Have you ever had That Moment when you see a book and say, “Oh, this sounds good. Who is this author? Never heard of him/her,” and everyone else in the room stares at you as though you were from the dark ages? I had one of these moments a couple …
The second in the delightful Mary Russell novels, “A Monstrous Regiment of Women,” sees our intrepid, eminently likeable young blue-stocking of a heroine turn 2, and take over her considerable inheritance from her hated aunt. Mary’s life is as busy as ever. She is finishing her Oxford thesis, and preparing …
To describe this touching, well-written novel as an Aga saga is to demean it somewhat. True it does chronicle the quintessential Aga-esque life of middle-class English people in a pretty village, where only one villager is actually a working farmer and everyone else is living the countryside dream. But there …
“The House at Riverton” is a well-written, easy-to-read novel, based in and around Riverton, a grand English country house. From the hot summer of 1914, when the shadow of war starts to loom over an otherwise idyllic England, to an equally hot, post-war summer of 1924, through to the bleak, …
Of all the delightful novels in the Mary Russell series, Laurie R. King’s “A Letter of Mary” is perhaps the most tender and romantic, bordering at times on sensuous. In this book, we see at work the love that unites the young, clever, courageous Mary Russell and her much older, …
Reviewing such an exciting, action-packed novel as “O Jerusalem”, the second (chronologically speaking) in the Mary Russell series, the period detail is such that one wants to use words like derring-do and possibly even swashbuckling, to describe the utterly delightful young heroine. In this story, Mary Russell is only 19, …
“The Moor” is another novel in the clever, entertaining and very successful Mary Russell series. Mary Russell, as in Mrs. Sherlock Holmes. The young wife of the now elderly detective is the one with energy and good humour and a delicious sense of irony, and we see the world and …
Having only recently discovered the wonderful Sherlock Holmes meets Kim whodunnit, “The Game” by Laurie R. King, this reviewer decided to go back to the first book in this eminently readable series, which is actually a series about the gutsy young Mary Russell. aka Mrs. Sherlock Homes. In “The Beekeeper’s …
