I’m sure I can’t be the only young woman whose expectations of romance were set unreachably high by reading Gaudy Night at an impressionable age. Let’s not detail exactly how many Lost Years I spent looking for Lord Peter Wimsey, and cut straight to my review.
My cousin Alison put this book into my hands, [...]
Gentlemen and Players feels like a significant departure from Harris’s earlier novels, including Chocolat, Five Quarters of the Orange, and Holy Fools. I’ve read those and enjoyed them, though I occasionally tire of Harris’s one-sided and relentless bashing of the Catholic church. But her settings (usually French, and historical) are lovely, and her [...]
I came to Queen’s Ransom with the disadvantage of jumping into a series — this is the third in Fiona Buckley’s series of mysteries featuring Ursula Blanchard, a sixteenth-century sleuth in the employ of Queen Elizabeth I and her right-hand man, Sir William Cecil. As this book opens, Ursula is tired of the underhanded work [...]
Last summer Jason and I got drawn into the world of Laurie R. King’s Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell novels, most of which I read on our trip to England (although King is an American writer. It just seemed appropriate to be reading about Sherlock Holmes in England). King’s latest novel draws upon her Holmesian writings, but [...]
The Big Over Easy is the first book in the new “Nursery Crime” series by Jasper Fforde, the almost unbelievably witty and inventive author of The Eyre Affair and other books featuring the time-travelling literary operative Thursday Next.
I think Jasper Fforde is one of those authors you just “get” or you don’t. If you don’t [...]
My husband’s thumbs-up on this book (which he gives with great enthusiasm) is probably more significant than mine, since Jason is the Sherlock Holmes fan in the family. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice is the first in King’s series of novels re-imagining the famous detective in retirement with an unlikely apprentice: an exceptionally brilliant young woman named [...]
