After a year of mostly re-reads, I’m making a concerted effort to get back in touch with the wider publishing world. This week? Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, a story about a parent trivia night gone very, very wrong… and everything leading up to the crucial evening. Engaging prose, sympathetic characters, and a complexly constructed…

This week it’s been something old and something new. In the something old category (and I do mean very old): Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. It’s a bit early for the new stand alone I’m writing, but still useful for background insight into my heroine’s childhood in the 1870s. In the something new category:…

This was a week of very old research books and brand new fiction books for me: that wonderful, decaying, tobacco-y smell from crumbling books on Belle Epoque Paris and the luxurious feel of thick paper and smooth covers on new trade paperbacks. I won’t go into the research side of things, but on the fiction…

I’ll admit it. I’m in a bit of a book slump. I’ve resorted to reading less liked books by favorite authors: Angela Thirkell’s Before Lunch (1930s English village antics) and Elsie Lee’s The Curse of Carranca (1960s romantic suspense). Laura Resnick’s Esther Diamond books and Ben Aaronvitch’s Rivers of London series got me through the…

It’s been rather a blurry few weeks of boxes and book events, but I managed to sneak in a few books along the way. I was in the Adirondacks for a few days, which meant, naturally, that I had to re-read Julia Spencer- Fleming’s Adirondack-set Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne Mysteries. Dealing with boxes…

Between The Lure of the Moonflower launch and toddler being toddler-ish, I haven’t been able to snatch much reading time this week. I’ve been craving my traditional comfort read: Gothic. (Whenever I’m tired, I revert to old school Gothics with houses on the covers. They’re my happy place.) Fortunately, my wonderful friend Vicki keeps me…

It’s been a rather crazy week, with much scurrying hither and yon, but I did take advantage of my event at the Mysterious Bookshop on Monday to buy one of the few Josephine Tey mysteries I haven’t read yet, To Love and Be Wise. Now there’s just Brat Farrar to acquire…. (Speaking of the Mysterious…

Summer to me doesn’t mean beach reads. It means old school Gothics, particularly the mysteries of Barbara Michaels/Elizabeth Peters. I don’t know if it’s because so many of the books are set during sultry Southern summers (like Houses of Stone, Be Buried in the Rain, and Shattered Silk); if it’s because the books must have…

Right now I’m reading… the copyedited manuscript of The Forgotten Room! There has also been a lot of The Highway Rat and A Squash and a Squeeze in my life. But once copyedits are in and storytime is (momentarily) over, I’m going to start scrounging on my shelves for something new to read. What have…