Judith’s Reviews

Set in Galveston in 1900, The Promise brings us inside two utterly different women’s voices and experiences as they cope with upheaval, loss and love. A masterful book.

Lincoln is a popular topic these days with sometimes fanciful results in fiction and movies. This book has a solid historian behind the fantasy. The prosecutor of the Booth conspirators told on his deathbed of a dangerous secret concerning Lincoln’s assassination, but he took the secret to his grave and the provenance of this tale was “by no means sturdy.” The story being too juicy to ignore, Stewart turned to fiction.

Flirtations of the most dangerous and serious sort entangle Frances Stuart first in the court of Louis XIV and then in the Restoration court of Charles II. Despite the luscious gowns and extravagant jewels she wins for herself, we don’t envy her the high-wire balancing act she must maintain as she tries to win first one king’s influence and then another, while concealing the tragic secrets that would destroy her family and herself.

“Webb holds up a light into the inner recesses of a fascinating and contradictory woman . . . Becoming Josephine is an accomplished debut.” Read my review of Heather’s excellent novel about Josephine, Empress of France, Napoléon Bonaparte’s wife on the New York Journal of Books.

Another page-turning, alternately funny and bone-chilling mystery from Julie Kramer. A delivery of an envelope of human teeth gets Riley going on another lethal investigation.

Teatime for the Firefly creates a vivid portrayal of the exotic world of the Assam tea plantations and Indian life during both WWII and the momentous upheavals immediately following the war. It excites the palate with its depth and fullness.

“Intimacy amidst the giants”– Stephanie Dray’s novel about Selene, Cleopatra’s daughter, set during the Augustan Age, ranges between Rome and the kingdom of Mauretania in northern Africa. My review published in the New York Journal of Books.

Priscilla Royal’s latest mystery finds Prioress Eleanor and Brother Thomas on a pilgrimage to Walsingham to mend Eleanor’s troubled soul. Royal takes on the notion of self-righteous religiosity that’s used to cover personal failings and sins. She also deals with a more subtle theme that she’s explored before—how to live true to oneself when who you are is rejected by your world.

At age fifteen in 1002, Emma came from Normandy to marry the much older King Aethelred. Bracewell brings back to life this often forgotten English queen through Viking invasions and jealous rivalries.

The Chalice follows Joanna Stafford after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries out into the secular world and into a complex conspiracy against the crown, involving mysterious prophecies, spies and danger for the people Joanna loves most.