Happy Friday, all! I’ve been deep in the research cave this week (so much Hamilton and Burr!), but I did pop my head out of the 18th century to visit with the Mitford sisters in Marie Benedict’s upcoming The Mitford Affair, which explores Diana’s and Unity’s plunge into fascism and its reverberations across their family,…

Happy Friday, all!  After a bitter cold week in New York, the sun has finally come back out… and let’s hope it stays that way! I started several books this week.  But it was one of those Goldilocks’s porridge reading weeks where nothing was quite right, so I reverted to Charlotte MacLeod with the next…

Happy Friday, all! Don’t you hate it when you finish a really brilliant series (or what there currently is of it) and then you have to decide whether you want to immediately re-read it or slink off to read something else? I finished The Last Graduate, Book II in Naomi Novik’s incredibly immersive Scholomance series,…

Happy Friday, all! It’s been a topsy turvy week here in New York in all sorts of ways, including swinging from snow to seventy degrees.  So I suppose it makes sense that my reading is all over the place, too? After finishing the last of Elizabeth Daly’s Henry Gamadge mysteries, I moved on to the…

Happy Friday, all! It’s winter again here in New York– with snow and sleet the other day– so I’ve retreated to the equivalent of a warm blanket with vintage cozy mysteries, finishing the last few books in Elizabeth Daly’s 1940s Henry Gamadge series.  I’ve heard the term “American Agatha Christie” uttered many times about many…

Happy Friday, all! It’s been something of a whirlwind of a week: I took my very first plane trip since 2020 to meet up with the other two thirds of Team W to plot the fifth (!!) Team W collaboration, Band of Sisters came out in paperback on Tuesday, All the Ways We Said Goodbye…

Happy Friday, all! I just sent the latest round of revisions on Smith Book II, aka the Cuba book– now tentatively titled Two Wars and a Wedding— to my editor, so I’m feeling thoroughly bewildered and bemused and desperately trying to remember all the things I’m meant to be doing but have forgotten about while…

Happy Friday, all! I’ve been back in the revision cave with Smith Book II, aka The Cuba Book, aka the Book That Will Not Die.  (At some point, this book will actually have a title!  And be done.)  I’ve found when I’m deep in the throes of writing or revising I need a very particular…

Happy Friday, all!  And happy almost Valentine’s Day! This week, the stand out read for me was an advance copy of Piper Huguley’s By Her Own Design, about dress designer Ann Lowe, who designed dresses for Olivia de Havilland and Jacqueline Kennedy among many, many others.  Biographical fiction is tough to do well, but this…

Happy Friday, all! I’ve spent another week immersed in the late 18th/early 19th century with the Manhattan Well Murder– but I did sneak away from 1800 New York to 1960s England with the latest in Elly Griffiths’s Brighton Mysteries, The Midnight Hour, in which an aging theatre impressario is murdered with rat poison and the…