Entertainment in the sixteenth century, by our modern standards, was primitive: no moving pictures streaming, recorded music to take on the road, or thousands of books in your tiny hand-held device. No, none of that, it was a “fool” in colorful garb telling quips and storytelling, doing athletic stunts and magic tricks, or performing musical interludes and dramatic interpretations.
Captain Jim Agnihotri and Diana Framji have left the strict rules of Bombay and moved to Boston. Theirs is an unusual marriage. Jim is a detective at the Dupree Agency and a fan of Sherlock Holmes. He’s teaching Diana the fine art of deduction.
In 1946, two women, who shouldn’t have been friends or even known each other, opened The Right Sort marriage agency. Women, whose work was prized during the war years, are booted out of their jobs when the men returned home. There’s also a definite shortage of marriageable men due to the high death toll. How’s a girl supposed to meet the right sort of guy? Before Match.com, there was The Right Sort.
I have read every book in Kaye George’s People of the Wind prehistory series, and I love Death in the New Land as much as the earlier books.
It’s November, 1867, San Francisco. Celia Davies came to the city with her husband, yet for three years, she’d thought herself a widow. She worked hard to be a well-respected nurse servicing the needs of a diverse community at her free clinic. Through happenstance, she also became known as a detective, of sorts, partnering with Detective Nick Greaves with whom she found she was attracted and free to foster a nice friendship.
Stan Lee, the creative force behind Marvel, has appeared in almost every film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe by way of a cameo, in roles so minor that he often had no lines. Fans watched for him, and I expect directors and writers had to place him carefully to ensure that the scene he inevitably stole, was not undone by that theft. Of course, Stan was not the first to walk into his creations. Alfred Hitchcock made cameos in forty of his fifty-four films. Nowadays, it is not uncommon for writers to be granted this small flourish in screen adaptations of their work.
Elizabeth Miles is a con artist, semi-retired. She’s trying to retire fully, but well, things keep happening. Right now she’s getting ready for her wedding to Gideon Bates. She’s shocked to find news of her wedding has been leaked to all the gossip columnists in town. Her worst fear comes true when Oscar Thornton, a true enemy, who thought she was dead, reads the news.
One of the best things about writing mysteries is the research I get to do. Who else has a job that lets them spend the day reading and learning about the gruesome and macabre and call it ‘work’? I’ve researched everything from what a dead body looks like four hours after a drowning… to poisons that can go for weeks undetected in the human body until the victim keels over… to centuries-old medical techniques and tools that we would find horrifying today.
It’s London. It’s the early nineteenth century. It’s a time of stark differences, upper class privilege, and women a century away from emancipation. Miss Rosalind Thorne, daughter of a baronet, had been a member of the upper crust of English society enjoying position and wealth prepped to be matched in a relationship that would strengthen her stand in society...until her father’s penchant for bad investments cost the family it’s fortune.
This week we have a trio of historical mysteries-City of Scoundrels: A Counterfeit Lady series by Victoria Thompson, Murder Cuts the Mustard: A Beryl and Edwina Mystery by Jessica Ellicott, and The Body on the Train: A Kate Shackleton series by Frances Brody.
