I can’t remember how I stumbled across Vanora Lawless’ Imperfect Illusions, but I’m very glad I did! I was gripped from start to finish by this historical adventure/fantasy romance set amid the horrors of World War One; the stakes are high, the historical and fantasy aspects of the story are really well done, and the…
Lauri Robinson has been reviewed several times at AAR and received wildly divergent grades. The Captain’s Christmas Homecoming falls somewhere in the middle of our rankings. Emma Leigh (Emily) Ellis has placed herself in a precarious position. After inadvertently introducing her engaged cousin Martha to the man she would elope with, Emma has felt a…
The Fossil Hunter splits its point of view between two different timelines and characters connected by a fossil. Cooper manages to keep this deft balancing act going, creating three very interesting and worthwhile heroines. Dark and engrossing and with dual timelines that are expertly captured in both time and place, it’s phantasmagorical and beautifully grounded…
The Great War has finally come to an end, but that doesn’t mean army nurse Bess Crawford’s days of fighting crime are finished. In An Irish Hostage, Bess travels to Ireland for the wedding of an old friend only to discover a missing groom, distraught bride and a village seething with rage regarding the upcoming…
The Ice Swan captures émigré life in early twentieth-century France quite well, but the soapy trappings of the plot stretch credulity more than a tad and hreaten to collapse inward and crush the old skool romance that lies at the book’s heart. It’s 1917, the Russian Revolution is happening, and Princess Svetlana Dmitrievna Dalsky ,…
The Moonlight School is a prettily written if occasionally predictable inspy with a heart of gold. Its feeling for life in the Kentucky hills alone is worth the price of admission. Lucille – Lucy – Wilson carries an ugly, heavy burden with her. When she was a little girl, it had been her job to…
Lauri Robinson’s A Family for the Titanic Survivor has a decent grasp on the times and pretty good research going for it, but the reactions of two of its characters to the tragedy is incredibly implausible, and its lack of true tension works against it in the end. It’s 1912, and Irish immigrant and barmaid…
Death, passion and good sleuthing combine in Death of a New American, the second instalment in Mariah Fredericks’ Jane Prescott series. It’s 1912, just after the sinking of the Titanic, and the New York-based Benchley family is trying to move on with life as best they can. Mild, plain, older daughter Louise is set to…
It’s 1911, and while Emilia Cruz and Ruben Torres are both authors, he’s a literary darling and newspaper publisher, while she uses a pseudonym to write The True Accounts of a Former Courtesan, an explicit and swashbuckling adventure serial. When their paths cross and Ruben learns Emilia’s secret, he faces multiple dilemmas. Revealing her identity…
I don’t usually gravitate toward historical mysteries, not because that I dislike them exactly, but the few I’ve read have left me feeling vaguely unsatisfied. Still, when I first heard about Victoria Thompson’s Counterfeit Lady series with its con artist heroine, I decided to give it a try. Fortunately, book one (City of Lies) lived…
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