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…

It’s been a marvelous reading week! I followed another one of my best friend’s recommendations and picked up Margaret Rogerson’s An Enchantment of Ravens, in which a mortal portrait painter gets dragged into the politics of the faerie courts (confession: I grew up reading fantasy, and always rather wondered how I would cope if I…

We’ve been House of Plague over here (who knew that kids could combine strep throat with two separate viruses?  It’s like a disease cocktail with a phlegm chaser), so I’ve been doing some comfort reading. After finishing up T. Kingfisher’s wonderful pseudo-medieval fantasy road trip Clockwork Boys (there are technically two books, but they read…

Happy November!  As if it got the memo, the weather suddenly dropped fifteen degrees today, the air turned crisp, and the trees decided to dump most of their leaves.  So it really feels like fall. I rounded off my Halloween reading with a re-read of Simone St. James’s The Broken Girls, which I first read…

I’m rocking three out of three on the Halloween theme reading this week! I started the week with a novel that’s sort of a ghost story and sort of a mystery novel, with a touch of spycraft: W.C. Ryan’s A House of Ghosts, set during World War I, with Britain and Germany vying to invent…