On tap for this week have been: — Eva Chase’s Black Rabbit Hall, a dark Gothic (think echoes of The Thirteenth Tale), with a surprisingly upbeat ending, set in a moldering manor house in Cornwall; — Barbara Michaels’s Wait for What Will Come, because once you read one Gothic set in a moldering Cornish manor…

The first half of this post was originally meant to go up last week– but the arrival of a small person intervened. So let’s call this fortnightly round-up instead of weekly round-up today? (Also because I just love the word “fortnight”.) I started last week old school, with a murder mystery from the early 80s:…

I’ve been having such a good run of new books recently. On tap for this week was: — Francine Matthews’s Death in Rough Water, the second of her Nantucket-set Merry Folger mysteries. The more I read this series, the more I love it– particularly the developing relationship between the detective and another character, which reminds…

I had a stack of books I was saving for slightly later in the summer, but couldn’t resist digging into them now. So, this week, I treated myself to: — Amy Poeppel’s Small Admissions (which just came out in paperback), a smart and snarky combination of social satire and coming of age story, in which,…

I’ve been on a mystery kick this week. I started with Carol Goodman’s The Seduction of Water, in which a writing professor goes back to the Catskills hotel where she grew up to solve the mystery of her mother’s death decades before, and then moved on to the first of Francine Matthews’s Merry Folger mysteries,…

Happy July, all! I indulged myself over the holiday weekend with a mini-mystery binge: Mary Kubica’s The Good Girl and two of Elly Griffiths’s Ruth Galloway novels, A Dying Fall and The Outcast Dead. Thanks to a recommendation over on my Facebook author page, I am currently immersed in The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life—…

There’s nothing like rediscovering an old favorite. This week, I went back to my Renaissance roots with Judith Merkle Riley’s The Master of All Desires, in which a would-be poetess with a difficult family finds herself accidentally in possession of the Undying Head of Menander, a sinister wish-granter who delights in causing doom and chaos.…

This week, I started with Carol Goodman’s River Road, a psychological thriller about a hit and run in an upstate New York university town, and all the secrets that come out in its wake. River Road was an emotionally fraught read, so, after that, I moved on to something a bit less gut-wrenching: Josephine Tey’s…

I’ve had an excellent run of new books this week, across a rather broad genre spectrum, from historical fiction, to women’s fiction, to ghost story/psychological thriller. Here’s this week’s haul: — Jennifer Ryan’s The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir, about a group of women in an English village during World War II, and the various dramas that…

Every now and then, it’s nice to revisit old books as a sort of literary palette cleanser, in this case, some of my less read books by favorite authors. This week, I dipped into Georgette Heyer’s The Unknown Ajax (which was so much better than I remembered it being!) and The Toll-Gate, and then stopped…