Harris, CS. Where Serpents Sleep ($26 Signed).
This Regency era series featuring Lord Devlin, 3rd but only surviving son of a harsh father and a mother who eloped with a lover when Devlin was but a child, captures the events as well as the ambience of the period, and in elegant language. The murder of a young aristocratic lady working (!) in a London brothel along with several other prostitutes and the torching of the building gets the story started. Devlin is hooked in by Hero Jarvis, an independent and astute spinster, daughter of Devlin's most powerful enemy, and by his own curiosity. His private life laid waste, Devlin is actually happy to feel any emotion, even an interest in murder. And the chief Bow Street magistrate is taking an odd stance..... Read in order: What Angels Fear; When Gods Die; Why Mermaids Sing ($6.99 each).James, Peter. Dead Man's Footsteps ($43 Signed).
The tragic unfolding mayhem of the morning of 9/11, failed Brighton businessman and ne'er-do-well Ronnie Wilson sees the chance of a lifetime, to shed his debts, disappear and reinvent himself in another country.Six years later, the discovery of the skeletal remains of a woman's body in a storm drain in Brighton, leads Detective Superintendent Roy Grace on an enquiry spanning the globe. The Daily Mail and I agree that James is "One of the most fiendishly clever crime fiction plotters." British policing doesn't get any better than in the hands of Supt. Roy Grace of the Brighton beat. Only 5 left.
Not Dead Enough ($15).
Kamensky, Jane and . Blindspot ($27 Signed).
Our Dec. History Pick. "In a masterpiece of teamwork, Kamensky and Lepore, both history professors, have brought alive pre-Revolutionary Boston in the most charming way imaginable by telling the story of an exiled Scottish portraitist and his surprising apprentice. Blindspot kept me guessing (and laughing) from beginning to end-it is the most entertaining historical novel I've ever read." There is so much here for Gabaldon and Margaret Lawrence fans, such a keen picture of Boston as an immigrant city and one seething with pros and cons to British economic/trade policies, so good on the idea of a fallen woman donning a boy's breeches and apprenticing herself to an irascible painter on the run from his own debts in England, so good with a very large cast and many voices presented in narrative, letters, and newspapers (a printer is a main character). Do not miss it!
Pollard, Tony. Minutes of the Lazarus Club ($41 Signed).
Charles Darwin, Charles Babbage and Isambard Kingdom Brunel are among those fine minids of 1857 who are members of this illustrious brotherhood. Their meetings take place behind closed doors, their discussions are revolutionary and their conclusions sometimes forbidden. Dr George Phillips, a young and ambitious surgeon, is intrigued to encounter Brunel over a well-used cadaver in the gory pit of his dissection theatre. It soon becomes apparent that the great engineer has mysterious plans for the good doctor. And so a naïve Phillips becomes embroiled in the enigmatic machinations of the Lazarus Club, unaware that in the midst of their unorthodox club, a black conspiracy lurks. A first novel.
Walters, Michael. The Outcast ($43 Signed).
Modern Mongolia, never far from its ancient roots, makes a wonderful landscape for this series. Ulaan Bataar bakes in the heat of an unseasonably hot summer as it prepares to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the birth of the Mongol Empire. But the city is facing a series of unexpected crises: an apparent suicide bomber shot down by police in Suuk Bataar Square, a dead body in the City Museum re-enacting an incident from ancient Mongolian history, an explosion at a political rally, and yet another body found murdered nearby. For Doripalam, now boss of the Serious Crime Team, the crises are growing increasingly personal. And then one of his own police team is arrested....
