Judith’s Reviews

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.

Winner Announcement: Sarah of the blog Reading the Past has won the signed copy of Heath’s A Thing Done.
Do you love the internecine, flamboyant world of Dante’s Florence? Knightly honor manipulated by a deadly woman sound like a great starting place for a plot? Then you’ll enjoy Tinney Sue Heath’s A Thing Done.

Westerson writes “medieval noir” with a sense of humor and a solid base of history, featuring Crispin Guest, a disgraced medieval knight, now The Tracker, a medieval version of a private detective.

When we think of internment camps and WWII, we don’t think of California, Arizona and Utah, but we should. Sophie Littlefield’s upcoming book, Garden of Stones, which moves between WWII and the 1970’s and follows three generations of women, draws us into this shameful chapter of US history after the bombing of Pearl Harbor—the rounding up, financial ruin, and forcible detention of Japanese Americans in desolate camps.

Author speaking in Phoenix 1/27 at Temple Emanuel. Coming of age story of a prominent rabbi’s daughter in 3rd century CE Babylon and Israel; full of incantations, sorcery and women’s customs.

Priscilla Royal has brought her fine historical and story-telling skills to a heartbreaking and complex period in medieval England: the treatment of Jews under Edward I. Murders, a love story, and mob violence make for a good mystery.

For Halloween: Bekka Black has retold Frankenstein in the 21st century by text, email, tweet, and web browsers, primarily for a teen audience.

Set in Tempe, AZ in 1916 this gracious mystery takes on tough themes such as anti-immigration phobias and racism while keeping you turning pages to find the murderer among movie stars, lawyers, Pancho Villa’s men, and a couple caddish ladies’ men.

This is a scary book—not in the Halloween sense but because it portrays our collective “worse nightmare” in post 9/11 America: a bomber right here “next door” as Siegel’s title says. A mysterious person, identified as “the young man” until the end, brings Chicago to its knees with fairly low-tech bombs, high-tech tools and carefully planned villainy.

Interview with Susan Elia MacNeal author of Princess Elizabeth’s Spy