Book Giveaway! Rubies of the Viper is a genuine gem of a mystery set in Rome during the reigns of the Emperors Claudius and Nero. The heroine is a fictional woman named Theodosia Varro, who at the opening of the novel has inherited a vast fortune–which seems to draw both suitors and killers to her doorstep.
Charles Todd’s A Bitter Truth interweaves the vices of war with the failings of families into a psychologically and historically compelling mystery set in England in 1917. Bess Crawford, an intelligent and fearless nurse working on the front lines in France, comes home on leave to discover a frightened young woman with a bruised face hiding on the doorstep of her London flat.
Fast-paced with a sense of humor and a shiver of terror, Shunning Sarah uncovers layers of mire in the Amish community of Harmony, Minnesota and among the TV broadcast staff of Spartz’s Channel 3.
The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall: from the New York Review of Books, insights into the central role of “story” in humanity.
Join the Desert Sleuths Sisters in Crime for a fantastic conference for writers (and readers) at the gorgeous Millennium Resort on August 11. To register right now go to the DesertSleuths.com website.
SoWest: Desert Justice, an anthology of 20 mystery stories including Judith Starkston’s story “A Season for Death,” is now available on Amazon.
Obituaries aren’t usually quite this exciting. I held my lunch partner spellbound reading this one of James Mellaart, a groundbreaking archaeologist in ancient Anatolia/Turkey.
MacNeal writes clever, enticing mysteries set in London during World War II with an inventive mathematician named Maggie Hope as her sleuth.
Set in 1938 in Paris, this spy thriller reveals an interesting chapter in history. America had no CIA or equivalent intelligence agency. Roosevelt had the foresight to realize he had to prepare for the inevitable war. Frederic Stahl, the main character of Mission to Paris, is a movie star with no training in being a spy, but while in Paris making a movie he becomes one.
If you like your Homer with a postmodernist twist, Mason’s boundlessly imaginative redo of the Odyssey will charm you. Reading Mason’s fourty-four “books,” about two to six pages each, reminds me of the experience of turning a prism and launching completely different colors across the room. Sometimes you’re in a bizarrely modern environment, say a sanitarium or a place where books have pages and bindings (i.e. not the ancient world), other times you’re in a variation that skims close to the Homeric narrative but is tipped on its end somehow.
