Posts tagged with fiction

Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl with A Pearl Earring, tells the story of two children in 1790s London, country boy Jem, who has recently moved to London when his father finds work with Astley's Circus, and streetwise city girl Maggie, and their friendship with poet and engraver William Blake. The children become the inspiration for Blake's most famous books of poetry. Chevalier paints a vivid portrait of life in London at the time of the French Revolution.

The Stranger Diaries is a contemporary gothic novel of suspense set at a high school in rural England. Clare Cassidy is an English teacher researching a Victorian novelist who used to live in one of the school buildings. There is a legend that he murdered his wife and that her ghost haunts the school. When two members of the English department are murdered and their bodies found with a line from a story by the Victorian novelist, and Clare finds that a stranger has written in her diary, she realizes the murderer must be someone she knows. Will she be the next victim? Or is the murderer trying to protect her by killing off her enemies?

The Blue is a historical thriller of industrial espionage in the world of 18th century porcelain manufacture. The heroine is a talented artist who wishes to become a serious painter, but, as a woman, that path is blocked to her in England. In Venice it would be a different story, but she doesn't have the money to go there. An unscrupulous nobleman offers to finance her journey to Venice if she accepts a job at a porcelain factory and steals the formula for a stunning new shade of blue. But the stakes are higher than she ever expected.

The Winter Ghosts is a beautifully-written novel about a young man whose brother was killed in World War I, who travels in the French Pyrenees in the hope that he will heal his emotional wounds. Stranded in a blizzard, he finds a remote village and meets a young woman who tells him a horrific story of the massacre of a Christian sect in the Middle Ages. But there is more going on than meets the eye. Time travel, ghosts, or the protagonist's imagination? It is up to the reader to decide.

In this mystery set in Venice, Commissario Guido Brunetti solves the murder of a young man, the son of one of Venice's noble families, who had been kidnapped two years ago and whose body was found in a field. His family had been involved in shady business dealings in eastern Europe. Was he murdered because of this? Or did his cousin, the new heir to the family business, murder him? As he searches for the murderer, Brunetti also wonders if his wife, Paola, is unhappy in their marriage because he spends too much time on his police work.

As catastrophic floods threaten to devastate Québec, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache finds the body of a murdered, pregnant woman. All the evidence points to her abusive husband as the killer, but there's not enough to convict him, and the woman's grieving father threatens to kill the husband. Meanwhile, Gamache faces damage to his reputation in social media, as a video emerges, seriously misrepresenting the actions which led to his demotion.

Prophecy is the second in S.J. Parris' mystery series set in Elizabethan England, featuring the real-life philosopher and scientist Giordano Bruno, who, in the series, works as a spy for Queen Elizabeth I. In this book, he attempts to foil a plot against the queen's life, which is being timed to coincide with an astronomical event.

In this entry in Camilleri's mystery series set in Sicily, Inspector Montalbano investigates two cases. In one, the young wife of a much-older merchant is robbed and sexually assaulted while depositing money at a bank. In the other, an abandoned building on a farm is used to store weapons, and two Tunisian farm workers are the prime suspects. Meanwhile, Montalbano is undergoing a crisis in his personal life, as he is torn between two women: his long-time girlfriend and a beautiful art gallery owner.

Emily, a young woman from an upper-class British family during World War I, falls in love with Robbie, an Australian pilot, to her parents' disapproval. When he's sent back to the war, she enlists as a land girl, working on farms while the men are away at war. She is assigned to take care of the garden at the estate of a reclusive old woman, and there she discovers a mystery related to the previous inhabitant of the cottage where she lives.

Parisian detective Aimée Leduc receives a visit from a Haitian woman claiming to be her half-sister. Just as she is about to tell Aimée more, she disappears, leaving an address behind. When Aimée goes to that address, she finds the body of a murdered scientist, and her supposed sister is the prime suspect. Two witnesses who are about to speak to Aimée are murdered, one by one. Can Aimée clear the woman she thinks is her sister?