In these alarming times, thank goodness for all the other worlds we find in books. When I haven’t been fighting in the Somme with the women of the Smith College Relief Unit (much more about that soon, I promise!) I’ve been escaping to the England of country house mysteries and spinster sleuths with Patricia Wentworth’s…

In a world gone mad, thank goodness for books. In between fighting my way through the last third of the Smith book and compulsively reading every single article about the current world health situation, I’ve been hiding in the classic mystery novels of Mary Roberts Rinehart, most recently The Great Mistake, in which pithy first…

I’ve been a huge Simone St. James fan since her first book, The Haunting of Maddy Clare, came out in– well, rather a while ago.  So you can guess what I’m reading right now!  Her latest, The Sun Down Motel, in which a present day woman tries to figure out what happened to her aunt…

I started the week with a gift from my wonderful friend, Lynda Loigman: Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, set in an alternate Yale in which the secret societies dabble in black magic.  So often, when you read a much hyped book, it falls flat, but I loved Ninth House, and stayed up far too late to…

Right before I left on book tour, my wonderful friend, Lynda Loigman, brought me a going away present: Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, about an alternate Yale with dark magic. It was too large to cram in my suitcase (we won’t even discuss the dark magic required to make two weeks’ worth of dresses fit in…

It’s been a hectic week trying to work on the Smith book and get ready for book tour at the same time (there’s always drama the week before book tour– wardrobe drama, scheduling drama, drama drama), but I know I’ll make up for it with lots of lovely airplane reading time. In the meantime, I…

Happy New Year! I rang in the New Year with a rather dark mystery, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, in which a bookseller finds one of her regular browsers dead in the store.  When she discovers a picture from her tenth birthday in his pocket, she begins to unravel his connection to the unsolved…

Merry, merry, all!  It’s been a Goldilocks sort of reading week for me– one book was too arch and one too bland, until I gave up and went back to Lord Peter Wimsey, who is always just right. All I wanted was a Golden Age Christmas-themed murder mystery I hadn’t read yet.   (Is that so…

Merry, merry, all! We’ve had cracked tooth drama with my rambunctious toddler, so reading time has been scarce (do you think Santa can deliver reading time?  Also possibly a toddler front tooth, while he’s at it), but I did manage to steal a few hours with Zen Cho’s The True Queen, which is just as…

From the French countryside to a land just this side of Faerie to a mid-century British market town, I’ve been all over the place this week.  Reading-wise, at least. There’s something very soothing about the familiarity of a mystery series, and Martin Walker’s Bruno, Chief of Police series is particularly good at recreating a familiar…