An interview with Kate Quinn author of Empress of the Seven Hills, discussing the challenge of building suspense about known historical figures, romance in Rome, the similarities between Roman and modern military experiences, the advantages of being a woman in Rome and what’s up next for Kate Quinn.
If you’ve been dying to go to Paris but can’t afford the airfare, read Cara Black. Her latest Aimée Leduc mystery is set in the part of the Marais which holds the oldest Chinatown in Paris. There’s action, excitement, romance and shopping. The perfect travel experience.
Hannah Vogel is back in Berlin, this time to report on the 1936 Olympic Games and do some spying for the British under cover as neutral Swiss reporter Adelheid Zinsli. She hopes to undermine the Nazis and awaken the British before it’s too late, but is she actually accomplishing anything? Quite the existential crisis in the midst of terrifying action.
Fiona Buckley’s latest installment in her Ursula Blanchard mystery series set in Elizabeth I’s court, Queen without a Crown, will please her fans. Ursula is back in action on a double mission, to track down Elizabeth’s hidden foes and to lift an accusation of poisoner from a man who died twenty-three years before. Both seem impossible, but Ursula has no choice.
Iran is in the news these days and the issues are important to us all, so it was with interest that I picked up Libby Fischer Hellman’s new novel, A Bitter Veil, set in the midst of the Iranian revolution that brought Khomeini to power. Two essential themes predominate in this viscerally effective novel: the fate of women when their choices have been taken from them and the banality of evil, to borrow a phrase applied to the Nazis—who also appear in this book if somewhat indirectly.
Berlin, 1931, the year Germany was lost to the Nazis. Hannah Vogel, a crime reporter, wanders into the Hall of the Unnamed Dead to examine the police reports from which she gathers her stories each week. Instead she sees her brother’s photograph on the wall. But her identity papers, and with them her ability to talk to the police, are on their way to America in the hands of her Jewish friend Sarah. Finding out who killed her brother is the least of many traps Hannah will fall into.
The setting of A Killing Season is a fearsome castle in the middle of winter—a castle that “looms like Satan’s shadow” on a wild coast connected to the mainland only by a narrow walkway over jagged rocks and crashing sea. Murders are propagating at an alarming rate. Is some evil plot of men behind these deaths or has the devil come to exact his due? Can Prioress Eleanor and Brother Thomas stop them or will they fall victim to Satan’s wiles?
What do modern Tibet, Cleopatra’s Egypt, revolutionary France, contemporary Paris, reincarnation, the Chinese mafia, the Dalai Lama, the catacombs, perfume production, and Greek mythology have to do with each other? Read The Book of Lost Fragrances and you will find out.
Kate Quinn knows how to serve up a full-flavored Rome with plenty of spice. Empress of the Seven Hills is driven along by fully-developed characters and skillful dialogue. Her main character, Sabina, from a powerful patrician family, sets out to see the world—and the world of the Roman Empire is a big place!
If you are a fan of Jacqueline Winspear’s mysteries set in London between the World Wars, when you read her last book (A Lesson in Secrets) you might have thought Maisie Dobb’s life was getting comfortably settled. Without any soap opera antics, just Winspear’s impeccable, nuanced character development, Maisie is at sea again in a variety of ways, and she’s solving a mystery of a completely new sort. Eddie is a “slow” man who has a magic way with horses. When he dies in an “accident,” the cockney costermongers of Maisie’s childhood feel justice hasn’t been done and they come to see her. You wouldn’t think this would involve issues of national safety, now would you?
