Review: Where the Dead Lie by C.S. Harris

Review: Where the Dead Lie by C.S. HarrisWhere the Dead Lie (Sebastian St. Cyr, #12) by C.S. Harris
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Sebastian St. Cyr #12
Pages: 334
Published by Berkley on April 4, 2017
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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The gruesome murder of a young boy takes Sebastian St. Cyr from the gritty streets of London to the glittering pleasure haunts of the aristocracy . . .
London, 1813.Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, is no stranger to the dark side of the city, but he's never seen anything like this: the brutalized body of a fifteen-year-old boy dumped into a makeshift grave on the grounds of an abandoned factory.
One of London's many homeless children, Benji Thatcher was abducted and tortured before his murder—and his younger sister is still missing. Few in authority care about a street urchin's fate, but Sebastian refuses to let this killer go unpunished.
Uncovering a disturbing pattern of missing children, Sebastian is drawn into a shadowy, sadistic world. As he follows a grim trail that leads from the writings of the debauched Marquis de Sade to the city's most notorious brothels, he comes to a horrifying realization: someone from society's upper echelon is preying upon the city's most vulnerable. And though dark, powerful forces are moving against him, Sebastian will risk his reputation and his life to keep more innocents from harm . .

My Review:

The dead lie in multiple meanings of the word AND in multiple places in this twelfth entry in the long-running, utterly marvelous Sebastian St. Cyr series.

The dead, and their deaths, circle around three points: a serial killer, a supposedly lost work from the pen of the late Marquis de Sade, and lost, missing or abandoned children. Those are three topics that sit uneasily in the mind separately, together they are a nightmare.

Or rather, Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin’s nightmares – and he already has PLENTY of those to keep him awake on entirely too many nights.

It begins with a child’s dead body, as a midnight burial is interrupted by an old soldier with a long-standing grudge. But it’s only the first body that’s found in this frequently macabre tale of murder and privilege. Benji Thatcher, abandoned, abused, stabbed, raped and killed, was not the first body to be murdered in such a heinous manner – only the one whose accidental discovery leads to more.

Too many more as Devlin discovers. Even more horrific, there are also too many people in the circle he is supposed to be a part of who don’t give a damn. Along with at least one who is adding to the body count even as Devlin does his damndest to see him hanged.

That he fails isn’t on Devlin, but rather, on the privileges of a society that protects both him and the killer – even as it fails to protect those without that privilege. Those like the children abandoned on London’s streets because their parents have been transported to remote penal colonies such as Georgia, or Botany Bay.

As well as those who have the misfortune to have been born female – no matter their class – not even the most privileged. Not even Devlin’s own niece who could still be saved – but refuses to let herself be.

Escape Rating A-: This one is a really hard read. It’s excellent, just as the entire St. Cyr series is, but this one is difficult because there’s just so much tragedy and horror uncovered within its pages.

At its heart, this is a story about lost children, and all the ways that society (not just his but also, frankly, ours) allows children to be lost, abandoned and abused. These children are being preyed upon because no one will miss them and the killer knows it.

And has exploited their position, over and over again, because they know they are so privileged and so protected that even if they are suspected, which they are and have been long before St. Cyr becomes involved, few will believe they could possibly be guilty of such heinous crimes and even then there are people in very high places who will guarantee they never pay.

Wrapped around the ongoing horror of finding not one but three mass burial sites, there’s a story about a lost child who is found, an adult child who loses a parent to an untimely death, a formerly lost child who recognizes that he has found a home, and a lost child who finds his way back to a home he once rejected.

With one child’s, as well as their mother’s, tragedy yet to come in the later books in the series.

This entry in the series is of the ‘read ‘em and weep’ variety, as everyone in Devlin’s true circle is as harrowed and horrified as the reader – which is made infinitely worse by the people who are informed but simply refuse to care. If “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” then there is more evil in the world than even Devlin can fix – and he is made all too aware of that in this entry in the series.

My reading of Where the Dead Lie completes my ‘catch-up’ read of this series, so I’ll be waiting with the proverbial ‘bated breath’ for the forthcoming new entry, What Cannot Be Said, currently scheduled for publication in April of 2024. And in the meantime, I have the readalike Wrexford & Sloane series to catch up with, as it reads quite a bit like the St. Cyr, series would read if we were viewing the Regency from Hero Devlin’s perspective rather than Sebastian’s.

Review: Who Buries the Dead by C.S. Harris

Review: Who Buries the Dead by C.S. HarrisWho Buries the Dead (Sebastian St. Cyr #10) by C.S. Harris
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Sebastian St. Cyr #10
Pages: 338
Published by Berkley on March 3, 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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The grisly murder of a West Indies slave owner and the reappearance of a dangerous enemy from Sebastian St. Cyr’s past combine to put C. S. Harris’s “troubled but compelling antihero” (Booklist) to the ultimate test in this taut, thrilling mystery.
London, 1813. The vicious decapitation of Stanley Preston, a wealthy, socially ambitious plantation owner, at Bloody Bridge draws Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, into a macabre and increasingly perilous investigation. The discovery near the body of an aged lead coffin strap bearing the inscription “King Charles, 1648” suggests a link between this killing and the beheading of the deposed seventeenth-century Stuart monarch. Equally troubling, the victim’s kinship to the current Home Secretary draws the notice of Sebastian’s powerful father-in-law, Lord Jarvis, who will exploit any means to pursue his own clandestine ends.
Working in concert with his fiercely independent wife, Hero, Sebastian finds his inquiries taking him from the wretched back alleys of Fish Street Hill to the glittering ballrooms of Mayfair as he amasses a list of suspects who range from an eccentric Chelsea curiosity collector to the brother of an unassuming but brilliantly observant spinster named Jane Austen.
But as one brutal murder follows another, it is the connection between the victims and ruthless former army officer Sinclair, Lord Oliphant, that dramatically raises the stakes. Once, Oliphant nearly destroyed Sebastian in a horrific wartime act of carnage and betrayal. Now the vindictive former colonel might well pose a threat not only to Sebastian but to everything—and everyone—Sebastian holds most dear.

My Review:

Whenever I flail around looking for a comfort read, I end up back in Regency England, following Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, as he investigates yet another murder that touches upon the high and mighty of his time and place – whether the high and mighty like it or not.

Especially, and sometimes just a bit gleefully, whether his powerful father-in-law, Lord Charles Jarvis, likes it or not. Devlin enjoys discomfiting his father-in-law, while Jarvis would just as soon see Devlin dead, and is more than capable of arranging it. The only thing keeping the two men from killing each other is that they both love Hero Jarvis, Lord Jarvis’ daughter who is, much to the consternation of her father, Devlin’s wife.

The case in this 10th outing of the series begins with a murder. Not just the usual garden-variety murder, either. Stanley Preston, a man who loved collecting memorabilia related to the famously dead, is found not merely dead but decapitated much like the late King Charles I. Or, to be a bit more accurate, like Oliver Cromwell, whose body was decapitated after death – and whose head is part of Preston’s ‘cabinet of curiosities’.

The late, mostly unlamented Mr. Preston was one of those people who are so cantankerous and so outspoken about all the many and varied things they are cantankerous about that it’s not hard to imagine that someone killed him. In fact, it’s all too easy and potential suspects are legion.

Or would be if not for that grisly, gruesome and downright difficult to accomplish decapitation. Not that plenty of Preston’s enemies weren’t more than wealthy enough to hire it done. Including, quite possibly, his daughter. Or one of her long-suffering suitors who believed that her father stood in the way of their happiness.

Bow Street would love to pin the murder on Miss Preston’s most objectionable suitor – at least the most impoverished one. Devlin hopes that the crime can be laid at the door of one of his own enemies, newly returned to London.

Unless the whole thing comes back around to Preston’s cantankerousness combined with his inability to keep his objectionable opinions behind his teeth. And a man who with a secret that he can’t afford to have exposed.

A secret not all that different from Devlin’s own.

Escape Rating A-: I picked this up this week because yes, I was having a comfort read flail, and Sebastian St. Cyr always delivers – or rather whisks me away from my time to his. Which got me to thinking about the nature of comfort reads in general, and why this works for me in particular.

I had originally hoped this week that Blind Fear, being the third book in a series I’m definitely enjoying, would scratch some of that comfort read itch – but it didn’t – leading me straight to questions about why and why not.

What makes mysteries in general so much of a comfort is the romance of justice. If a story is a mystery and not purely a thriller, then it’s guaranteed that in the end the crime is solved, evil is punished and justice triumphs.

The Finn Thrillers have a mystery component, but they are exactly what it says on the label. They’re thrillers. At the end of the whole series, it seems highly probably that justice will triumph and evil will get its just desserts. But it hasn’t happened yet and doesn’t look like it’s happening any time soon. And in the meantime Finn is dealing with a lot of injustice, directed at himself as well as others, and wading all too frequently in some of the nastier cesspits of human behavior as he searches high and low – mostly low – for that justice.

In a historical mystery like the St. Cyr series, the historical setting adds to the comfort. Not that the past was any better, easier or safer than the present, but rather that its problems and its evils are not open-ended. We know what got solved or resolved, which situations improved and which are still plaguing the world today.

Not that justice writ large always triumphs in the St. Cyr series, but writ small it generally does. Even if the evils of the socioeconomic issues of the day are frequently appalling. Devlin and Hero attempt to do some good with the money and power they have, and often succeed if only a bit.

Bow Street may attempt to rush someone to judgment because it’s convenient for the high and mighty, but Devlin is always successful at standing in their way on that front, at least. The official story that gets into the papers may sweep things under the rug that shouldn’t be, and some of the rich and powerful escape the full range of justice they deserve, but no one is successfully railroaded to the hangman’s noose who hasn’t earned that punishment, at least not on Devlin’s watch.

And that is most definitely a comfort to the reader. Or at least this reader.

Who Buries the Dead was the penultimate title in my quest to catch up with the Sebastian St. Cyr series. I have one book left, Where the Dead Lie, and I’m pretty confident at this point that I’ll have that read long before the 19th entry in the series, What Cannot Be Said, gets said, done and published in April 2024.

After that, if I get desperate for a comfort read that is very like St. Cyr, I’ve got more of the Wrexford & Sloane series to look forward to. And I am!

Review: Why Kings Confess by C.S. Harris

Review: Why Kings Confess by C.S. HarrisWhy Kings Confess (Sebastian St. Cyr, #9) by C.S. Harris
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Sebastian St. Cyr #9
Pages: 340
Published by Berkley, New American Library, Obsidian on March 4, 2014
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

The gruesome murder of a young French physician draws aristocratic investigator Sebastian St. Cyr and his pregnant wife, Hero, into a dangerous, decades-old mystery as a wrenching piece of Sebastian’s past puts him to the ultimate test.
Regency England, January 1813: When a badly injured Frenchwoman is found beside the mutilated body of Dr. Damion Pelletan in one of London’s worst slums, Sebastian finds himself caught in a high-stakes tangle of murder and revenge. Although the woman, Alexi Sauvage, has no memory of the attack, Sebastian knows her all too well from an incident in his past—an act of wartime brutality and betrayal that nearly destroyed him.
As the search for the killer leads Sebastian into a treacherous web of duplicity, he discovers that Pelletan was part of a secret delegation sent by Napoleon to investigate the possibility of peace with Britain. Despite his powerful father-in-law’s warnings, Sebastian plunges deep into the mystery of the "Lost Dauphin”, the boy prince who disappeared in the darkest days of the French Revolution, and soon finds himself at lethal odds with the Dauphin’s sister—the imperious, ruthless daughter of Marie Antoinette—who is determined to retake the French crown at any cost.
With the murderer striking ever closer, Sebastian must battle new fears about Hero’s health and that of their soon-to-be born child. When he realizes the key to their survival may lie in the hands of an old enemy, he must finally face the truth about his own guilt in a past he has found too terrible to consider.... 

My Review:

Once upon a time there was a legend about a prince locked in a tower, never to be seen again. You might be thinking this sounds familiar, but that there were two princes. This is not that story. Although the idea that the one about the two princes might have inspired this version, or at least might have made this version seem a bit more plausible, is not outside of the realms of possibility.

The earlier version of this legend, the one about the two princes in the tower, refers to the end of the Wars of the Roses, young Edward V of England and his brother Richard, and the perfidy – at least according to Shakespeare’s popular account, of their uncle Richard III.

Bones were discovered in the tower two centuries later and ascribed to the bodies of those two little boys. No one knows what really happened, hence the persistent legend.

Louis XVII, Dauphin of France, Portrait by Alexander Kucharsky, 1792

While the truth about the boys’ fate is was never discovered, the fact that it wasn’t clear in their own time led to a seemingly endless parade of opportunists pretending to be one or the other of the ‘lost’ princes, resulting in a simmering cauldron of uncertainty and doubt about the legitimacy of the English throne and the ability to topple whoever was sitting on it that lasted for DECADES.

In light of that history, both the known and the unknown, it’s not a stretch to think that, in the wake of the French Revolution, when the fate of the last heir to the throne seems to have been equally suspiciously, dubiously, and questionably unknown, that there would be rumors and even downright hopes that Louis XVII, the ‘Lost Dauphin’ (then aged EIGHT), had been spirited away from the inhuman conditions in which he was imprisoned to an unknown sanctuary, and that the child who died in his cell two years later was an imposter.

It seems like I’m talking all about the distant past rather than about the present matter in this book. And I am. But I’m also very much not, as ALL of the books in the Sebastian St. Cyr series are intimately involved with not merely the Regency period in which they are set, but with the great doings and underhanded dealings of the very month and year in which they take place.

Why Kings Confess opens in January of 1813. Those two princes in England’s Tower of London are over three centuries dead, but the Lost Dauphin is merely two decades into his, if he truly IS in his grave, that is. Napoleon Bonaparte is the Emperor of the French, but his popularity is very much on the wane after his catastrophic retreat from Russia’s most implacable field commander – ‘General Winter’.

As the story begins, Napoleon has sent a not-so-secret (utterly plausible but entirely fictional) embassy to England to negotiate a peace that England, and its unpopular Prince Regent, need as much as Napoleon does after ten years of the ruinously costly Napoleonic Wars.

The murder that opens Why Kings Confess is that of a young French doctor who was part of that peace overture. The palace, in the person of the shadowy power behind the throne, Lord Charles Jarvis, wants the murder hushed up. His enemy and son-in-law Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, disagrees. Strenuously.

Devlin knows the man wasn’t killed by footpads, because footpads don’t cut out their victims’ hearts – just their money and other valuables. As Devlin investigates, it begins to appear that the murder wasn’t related half so much to the current embassy as it was to the fate of the Lost Dauphin.

The deaths are certainly related to someone’s past, but when the second member of the embassy is also murdered, Devlin is forced to look both further afield and closer to home. Because the past that is coming to light is Devlin’s own.

Escape Rating A-: This week already felt like a week and a half by the time I picked this book up on Wednesday – and there were still two days to go. I needed a comfort read, and it had been just long enough since I finished my previous St. Cyr read that I was more than ready to dive back into Devlin’s era and escape my own for a bit. I confess that Why Kings Confess was absolutely the right book at the right time.

What makes this series work for me, every single time, is that every single story is an example of the proverbial three-legged stool where three story threads provide strength and balance to the story as a whole, keeping the reader sitting pretty and enthralled from the first page to the last.

First, there’s a murder. Generally there’s more than one. But when that first body drops Devlin becomes wrapped up in a case that reaches over to the second leg of the plot, the historical period in which this story is set, not just the year but down to the month and even the day, and the tendrils of that history reach down to the stinking underbelly of the glittering Regency all the way up to the dirty political deals being done by the high and mighty. And last, there’s the third leg that keeps it all in balance, as the entire series is Sebastian St. Cyr’s journey from a young, scarred, disillusioned war veteran to become the powerful force for justice that he needs to be to keep his own demons at bay.

I started this series for the historical mystery setting. St. Cyr has been a fascinating character from the very first page of What Angels Fear, and following his dangerous and deadly journey has been riveting from that beginning. But it’s the way that the character grows and changes, the way that he heals from the damage of war, in fits and starts and one step forward and sometimes two steps back, that makes him a leader, and a character, worth following from book to book and year to year.

At the same time, the thing that makes the series different from other historical mysteries is its deep and penetrating dive into its historical setting. I know enough to get caught up in the political skullduggery behind the deaths to get sucked right in, and then find myself looking up details just to get that little bit more meat out of everything he’s just experienced and I’ve just read.

Which is exactly the experience I expect from the next book in my St. Cyr catch-up read, Who Buries the Dead, the next time I go flailing around for a comfort read of justice delivered by a riveting character who cannot make himself stop trying to deliver that justice in spite of the odds stacked against him.

Review: Beach Read by Emily Henry

Review: Beach Read by Emily HenryBeach Read by Emily Henry
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Chick Lit, contemporary romance, relationship fiction, women's fiction
Pages: 358
Published by Berkley on May 19, 2020
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters.
Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast.
They’re polar opposites.
In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they're living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer's block.
Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She’ll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he’ll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no one will fall in love. Really.

My Review:

Beach Read has been in the virtually towering TBR pile ever since I read – and fell in love with – Book Lovers early this year. I’ve been “playing along” with the Kindle Achievements every quarter, so when the list of possible titles to fulfill that last badge included Beach Read, it seemed like the universe was telling me that now was the time. So here we are.

Both January Andrews and Augustus Everett are best selling authors – but most definitely NOT in the same genre. January writes women’s fiction (not all that different from the author herself), while Augustus Everett is famous for his dark and gritty literary fiction.

Their characters and worlds do not even begin to intersect – but they do. They are both graduates of the same University of Michigan Creative Writing Program. In fact, they attended together and graduated at the same time, spending four years competing for every single award and critiquing pretty much every single one of each other’s works.

Saying they are familiar with each other is hardly a stretch – even if they have nothing in common. Or believe they have nothing in common. At least not until they find themselves next door neighbors in a northern Michigan beach community, wanting nothing to do with each other.

But needing each other all the same.

They’ve each fallen into some really deep ruts, and they are separately having a damn hard time crawling out of those ruts. January has stopped believing in happy ever afters, after the one she believed her parents had found turned out to be based on a lie. A year after her dad’s death, she has a book due, an empty bank account, and a severe case of writer’s block.

Leading her to her dad’s old home town and the house he shared with his childhood sweetheart at a point considerably after either of their childhoods.

Gus has never believed in happy ever afters. Or even happy for nows. He’s always looked on the dark side and is in the throes of his third book, this time about death cults and their few survivors. But he’s going through his own case of writer’s block, for reasons that he isn’t willing to share with January. Because sharing isn’t something that Gus does easily. Or at all.

Still, they’re both writers and they’re both stuck and they have a whole lot of common ground to build on – even if that ground is more than a bit shaky on both sides. So they challenge each other as a way of breaking their writer’s block.

And it turns into the making of a happy ending for everyone – including sorta/kinda – the protagonists of not one but two surprising new books.

Escape Rating A-: I enjoyed Beach Read, but not quite as much as Book Lovers, because it’s a bit too much like Book Lovers. Which isn’t fair to Beach Read, as it was published first even though I read it second. Still, if you like one you’ll like the other – although it probably isn’t a good idea to read them too close together.

Like Nora and Charlie in Book Lovers, January and Gus are not just both in the book business, but in the same end of the book business as each other. (Nora and Charlie were both editors, January and Gus are both authors). Which means that both books, in addition to being just the kind of stories that January writes, are steeped in the book business – merely different aspects of that business.

And both stories begin when the protagonists meet when both parties are in the midst of a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.” What makes both stories fun to read is the way that they get themselves and each other past the horribleness.

We’re in January’s head in this story, so we know what she’s been through, what she’s thinking, and what she’s feeling. Because she and Gus knew each other fairly well – and very nearly better than that – once upon a time, we are also aware of all of her pre-conceived notions of who Gus is and what he thinks of her and in both of their situations.

Which gives Beach Read a very strong sense of “assume makes an ass out of ‘u’ and ‘me’” because January’s assumptions about Gus were and are too frequently wrong, wrong, wrong. But this steers clear of misunderstandammit territory because Gus has a damn hard time communicating his thoughts and feelings in any way other than expiating the worst of them through his writing.

While it was a given from the outset that January and Gus were going to reach at least the kind of happy for now that both the character January AND the author usually write, what made this book interesting and different was the books that January and Gus each produced on their way to it, and how those books managed to be both a departure from their usual styles while still expressing the core parts of their personalities and their reasons for becoming writers in the first place.

So a good reading time was definitely had in Beach Read. Because it was most definitely a good reading time, and because one of the other possible titles for that last achievement was the author’s People We Meet on Vacation, I bought that too. I’m pretty sure I’ll be picking that up and meeting those people the next time I’m looking for a feel-good read!

Review: Hiss Me Deadly by Miranda James

Review: Hiss Me Deadly by Miranda JamesHiss Me Deadly (Cat in the Stacks Mystery) by Miranda James
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy mystery, mystery
Series: Cat in the Stacks #15
Pages: 320
Published by Berkley on June 27, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Charlie and Diesel must catch a killer before he strikes another deadly note in this latest installment of the New York Times bestselling Cat in the Stacks Mysteries.
Charlie Harris remembers Wilfred “Wil” Threadgill as one of the outsiders during high school in Athena. Although Wil was a couple of years ahead of him and his friend Melba Gilley, Melba had a big crush on Wil, who dropped out after his junior year. An aspiring musician, Wil hit the road for California and never looked back. Wil eventually became a star, fronting a band and writing award-winning songs.
Coming back to Athena to work for two weeks with students in the college music department, Wil is now the big man on campus. Not everyone is happy to have him back, however. His entourage have been the target of several acts of petty harassment. At first they are easy for Wil to shrug off, but the incidents escalate and become more troubling. When one of the band members is killed Charlie worries that Melba, now deeply involved with the man at the center of the attacks, could be in deadly danger. It is up to Charlie and Diesel to find out who hates Wil Threadgill enough to silence his song . . . forever!

My Review:

I’m on my way to the American Library Association Annual Conference this week, which makes this the perfect time for another Cat in the Stacks cozy mystery. Why? Because both amateur detective Charlie Harris and his author, Miranda (Dean) James, are both librarians! The college in Charlie’s hometown, Athena, Mississippi, where Charlie works part-time as an archivist and rare books cataloger, probably doesn’t ever send him to the Annual Conference, but I’d say it’s a sure bet that when Charlie worked at the much larger Houston Public Library that they occasionally did – particularly on those occasions when the conference touched down in the Lone Star State – as it sometimes still does.

50something Charlie has an unfortunate – or fortunate for the readers of this series – tendency to find himself involved in murder. Not perpetrating it – as his large and in charge Maine Coon cat Diesel would never permit his human to ever fall to the dark side. Rather, Charlie all too frequently finds himself in a position to solve murders, or at least to make the attempt.

A fact which ALWAYS makes Detective Kanesha Berry wish he’d mind his own business, as he’s all too frequently working in parallel to her and very much without her sanction. His family and friends also wish he’d do a better job of letting sleeping dogs lie, as his willingness to stick his nose in where it doesn’t belong – at least when it comes to murder in his hometown – all too often put Charlie (and even Diesel) directly into the line of fire.

And so it proves in this case of one of Athena’s prodigal sons returning home to both a hero’s welcome and a twisted version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, with Charlie’s sister-from-another-mister, Melba Gilley, caught in the crossfire along with Charlie, Diesel, and the man she’s been pining over for entirely too long.

Escape Rating B: I’ve missed Diesel, although now I have Tuna and he’s about half a Diesel in size, intelligence and purr volume. Diesel is always the best part of the Cat in the Stacks mystery series, even though he is not the detective like Joe Grey and is merely (although merely can’t truly encompass a cat Diesel’s size) a big, sweet cat.

Howsomever, Diesel frequently serves as an emotional support cat during Charlie’s adventures – and not just for Charlie. A LOT of the characters in this entry in the series need more than a bit of feline TLC to get them through the trauma.

The starting point is a deadly take on “small town child makes good” as Wilfred “Wil” Threadgill is coming back home to Athena after 40 years of musical success, both as the leader of his own band and an Oscar-worthy movie soundtrack composer.

But Wil didn’t simply leave Athena and never look – or come – back over the years. He ran away – from town, from home, from his senior year in high school, and especially from the musical group that had formed around him and his friends. A musical group that was starting to see a fair amount of local success, and had a promising future – until Wil, the driving force behind that success bailed on Athena and left them high and dry and in the lurch.

It’s clear from the outset that someone in town isn’t exactly happy to see Wil, but their method of attack is to start attacking people around the man, and not the man himself. As the injuries mount and the bodies continue falling, Melba tries to protect her old flame, Charlie stays on the case to look out for Melba, while Detective Berry searches for a killer who seems to be holding an old grudge while hiding in plain sight.

I had a lot of fun reading this one – as usual. Charlie Harris is authentically one of us librarians, and Diesel is just as authentically a very big cat. Charlie’s life reads like a comfortable slipper that produces a sigh of relief whenever I put it on, because so much of his work and career is so familiar and rings true. Very much on the other hand, he has a tendency to find himself in interesting trouble, much like Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote.

This particular entry in the series relies on a bit of prior knowledge of Charlie’s life to date and the family of both birth and choice that he shares it with, as the ‘B’ plot of the story involves both Charlie’s attempts to get his fiancée to set a date for their wedding as well as a bit of trouble in the paradise of his son’s marriage. It’s not necessary to have read the entire series to get stuck into this entry, but one or two would be helpful – and the whole thing is a lovely, cozy read.

The case itself, while it isn’t a fair play mystery as there aren’t nearly enough clues to figure it out until very late in the game, is still more than interesting enough to follow between the story of the local boy makes good returning, the very old, very deep and very justified grudge, and the second set of crimes that just makes solving the puzzle that much more complicated.

So if you like small town cozies with engaging amateur detectives assisted by diverse ‘Scooby gangs’ accompanied by really adorable and personable animals, the Cat in the Stacks series might be your reading catnip. It certainly is mine!

Review: What Darkness Brings by C.S. Harris

Review: What Darkness Brings by C.S. HarrisWhat Darkness Brings (Sebastian St. Cyr, #8) by C.S. Harris
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Sebastian St. Cyr #8
Pages: 349
Published by New American Library, Berkley on March 5, 2013
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London, September 1812. After a long night spent dealing with the tragic death of a former military comrade, a heart-sick Sebastian learns of a new calamity: Russell Yates, the dashing, one-time privateer who married Sebastian’s former lover Kat Boleyn a year ago, has been found standing over the corpse of notorious London diamond merchant Benjamin Eisler. Yates insists he is innocent, but he will surely hang unless Sebastian can unmask the real killer. For the sake of Kat, the woman he once loved and lost, Sebastian plunges into a treacherous circle of intrigue. Although Eisler’s clients included the Prince Regent and the Emperor Napoleon, he was a despicable man with many enemies and a number of dangerous, well-kept secrets—including a passion for arcane texts and black magic. Central to the case is a magnificent blue diamond, believed to have once formed part of the French crown jewels, which disappeared on the night of Eisler’s death. As Sebastian traces the diamond’s ownership, he uncovers links that implicate an eccentric, powerful financier named Hope and stretch back into the darkest days of the French Revolution. When the killer grows ever more desperate and vicious, Sebastian finds his new marriage to Hero tested by the shadows of his first love, especially when he begins to suspect that Kat is keeping secrets of her own. And as matters rise to a crisis, Sebastian must face a bitter truth--that he has been less than open with the fearless woman who is now his wife.

My Review: 

The Hope Diamond in 1974

The Hope Diamond, the very real, very beautiful and very large Hope Diamond, is currently owned by the Smithsonian Museum and housed in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Once upon a time, the Hope Diamond was just a bit bigger than the 45.52 carats it is today and was part of the Crown Jewels of France. Then there was that little historical incident known as the French Revolution, and the Crown Jewels were first put on display and then stolen in 1792.

At which point it disappeared from history, only to reappear in its current size and setting in 1839 as the Hope Diamond in a gem catalog from the banking family of that name.

So where did it go between 1792 and 1839? It’s not exactly the kind of thing that a person could hawk on a street corner – or even take to the usual dealers in stolen goods. Because of its unusual color, it was too easy to trace – even after cutting it down from its original OMG 115 carats to the (still OMG) 67.125 carat gem that was part of the French Crown Jewels.

When the noted art collector, diamond merchant, high-priced pawnbroker and all-around thoroughly disgusting example of humanity Daniel Eisler is killed in his own front parlor, it’s not a case that would normally involve Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin. But the man accused of the murder is dear to a woman Devlin once loved. She claims her husband is innocent – of that crime at least.

Devlin agrees to look into the killing, as it’s pretty obvious that whatever else is going on, there’s been somewhat of a rush to judgment, to the point where it looks like a fix is in. A fix that has tentacles that reach all the way up to the highest powers in that land – whether one defines those high and mighty powers as the Prince Regent or Devlin’s father-in-law, the power behind Prinny’s shaky throne.

At first, it doesn’t seem possible that the famous blue diamond could have anything to do with the death of a dealer whose hands it may have passed through, once upon a time. After all, Daniel Eisler – at least in his fictional incarnation – is such a thoroughgoing bastard that most who hear of his death consider it an improvement to humanity as a whole.

(Daniel Eisler was based on a real person, Daniel Eliason, who really does occupy a place in the history of the Hope Diamond at the time this story takes place. However, the real person does not seem to have been anything like as poor an excuse for a human being as his fictional counterpart.)

But the deeper Devlin digs, the more the diamond – and the agents of Napoleon still hunting it after twenty years – appears to be at the center of a case that otherwise gets darker and murkier as it goes.

Revealing secrets and lies that have lurked in the shadows of the seemingly war with France – and have the potential to rock Prinny’s unstable Regency to its foundations.

Escape Rating A: It’s not much of a surprise that after Tuesday’s book reminded me SO MUCH of St. Cyr that I would be hearing the siren song of the next book in my catch-up read of the series. I kind of wish I’d listened to that voice a bit more readily, as once I started What Darkness Brings I fell right into it with a grateful sigh.

One of the things that I’ve loved about this series is the way that it blends real historical events and figures with a story that often feels “ripped from the headlines” of its own era’s newspapers and gutter press.

Nearly all the history of the Hope Diamond and the French Blue diamond from which it was cut really happened – especially the truly wild bits about the original theft. The speculation about why that theft occurred and just how it got to England are not just plausible but have been looked into as possibilities over the centuries. One part of that speculation and conjecture in Devlin’s time, however, has been verified. In 2005, when scientific testing confirmed that the Hope Diamond was, in fact, cut from the gem in the French Crown Jewels.

At first, I didn’t think the plots in this entry in the series were going to reach nearly as high as they did, but once you read even a bit of the true history and the conjectures that surround it, it made sense that it turned out the way it did.

The way the murder, the theft plot and the real history branched and intertwined made this entry in the series one hell of a wild ride, while still tying up loose ends from previous entries and opening up entirely new fields of questions for future books in the series – some of which have admittedly been answered by the point where the series as a whole rests – hopefully temporarily – after Who Cries for the Lost closed its own set of doors and opened yet more to keep us all on pins and needles until the next entry in the series.

Next up in my catching up/filling in read of the St. Cyr series will be Why Kings Confess. And I confess that I’ll be picking that up the next time I’m looking for a comfort read, or guaranteed competence porn, or just have the urge to see what I missed with these marvelous characters!

Review: The Benevolent Society of Ill Mannered Ladies by Alison Goodman

Review: The Benevolent Society of Ill Mannered Ladies by Alison GoodmanThe Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies (The Ill-Mannered Ladies, #1) by Alison Goodman
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Ill-Mannered Ladies #1
Pages: 464
Published by Berkley on May 30, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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A high society amateur detective at the heart of Regency London uses her wits and invisibility as an 'old maid' to protect other women in a new and fiercely feminist historical mystery series from New York Times bestselling author Alison Goodman.
Lady Augusta Colebrook, "Gus," is determinedly unmarried, bored by society life, and tired of being dismissed at the age of forty-two. She and her twin sister, Julia, who is grieving her dead betrothed, need a distraction. One soon presents itself: to rescue their friend's goddaughter, Caroline, from her violent husband.
The sisters set out to Caroline's country estate with a plan, but their carriage is accosted by a highwayman. In the scuffle, Gus accidentally shoots and injures the ruffian, only to discover he is Lord Evan Belford, an acquaintance from their past who was charged with murder and exiled to Australia twenty years ago. What follows is a high adventure full of danger, clever improvisation, heart-racing near misses, and a little help from a revived and rather charming Lord Evan.
Back in London, Gus can't stop thinking about her unlikely (not to mention handsome) comrade-in-arms. She is convinced Lord Evan was falsely accused of murder, and she is going to prove it. She persuades Julia to join her in a quest to help Lord Evan, and others in need—society be damned! And so begins the beguiling secret life and adventures of the Colebrook twins.
A rollicking and joyous adventure, with a beautiful love story at its heart, about two rebellious sisters forging their own path in Regency London

My Review:

Lady Augusta Colebrook is an ape-leader. She’s a 42 year old spinster with no prospects of marriage whatsoever – and she’s content in that state, living with her twin sister Julia in rather well-upholstered circumstances. Lady Augusta and Julia may still be under the control of the younger brother who inherited the title, but his control is limited to general opprobrium and ownership of the house they live in as they have independent means of their own.

What makes Lady Augusta (generally called Gus by her friends and intimates) an ape-leader? The term is from an old English adage which said that a spinster’s punishment after death, for failing to procreate, would be to lead apes in hell. Technically both Gus and Julia are ape-leaders, but Gus’ personality tends toward leading considerably more than Julia’s does or ever will.

Julia is a peacemaker who thinks the best of everyone. Gus is the person in whose wake Julia is generally trying to make peace after Gus has refused to kowtow to the behavioral expectations due to her gender.

The sisters should be content to sit on the sidelines of Regency society and mind their own behavior while observing the misbehavior (amorous and otherwise) of the younger and livelier members of the ton.

But there’s life in both of these “old girls” yet, and Gus at least is determined to make sure that both of them experience that life to the fullest – for whatever time her sister might have left. Which leads them to the kind of dangerous derring-do that neither of them ever expected.

The kind of adventure in the kinds of places that may very well get them killed – even as it opens their eyes to the kinds of things that no well-bred, well-behaved woman is expected to see or know.

But once they’ve seen, once they know, they can’t unsee. And they can’t help but try to fix what they can with as much benevolence as possible.

Escape Rating B+: “Well behaved women seldom make history” or so goes the famous quote by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, which may be a quote from 1976 rather than the Colebrook sisters Regency – but very much still applies.

It’s also the reason I picked this book up.

The cover, and the blurb, both lead readers to the impression that this book is going to be on the light and frothy side, but that is far from the case. Rather than being a look at the frivolities and minor disgraces in the life of the ton, as so many Regency romances are, The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies shines its light in very dark places, in a way that is not dissimilar to C.S. Harris’ Sebastian St. Cyr series.

Both the Colebrook sisters and St. Cyr are conducting their investigations during the Regency period, in this book specifically 1812 – which is also the year in which books 4 through 8 of the St. Cyr series (Where Serpents Sleep, What Remains of Heaven, Where Shadows Dance, When Maidens Mourn, What Darkness Brings) take place. Both series expose the slimy underbelly of the glittering Regency, but they do it from different perspectives.

St. Cyr, as a member of the aristocracy, operates within the halls of power, while the Colebrook sisters, as disregarded females on the outskirts of the ton, expose the dangers that specifically affect women in that society merely for living while female. In a way, it’s as though Sebastian’s wife Hero, a social reformer in her own right, was the focal point of his series.

(This is all a very large hint that if you enjoy the one series you’ll probably enjoy the other, as they are shining their lights into the dark places of the same historical period. Just not the same dark places.)

What makes the dark places that the Colebrook sisters so chilling is that the places their so-called ill-behavior takes them were all much too real. And it’s much too easy for a reader to imagine themselves in those circumstances. Women really were not just their husband’s property in this era, but his to seemingly dispose of as he pleased, even into an early grave whether indirectly by way of an insane asylum or by an outright murder which was entirely too easy to cover up in a world where a man’s word was law, his wife was chattel and forensic science hadn’t even reached infancy yet.

It’s no wonder that Gus has no desire to marry – she’s too intelligent not to be aware that for a woman with both independent means and an independent streak a mile wide, the costs for her could be deadly.

The conditions that Gus and Julia investigate in the three stories that make up this book are dark, gruesome and inescapably real, to the point where this book needs a whole lot more trigger warnings than that blurb would lead one to believe.

Whether or not a reader will stick through those dark places is going to depend a lot on how one feels about Gus and Julia, because they, especially Gus, are the ones leading us through multiple valleys of the shadow of death, and if they aren’t people you’re willing to follow, then it does work.

I felt for Gus, and liked her intelligent observations of the conditions she was supposed to live under and decided to refuse from her position of relative privilege. I’m not totally sure she successfully walked that fine line between giving a historical-set heroine enough agency to do the things we need her to do to be the protagonist without making her more of a creature of our time than hers. Julia does feel like a woman of her times, which is why she drove me a bit crazy as a character as I couldn’t get into her head at all.

Your reading mileage may vary when it comes to Gus and Julia, but there seems to be no debate on the personality of their brother Duffy. Duffy is used to demonstrate just how circumscribed their lives are supposed to be by the lights of their society. He’s also a total arsehat, a person whose head is so far up their arse that they are wearing it for a hat. And in Duffy’s case, only the British spelling will do. He’s the character we all love to hate. If this were the froth that the cover picture leads you to believe, he’d be both the villain AND the comic relief.

Instead he’s a symbol of everything that’s wrong and just why Gus needs to fight back so damn much and so damn hard.

While there is a bit of a romance hinted at, this is far, far, far from being what is usually meant by a Regency romance – and it’s a much more interesting book for it, but perhaps not for the faint of heart.

Review: When Maidens Mourn by C.S. Harris

Review: When Maidens Mourn by C.S. HarrisWhen Maidens Mourn (Sebastian St. Cyr, #7) by C.S. Harris
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Sebastian St. Cyr, #7, #7
Pages: 341
Published by Berkley, New American Library on March 6, 2012
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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Regency England, August 1812. Sebastian's plans to escape the heat of London for a honeymoon are shattered when the murdered body of Hero's good friend, Gabrielle Tennyson, is discovered drifting in a battered boat at the site of a long-vanished castle known as Camlet Moat. A beautiful young antiquarian, Miss Tennyson had recently provoked an uproar with her controversial identification of the island as the location of Camelot. Missing and presumed also dead are Gabrielle's two young cousins, nine-year-old George and three-year-old Alfred.Still struggling to define the nature of their new marriage, Sebastian and Hero find themselves occasionally working at cross-purposes as their investigation leads from London's medieval Inns of Court to its seedy back alleys, and from grand country homes to rural enclaves where ancient Celtic beliefs still hold sway. As he probes deeper, Sebastian also discovers dark secrets at the heart of the Tennyson family, and an enigmatic young French lieutenant with a dangerous, mysterious secret of his own.Racing to unmask a ruthless killer and unravel the puzzle of the missing children, Sebastian and Hero soon find both their lives and their growing love for each other at risk as their investigation leads to Hero's father, who is also Sebastian's long-time nemesis... and to a tall, dark stranger who may hold the key to Sebastian's own parentage.

My Review:

The legend of King Arthur has always loomed large over Britain, but even more so at times when the current monarch is less than popular. Or, as in the case of the corpulent, aging, spendthrift Prinny, Prince Regent for his mentally incapacitated father George III, not just unpopular but downright detested for his endless need for more money and therefore higher taxes to maintain his profligate lifestyle AND continue to prosecute Britain’s seemingly endless war with Napoleon and France.

At times like these, King Arthur, the “once and future king” shifts from being a mere legend to a figure of hope. People are looking for a savior from the hated Hanoverian dynasty and praying for a fated king from the mists of time and myth skirts the edges of treason without quite toppling into that abyss.

Not that Prinny isn’t scared out of his mind over the broadsheets that appear everywhere, and especially not that the powerful Lord Jarvis, propping up Prinny’s throne, isn’t looking for a way to tamp down the enthusiasm. No matter how many lies he has to tell, how many experts he has to blackmail, and how many people he has to kill in the cause of keeping Britain safe and Prinny’s throne secure.

Even if he has to lie to his daughter and have one of her dearest friends murdered. As far as Jarvis is concerned he’ll do whatever is necessary in service of what he considers, not merely the “Greater Good”, but the highest cause of all.

But the murder of Gabrielle Tennyson, his daughter Hero’s dear friend, puts Jarvis in opposition – again, pretty much perpetually – to Hero’s new husband, Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin. As always, Devlin is determined to get to the bottom of this devilishly complicated case that has, so far, left one woman dead and put her two missing nephews in danger of following her into the grave – if they haven’t already.

While the conflict between Hero’s loyalties and Devlin’s secrets open a chasm in their barely-begun, frequently tense relationship and ink-barely-dry marriage. A chasm they may not be able to navigate across – not even for the sake of the child they married to protect.

Escape Rating A+: The Sebastian St. Cyr series, as a collective whole, comprises three elements that are endlessly fascinating. As historical mysteries, they generally begin with a dead body, in this particular case that of Gabrielle Tennyson. Thus there is always a case to be solved, with St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, as the principal investigator into whodunnit and often more importantly, why it was done and all too often, who ordered it done.

The who ordered it part leads directly to the second element. These stories take place during the Napoleonic Wars or in their immediate aftermath. Devlin served as a cavalry officer and suffers from PTSD as a result of that service. His penchant for investigating murders is one of the ways he copes with his condition.

But Devlin is a member of the aristocracy, the heir to an Earldom. When he pokes his nose into the doings of the ‘high and mighty’ he can’t be ignored or shoved aside – not that plenty haven’t tried. As a consequence, there is quite often a political element to his investigations, along with a deeper than usual dive into the frequently rancid sausage-making of government – with insights into history as they are happening.

When Maidens Mourn dives into that morass from a surprising direction, as the murder of Gabrielle Tennyson leads back to the government’s underhanded contrivance to put the legend of King Arthur to rest. Again. (“This has all happened before and it will all happen again.”)

Diving into the Arthurian legends in this particular instance proved to be doubly poignant, as it touches, indirectly and fictionally, on the very real Arthur, Lord Tennyson, who will grow up to write The Idylls of the King, a Victorian reimagining of, you guessed it, the legends of King Arthur.

Along with the investigation and the politics and history, there’s a third, personal element to each story, an element that at first seemed the most prominent in this case. Devlin and Hero have been married a scant four days when this story opens. Their marriage is one of necessity, as Devlin needs an heir, and Hero is carrying that heir after the events in Where Serpents Sleep, when they spent one night grasping for life while expecting to die.

Hero is the daughter of Devlin’s greatest enemy, and she is now trapped between two conflicting sets of secrets, a conflict that may cost her any possibility of happiness in her hasty but necessary marriage. Devlin has secrets of his own that he does not want to reveal to a woman he is not sure he can trust – and yet there can be no trust if one of them doesn’t give up something.

Part of what makes this series so interesting is that Hero is likely to prove the one with the stronger will and the better reason not to compromise, but as things stand at the end of this book, how they will go on together is yet uncertain.

At least, it’s uncertain at this particular point in the series. I began reading St. Cyr almost 20 years ago, at the beginning with What Angels Fear. At first, it read as a combination of historical mystery firmly grounded in its historical period with a touch of romance. What initially captivated me was that combination of history and mystery, and the way that the historical period has come to the fore – as well as the continuing development of this fascinating cast of characters – has made this one of my favorite comfort reads.

So I’ve read the early books and the later books and am hit or miss in the middle. I’m systematically changing those misses to hits as I wait for each new book in the series. Which means that next up will be What Darkness Brings, the next time I need a reading pick-me-up to whisk me away!

Review: The Bride Wore White by Amanda Quick

Review: The Bride Wore White by Amanda QuickThe Bride Wore White (Burning Cove, California, 7) by Amanda Quick
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical romance, paranormal, romantic suspense
Series: Burning Cove #7
Pages: 316
Published by Berkley on May 2, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

A psychic desperate to escape her destiny—and a killer—finds her future in the coastal town of Burning Cove in New York Times bestselling author Amanda Quick’s latest novel.

Being Madame Ariadne, Psychic Dream Consultant, wasn’t Prudence Ryland’s ideal gig, but it paid well which was reason enough to do the work—until she realizes that her latest client intends to kill her. But Prudence, a master at reinvention, finds a new job and home as far away as possible and is finally able to relax—which turns out to be a big mistake. Letting her guard down means being kidnapped and drugged and waking up in a bloodstained wedding dress in the honeymoon suite next to a dead man. With the press outside the hotel, waiting with their cameras and police sirens in the distance, it’s obvious she’s being framed for the man’s murder. Prudence knows who is responsible, but will anyone believe her?

It doesn’t seem likely that rumored crime boss Luther Pell or his associate, Jack Wingate, believe her seemingly outrageous claims of being a target of a ruthless vendetta. In fact, Prudence is convinced that the mysterious Mr. Wingate believes her to be a fraud at best, and at worst: a murderer. And Jack Wingate does seem to be someone intimately familiar with violence, if going by his scarred face and grim expression. So no one is more shocked than Prudence when Jack says he’ll help her. Of course, his ideas for helping her involve using her as the bait for a killer, but Prudence feels oddly safe with Jack protecting her. But who will protect Prudence from her growing fascination with this enigma of a man?

My Review:

So much revenge is being served, in so many seriously chilling and chilled ways, that at first it seems impossible to determine who – or how many – are doing the serving. Even without using her powers, Prudence Ryland knows she’s in over her head.

Prudence makes her living as a psychic dream consultant, just as her grandmother did before her. She’s good at her job – even though she seldom uses her very real powers. After all, most people want the same things when they come to have their dreams analyzed. All it takes is knowledge of human nature to give it to them.

But Prudence’s last client – both for the day and for her life as Psychic Dream Consultant Madame Ariadne, is not in her office for a dream interpretation. He’s there to kill her. So she uses those powers that she definitely does have to disable him long enough to get the hell out of Dodge.

Only to reinvent herself in another small, coastal California town. As a research librarian. When she comes to in a hotel room, dressed in a formal bridal gown, covered in the blood of the dead man lying beside her, she recognizes that she needs a certain kind of very specialized help.

The help of someone who both accepts the supernatural community AND knows how to get things “fixed”. Prudence goes to Burning Cove California to just about throw herself on the mercy of Luther Pell, the owner of the exclusive Burning Cove Hotel and one of the central characters of both the place and the series that began with The Girl Who Knew Too Much.

Luther decides to kill two birds with one stone – along with solving the mystery. His friend and confidential agent, Jack Wingate, needs a case to solve to keep him from brooding on his recent betrayals and to help him with his groundbreaking work on criminal profiling. Prudence needs an investigator AND a bodyguard wrapped in one package, as she needs protection as well as someone to figure out who really is out to get her.

Jack is skeptical about Prudence’s claims of psychic abilities as well as her protestations of innocence in not one but two spectacular murders. He’s planning to profile her for his book. She’s trying to stay alive.

And Luther Pell has a reputation – not just for fixing problems – but for fixing up his clients and his agents into surprising happy-ever-afters. After they figure out whodunnit.

Escape Rating A-: Burning Cove has turned out to be a fascinating place. To the point where, when I get the next installment, I can’t resist sitting down with it immediately – and I’m caught up in it from the very first page. The Bride Wore White was no exception.

This series whips up a lot of disparate elements into an absolute froth of a story. I say froth both in the sense that it has a certain lightness in the way that the protagonists banter their way towards romance – if occasionally just a bit too quickly – and in the way that the tension gets whipped into a frothy fury as more and more motives, opportunities and suspects get added to the brew.

As a long time reader of this author under her many, many names (Amanda Quick, Jayne Ann Krentz and Jayne Castle) I particularly adore the way that each new series teases at events both past and present in everything connected to the Jayneverse. It’s not necessary to have read her connecting series to enjoy Burning Cove, but they are all oh-so-much-fun that once you’ve bitten into one you’ll be compelled to taste the rest!

What made this case so compelling was the way that the longer it went on the wilder and crazier things got. It’s clear at the beginning that someone is out to get Prudence, but as the story progresses the way it shifts from Prudence being at the center to Prudence being the means to someone else’s end changes the situation from something straightforward to something with twists and turns and wheels within wheels.

There’s a long game being played and it takes the reader and the investigators quite the chase to even begin to see the shape of that game and its purpose.

That Jack is working on something that will become the start of criminal profiling as we know it now added a bit of icing onto the cake. We may not know how the case ends, but we know what criminal profiling has become and his work grounded this paranormal story into the real in a surprisingly satisfying way.

Burning Cove as a place and a series, and The Bride Wore White in particular, have all the elements to mix spellbinding suspense, a satisfying mystery and a delightful romance into one delicious cocktail of a story.

I want another, so I’ll be waiting with that proverbial bated breath for her next suspenseful, paranormal, romantic adventure, whether in the past as Amanda Quick, in the present as Jayne Ann Krentz, or in the future as Jayne Castle. And it looks like that next adventure will be The Night Island, written as Jayne Ann Krentz, the second book in her Lost Night Files, coming in January 2024.

Review: Happy Place by Emily Henry

Review: Happy Place by Emily HenryHappy Place by Emily Henry
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Chick Lit, contemporary romance, relationship fiction, women's fiction
Pages: 400
Published by Berkley on April 25, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Harriet and Wyn have been the perfect couple since they met in college—they go together like salt and pepper, honey and tea, lobster and rolls. Except, now—for reasons they’re still not discussing—they don’t.
They broke up six months ago. And still haven’t told their best friends.
Which is how they find themselves sharing the largest bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. Their annual respite from the world, where for one vibrant, blue week they leave behind their daily lives; have copious amounts of cheese, wine, and seafood; and soak up the salty coastal air with the people who understand them most.
Only this year, Harriet and Wyn are lying through their teeth while trying not to notice how desperately they still want each other. Because the cottage is for sale and this is the last week they’ll all have together in this place. They can’t stand to break their friends’ hearts, and so they’ll play their parts. Harriet will be the driven surgical resident who never starts a fight, and Wyn will be the laid-back charmer who never lets the cracks show. It’s a flawless plan (if you look at it from a great distance and through a pair of sunscreen-smeared sunglasses). After years of being in love, how hard can it be to fake it for one week… in front of those who know you best?
A couple who broke up months ago make a pact to pretend to still be together for their annual weeklong vacation with their best friends in this glittering and wise new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.

My Review:

Ironically, Harriet’s “happy place” isn’t all that happy when she arrives – no matter how much everyone, including Harriet, tries to recapture the happiness they all always feel when they get there.

Once upon a time, all the way at the beginning of their freshman year at Mattingly College, the algorithm that matches up roommates matched three girls who, on the surface, couldn’t have been more different.

A serendipitous match that gave Harriet, Cleo and Sabrina the ‘sisters from another mister’ that none of them had ever had. They belonged together in a way that was so profound that it took them through college, graduate school, and beyond, culminating every summer at Lobster Fest in a tiny coastal town in Maine where Sabrina’s extended birth and step-family owned a gigantic, fully stocked summer house. (Honestly, more like a summer mansion or a compound. It’s vast and sprawling and perfect – except for one teensy little problem which we’ll get to in a minute.)

Every summer, the girls share one fantastic week together, a tradition that has not wavered as they have each found other roommates, friends and lovers along life’s way. As this summer visit begins, the three have been six for several years, and they are all thirty years old or on the cusp of it.

Sabrina, the great organizer of the group, has pulled them all together – in spite of more than one person’s reluctance – because this is going to be the last summer of their happy place. Her dad has sold the house.

But that’s not the only rain on this particular parade. On the one hand, there’s the good news that Sabrina and her lover, Parth, are getting married that weekend, on the beach near the house, with all their besties around them.

Sabrina and Parth’s good news – if it actually happens – is overshadowed by whatever is eating at Cleo and her girlfriend Kimmy – which is in its turn eating at Sabrina. Harriet, in the second year of a medical residency, has pushed everyone away, partly out of exhaustion but mostly in denial over her own depressing secret.

A secret that greets her at the door, when her long-term ex-fiance is waiting, intending to help her keep up the deception that they are still together. When they’re not. And haven’t been for several months but haven’t managed to tell anyone.

Because they fear it will affect the dynamic of the group – a group which has become a family they both need – whether separately or together.

And because they don’t really want to let each other go – no matter how much they each believe the other is better off without them.

Escape Rating B+: I went into Happy Place hoping for another Book Lovers – which I utterly adored. When I didn’t get that, I found this to be a tough read for most of its length, but now that I’ve finished the book I keep thinking about it and it’s turning out to be one of those cases where the whole is absolutely greater than the sum of its parts.

The story as it progresses seemed like a giant misunderstandammit for the longest time. But the thing about those kinds of books is that what makes them so awkward is that it’s obvious to the reader that all it would take would be one frank conversation to clear up the mess.

That’s not true here. While a bit of frankness would go a long way, it would take WAY more than one conversation to clear things up. All of them are bottling up how they really feel or what is really going on in order to keep the peace – and it’s not working for anyone.

Just as occurred in Book Lovers, this mess needs to build up to an explosion for that air to get cleared. It just takes a week of heating up before it all boils over.

On top of that, what really got to me about this story as I looked back at it was just that, the looking back. Because this is the last summer at their ‘happy place’ they are all aware that an era is ending. That, in combination with all of them turning 30 this year, makes all of them realize that life is changing and that this family that sustains all of them could come to an end if they don’t figure things out and learn to adapt to the changes they are all going through.

And yet, with the secrets hanging over them, they are in danger of not figuring things out. With all the nostalgia on tap on this trip, and with all of the music they play because it is the background of their lives together, (and because they mention Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” playing on the radio) I realized that this is the summer where they are all aware that whatever happens next for any of them, the years they spent together are the “Glory Days” they will be looking back on for the rest of their lives.

The question in the story is whether they can get beyond what’s driving them apart to find a new way to hold each other together – no matter where the future takes each of them.

In the end, I didn’t love Happy Place the way I did Book Lovers. But once I finished I realized that I liked it quite a bit more than I initially thought!