Days of Christmas, in which a house-sitting chef winds up snowed in at a Lancashire manor house presiding over a large house party.  (There is…

I’m a little late with the round-up today because there isn’t much to round up. I could blame it on working on the latest Team W chapter (did I mention that Team W is hard at work on our latest collaboration?), or on the kids going on bedtime strike, but it’s really less any of…