Narrated by Joel Froomkin Family Plot is book three of Sheri Cobb South’s series of historical mysteries featuring Bow Street Runner John Pickett, a sharply intelligent and quietly charming young man who was rescued from a life of crime by magistrate Patrick Colquhoun, and eventually became the youngest member of the Bow Street force. In…
There are a lot of historical mysteries on the market these days, but not so many set in ancient China. And of those, how many, in English, were originally written by a Chinese author for a Chinese audience? The Golden Hairpin by Qinghan CeCe, originally written in 2015 and translated into English just this year,…
C.S. Harris has maintained a consistently high standard throughout her long-running Sebastian St. Cyr series of historical mysteries, but the last two or three books, in particular, have been outstanding – which is quite remarkable when one considers that this latest instalment, Why Kill the Innocent, is number thirteen. The individual mysteries are extremely well-constructed…
Long series and I are not friends. I tend to prefer story arcs that have a definite end because I’ve found that most which don’t wind up having a great beginning but increasingly weak novels as the series continues into infinity. Some writers rise above that though and Jacqueline Winspear is one of them. While…
Murder at Half Moon Gate is the second book in Andrea Penrose’s series of historical mysteries featuring the scandalous but scientifically-minded Earl of Wrexford and Mrs. Charlotte Sloane, otherwise known as A.J. Quill, London’s premier satirical cartoonist. In Murder on Black Swan Lane, Wrexford was accused of the murder of the prominent clergyman with whom…
The Broken Girls by Simone St. James: A Roundtable Discussion Simone St. James is well-loved by the staff here at AAR, so we have been eagerly anticipating her new book. The Broken Girls is a dual-timeline story centered around a boarding school for the teenaged girls society has turned its back on, and the mysteries…
At the end of As Death Draws Near, the fifth book in Anna Lee Huber’s series of historical mysteries, the recently-wed Lady Darby and her husband, private enquiry agent Sebastian Gage, were urgently summoned to England – specifically, to Gage’s family home at Langstone Manor in Dartmoor. Gage’s cousin, Alfred, heir to their grandfather, Viscount…
Winter Sisters is the follow-up novel to Robin Oliveira’s bestselling My Name Is Mary Sutter. It picks up some fifteen years after the end of the previous book, and can be read perfectly well as a standalone. However, if you, like me, haven’t gotten around to reading My Name Is Mary Sutter quite yet, it’s…
Narrated by Tom Carter I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of Think of England ever since I learned that Audible Studios was going to be releasing a number of K.J. Charles’ backlist titles in audio. It’s one of my favourite books of hers (one of my favourite books, full-stop, actually) and while I admit to…
Deanna Raybourn continues her series of late-Victorian historical mysteries featuring the intrepid lepidopterist Veronica Speedwell and her piratically handsome, enigmatic associate, Revelstoke Templeton-Vane (Stoker) in A Treacherous Curse. The big draw of this third instalment was the prospect of at last getting to know more about Stoker’s chequered – and sometimes heartbreaking – past and what exactly happened to turn him into a social pariah with the blackest of…
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