Mystery, adventure, and romance
Mention historical romance, and the images that usually leap to mind are of European ladies in dresses with hoops or corsets, swooning under the gaze of some strapping hero.
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Posts by Katie H
Complicated legacy
Though slavery ended in 1865, the importation of Africans as slaves was outlawed nearly fifty years earlier in 1808 with an act of Congress banning the practice. The truth, like most everything in history regarding race, is far from black and white. Environmental journalist and Alabama waterman Ben Raines sheds light on just how the ghosts of the slave trade, long thought well-buried, exist surprisingly close to the surface both literally and figuratively in The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning.
Murder is messy. So who are you going to call?
Molly Gray doesn’t see the world like other people do. The eponymous maid in Nita Prose’s debut mystery, Molly also knows that most people don’t see her either. Not really, at least. At the luxury hotel she works at in Manhattan, her single-minded devotedness to her job mostly makes up for that deficiency, and as long as she can keep the Regency Grand in tip-top shape and maintain her A+ devotion to employee excellence, she can cope with the problems that crop up.
When she fell, she bounced back
If one were to check the wallets of some of 1930s New York more prominent male citizens, it’s likely one would find a business card bearing simply a sketch of a parrot and a phone number. This card might be inscrutable at first glance, but to those in the know, that card would lead to the home of one Polly Adler, New York’s most notorious and successful madam during the city’s hedonistic Jazz Era.
Cold cases and basket cases
Anne Capestan knew she’d be punished for her itchy trigger finger, but the sentence is like no other she’d ever heard of. After firing one too many bullets, the Parisian police commissaire was lucky to still have her job, but is stunned when she learns that she is to lead a new police squad in charge of cold cases. But Capestan’s squad consists entirely of the police officers that have run afoul of the police judiciare, and since they cannot be fired, they can at least be relegated to some brigade, starved of funds and support until they quit in frustration.
Who was Peggy Smith?
There’s nothing particularly unusual about Peggy Smith. She’s an old lady living in an assisted living facility beside the sea, spends her days noting passersby in her notebooks and reading her beloved crime novels that fill her apartment. Even her death isn’t out of the norm--sudden and apparently peaceful in her chair overlooking the sea. But something about the death unsettles her carer, Natalka. How could a woman who was still spry enough to climb flights of stairs die of heart failure when her pills were within reach? Why are so many of the books in Peggy’s apartment dedicated to her,
Strange and wild songs
Early in Matrix, Lauren Groff’s stunning new novel, Marie of France recalls a nightingale that Queen Eleanor had raised by hand, caged among the ladies of the English court. She despises this bird, which sings the same song, unlike the wild birds that Marie knew from her days when her mother and aunts were alive, free and fierce to pursue a life away from the strictures of court and the stringent roles of the ladies there. Marie herself defies easy categorization, as both bastard and royal, the product of rape from the lanky Plantagenet king and her Amazonian French mother.
A new meaning for moonshot
Kazimieras “Kaz” Zemeckis was bound for the stars. At least, that was the plan before a bird strike on a routine fighter training flight left him with a glass eye and a job shepherding astronauts through the sort of space flights he was supposed to be on himself. By 1973, the Apollo missions are winding down as budget cuts take their toll, but the Apollo 18 trip promises to be like no other.
Fowl doers of foul deeds?
I think it’s pretty safe to say that we’d like to have Mary Roach in our high school science classes. Her ‘can-you-believe-this’ odd factoid interjections would likely liven up most classrooms while making those facts that teacher presents stick all the better.
A child of grace
It may seem incongruous that The Ninth Hour, Alice McDermott’s exquisite family saga of faith, sacrifice and grace, should begin with a suicide. When Jim shoos his young wife Annie out of their Brooklyn tenement to do some shopping, locks the door behind her and turns on the gas, it looks as bleak as could be for the young widow. Early-twentieth century Brooklyn is a tough place for its many inhabitants, and particularly so for a young Irish widow with a baby on the way.