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…

Hello from the book tour whirlwind! To celebrate the end of the first week of book tour, I treated myself to Karen White’s upcoming The Christmas Spirits on Tradd Street, the latest in her popular Tradd Street series about a realtor who sees dead people. There are very few things that can make a five…

Hello from book tour!  I’ve been having the best time roaming the country talking about The Summer Country (if I saw you on the road this week, hi!  And if you’re in Chicago, come see me tonight at 57th Street Books!  But I digress). The other great thing about book tour?  Tons of travel time…

Between college reunion, Book Expo, and preschool graduation, this week has been something of a fog (what’s my name again?), but I did manage to snatch a little reading time in the midst of the madness: — Jasmine Guillory’s The Wedding Date, a fun contemporary romance set in California; — and the latest Ruth Galloway…

Huzzah for uninterrupted airplane reading!  This week, as I flew back and forth from Team W’s retreat, I managed to get in some pure leisure reading, including: — the latest in Lucy Parker’s London Celebrities contemporary romance series, The Austen Playbook, about a choose your own adventure Austen production gone wrong (or gone right, depending…

I’ve been working away on the final chapters of the next Team W book (one word: FRANCE), so there hasn’t been terribly much discretionary reading time this week, but I did finally start reading Theodora Goss’s The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter , the first in her Athena Club mysteries, about the daughters of…

Digging out from the book pile, I finally read Susanna Kearsley’s Bellewether, which goes back and forth between a historic house on Long Island in the present day and the same house during the French and Indian Wars.  It reminded me a great deal of her The Shadowy Horses (anyone else a Shadowy Horses fan…