Posts by Vicki J Kondelik

This is the first part of an immense 2800-page novel which continues the adventures of the four musketeers--Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d'Artagnan. As the young French king, Louis XIV, comes of age, the musketeers help restore Charles II to the English throne and become involved in the intrigues of the French court.

Shutter is a thrilling, suspenseful novel about Rita, a Navajo woman who is a forensic photographer and who can see and talk to ghosts. Her unique ability helps her when investigating crime scenes, but she has to keep it secret. The ghost of a murder victim haunts Rita and insists that she find her killer, or she will make Rita's life a misery. The murder story is interspersed with the story of Rita's childhood on the Navajo Reservation and her relationship with her grandmother.

Dance Hall of the Dead is the second book in Tony Hillerman's best-selling mystery series featuring Navajo policeman Joe Leaphorn. (It can easily be read without having read the first.) Leaphorn investigates the disappearance of two boys, one Zuñi and one Navajo. The strength of Hillerman's writing is in his descriptions of the locations in New Mexico and Arizona, and of the religion, mythology, and ceremonies of the Navajo and Zuñi. A beautifully-written book!

This is the first in a mystery series set in Bangalore, India, in the 1920s, featuring Kaveri Murthy, an independent-minded young woman with a passion for mathematics and crime-solving. Recently married to a doctor, Kaveri attends a party with her husband's colleagues. The party soon becomes a crime scene, and Kaveri and her husband must find the killer before the wrong person is executed for the murder.

In this highly entertaining Victorian mystery novel, the heroine, the American-born Frances Wynn, Countess of Harleigh, is engaged to her beloved George, her partner in crime solving, when a mysterious woman shows up, claiming to be married to George. He denies it, but then the woman ends up murdered in Frances' garden. Can Frances and George clear their names and go on with their wedding?

This is a delightful mystery novel set in Victorian England, featuring Frances Wynn, an American heiress who married a British aristocrat, and whose husband was murdered in the first book in the series. In this one, she goes to a country house owned by the family of her partner in crime-solving, to attend her sister's wedding. A series of accidents happens to the guests, but Frances realizes they're not accidental at all. Who will be the next victim?

This is a fantasy novel about Addie, a young woman in 1714 who makes a deal with a devil-like figure for eternal life, only to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Three hundred years later, in 2014, she finally meets someone who remembers her. Why does Henry, the bookseller, remember her when no one else does? You will find out in this poignant, beautifully-written novel.

In this exciting, suspenseful mystery, Detective Inspector Harbinder Kaur investigates two murders that are tied to another murder that took place over twenty years ago, when a group of friends at a London school killed a classmate. The story takes many twists and turns, and several of the leading characters are suspects.

This epic novel tells the story of three important figures of the French Revolution: Camille Desmoulins, Georges-Jacques Danton, and Maximilien Robespierre, from their childhoods to the tumultuous events of the Revolution. Mantel has a unique and compelling writing style that draws the reader into the world she writes about.

This is a biography of the playwright and feminist activist Olympe de Gouges, who was the author of pamphlets and other literature in support of women's rights and the abolition of slavery during the French Revolution. She was ridiculed and dismissed in her time, but later recognized as a pioneer of feminist theory, and had a great influence on later advocates for women's rights. The book has its flaws, but it is practically the only biography of this important figure available in English.