Happy Friday!  This week, I’ve been wallowing in Golden Age British crime with a couple of Georgette Heyer mystery reprints. I will confess, I’m not usually the hugest fan of her mysteries, since I find them less finely drawn than her historicals and the people somehow more unpleasant, but I’m finding Death in the Stocks…

It’s been a rather crazy week– and a strangely long one– so I’m having the hardest time thinking back to what I might have read! I went seasonally inappropriate with Susan Wittig Albert’s Christmas-set mystery, The Mistletoe Man, Book 9 in her China Bayles series about an attorney who leaves her Houston practice to open…

Happy Friday!  I’ve been squinting my way through some terrible handwriting from one of the members of the Smith College Relief Unit (I suppose writing on a transatlantic liner while worrying about torpedoes is some excuse for sloppy penmanship?), but when I can sneak away from the sources for my next book, I’ve been resting…

Happy Friday, all!  In between wallowing in the correspondence of the members of the Smith College Relief Unit (oh my goodness, those letters!), I’ve been blazing through some new books– mostly thrillers, which I suppose isn’t that surprising, since that seems to be such a large part of what’s on the shelves right now. First,…

As New York swelters in the late summer heat, I’ve gone back to my Barbara Michaels shelf— because no one writes sweltering summers like Barbara Michaels. I started with a re-read of Witch, in which a middle-aged divorcee with grown children buys a cottage in the Virginia woods and discovers evil lurks in the bucolic…

It’s been a reading hodge-podge this week! I had recommended Georgette Heyer’s Talisman Ring to someone– which meant, of course, that I was suddenly seized with the need to go back and read it myself.  For quality control, of course.  And I am pleased to report that it is just as marvelous and laugh-out-loud funny…

I’ve mostly been doing background reading for the next book, which is set around the activities of a gallant group of Smith alums who went over to France to aid French villagers right behind the front lines during World War I. I’ve been wallowing in their letters, which read like Rilla of Ingleside— so tongue-in-cheek…

Happy Friday!  With the hot, bright July weather in New York this week, I went back to some old summer favorites. Do you have those sorts of seasonal books?  For some reason, whenever the weather gets particularly sultry, I find myself going back to Barbara Michaels’/Elizabeth Peters’ gothics: to her Ammie Come Home trilogy, to…

Happy 4th, all! On my wonderful trip to Houston this week, I finally got to finish the second of Martin Walker’s Bruno mysteries, The Dark Vineyard.  Think French Longmire, in which the local chief of police must investigate a series of crimes linked to the local wine industry. Then I broke my very sensible “don’t read…

I tend to write best when I’m reading something I can read a lot of, preferably a mystery series.  But I’ve re-read my favorites so many times… so I went to the best book guru I know, Barbara Peters of The Poisoned Pen.  (If Barbara recommends it, you read it.) Thanks to Barbara, I just…