Judith’s Reviews

Charles Lenox is back in another of this extended series of gentle, Victorian era mysteries. Love in many forms turns up in unlikely places as the evil crimes are committed and solved. Finch uses this counterpoint thematically and it gives the book a benign lightness despite some grim moments.

George starts with Helen as a small girl and takes her all the way through the Trojan War, back to Sparta and beyond. The most compelling things about Helen of Troy, besides the abundance of detail of daily life and war in ancient times, are George’s character portrayals.

Imagine watching your loving, nearly perfect mother stand on the front stairs of your farmhouse, put the baby down behind her and stab a man to death and then act as if this brutal act had little to do with her? Fifty years later Laurel Nicolson sets out to find the real answer in a novel spanning London in the blitz and an idyllic childhood in the English countryside post WWII.

An historical romance set in early Rome and the Etruscans, this novel contrasts the frugal Romans with the sensual Etruscans while unfolding the complexities and crises of a marriage between a Roman girl and a nobleman of Veii.

Feeling down but a lighthearted romp among screwball writers in the 1920’s would cure you? Try the third book in J.J. Murphy’s Dorothy Parker series, A Friendly Game of Murder. Dorothy Parker, poet and satirist, and her fellow Algonquin Round Table companions, a group of New York City writers, critics, actors and wits, were famous for their biting wisecracks and wordplay. Murphy continues this tradition in his entertaining mysteries.

A girl is drowned and her throat cut in the baths of Herod’s palace in 28 CE. Using traditional Talmudic reasoning, Rabbi Gamaliel tracks down the killer without slowing down the fast paced action.