The Black Country by Alex Grecian Fiction — Mystery / Crime Fiction Putnam Adult; May 21, 2013 Paperback (ARC) 400 pages (Source: Publisher) From the book: The British Midlands. It’s called the “Black Country” for a reason. Bad things happen there. When members of a prominent family disappear from a coal-mining village–and a human eyeball […]

Proof of Guilt: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery (#15) by Charles Todd Fiction — Mystery, Crime Fiction William Morrow; January 29, 2013 Hardcover 352 pages From the inside flap: London, summer 1920. An unidentified body appears to have been run down by a motorcar and Ian Rutledge is leading the investigation to uncover what happened. […]

Kindred by Octavia Butler Fiction — Historical / Fantasy Beacon Press, 2004 (25th Anniversary Edition) Paperback 287 pages From the back cover: Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white […]

The Yard by Alex Grecian Fiction — Historical, Mystery Putnam; May 2012 Hardcover 432 pages From the back cover: “Victorian London is a cesspool of crime, and Scotland Yard has only twelve detectives–known as ‘The Murder Squad’–to investigate thousands of murders every month. Created after the Metropolitan Police’s spectacular failure to capture Jack the Ripper, […]

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray Fiction — Classic Lit. Book-of-the-Month Club, 1991 Paperback 768 pages This is not going to be a formal review. I spent an entire month reading Vanity Fair, and it fought me the whole time. I know I had a lot of things to say about it when I finally […]

The Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye Historical Fiction/Mystery Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam; March 15, 2012 Advance Review Copy (Paperback) 414 pages From the inside flap: It is 1845…Timothy Wilde tends bar near the Exchange, fantasizing about the day he will have enough money to win the girl of his dreams. But when his dreams incinerate […]