Since plague has struck my household (bring out your tissues!), it seemed like a good time for comfort reads, in the form of two old favorite madcap mysteries that I hadn’t re-read in a bit: –Dorothy Cannell’s The Thin Woman, in which our heroine hires an escort for a family event, and, a few months…

I’ve been in a bit of a reading slump, but there have been some gems amid the grumpiness. This week’s gems? Carla Kelly’s Marrying the Royal Marine, set in Portugal during the Napoleonic Wars, in which the ugly duckling sister finds herself on an unexpected adventure when she joins her sister in staffing a hospital…

I had a big treat this week: an early copy of Simone St. James’s upcoming book, The Other Side of Midnight! In this one, a reluctant medium finds herself drawn into a former friend’s murder inquiry, pulling her back into a world that she’s been avoiding since their big falling out years before. As always,…

I’ve been living in the 1920s for so long now, that I desperately needed to read something that wasn’t a) anywhere near the Twenties, or b) set in England. So this week’s haul was: — Jo Goodman’s In Want of a Wife. We all have those ridiculous plot tropes we secretly love. One of mine…

I have the best college roommate in the whole wide world. Last week she sent me a box of loot– including four vintage Kathleen Gilles Seidel novels. If you haven’t read Kathleen Gilles Seidel, they’re a little romance, a little women’s fiction, deeply moving, and always fascinating. My two favorites are Again, about a woman…

I’ve been chugging away on the 1927 book this week, interspersed with hanging out at the That Summer Read Along, so there hasn’t been that much leisure reading this week. But I have dipped into: — Laurie King’s Pirate King, the eleventh in her Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series. (As you can imagine, I’m…

The one up side to an eight hour delay at Birmingham airport? (Other than the Starbucks right next to my gate.) Lots of time to read. And I mean lots of time to read. I finally had time to read two very different advance copies of upcoming books: — Iona Grey, Letters to the Lost.…

There have been a lot of flights in my life recently. Which, on the plus side, means lots of reading time! Among other things, I’ve read: — Susanna Kearsley’s upcoming A Desperate Fortune, which is, if possible, even better than her previous books (and I hadn’t thought anything could ever top The Shadowy Horses for…

What with one thing and another, this is a slightly belated Weekly Reading Round-Up this week! I’ve been revisiting old favorites, Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate and Dorothy Sayers’s second Harriet Vane mystery, Have His Carcase. I also– moment of gloat!– have a very, very advance copy of the new Susanna Kearsley to…

Writing that post for Heroes and Heartbreakers on “house” books made me nostalgic for some of my favorite house books. So this was a week of re-reads for me, starting with Barbara Michaels’s Ammie, Come Home, a classic ghost story set in a townhouse in Georgetown, followed by House of Many Shadows (another house with…