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A Long Petal of the Sea, Isabel Allende's epic of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath

Allende’s fluidly written saga conveys her deep familiarity with the events she depicts, and her intent to illustrate their human impact in a moving way. The scope spans most of the lives of Victor Dalmau, a Republican army medic in 1936 Spain, and Roser Bruguera, a music student taken in by Victor’s family and, later, his brother Guillem’s lover and the mother of Guillem’s child. The story follows them over nearly sixty years, beginning with the tumult of the Spanish Civil War. Guillem is killed fighting against the Fascists, news that Victor can’t bear to tell Roser initially. After surviving separate and terrible circumstances that leave them refugees in France, where authorities treat them with contempt and worse, the two marry for practical reasons in order to join Pablo Neruda’s mission transporting over 2000 Spanish exiles to Chile aboard the S.S. Winnipeg . In Santiago, the Dalmaus find many Chileans sympathetic to the Spaniards, while others make them unwelcome. With a poetic ...
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The Secret

The Secret

The Monastery Murders by E. M. Powell, a deadly excursion to 12th-century Yorkshire

The second outing for the talented detective team of Aelred Barling, royal clerk to Henry II, and his assistant Hugo Stanton is full of chilling atmosphere, both literal and figurative. At the request of Ranulf de Glanville, Justiciar of England in 1177 AD, both are sent north from London, a ten days’ ride in darkest winter, to the remote Cistercian house of Fairmore Abbey in Yorkshire. On Christmas Eve, the mild-mannered sacrist, Brother Cuthbert, was found murdered in a pretty horrific way.

Abbot Philip, who’d known Barling during their youthful studies in Paris, requests his help specifically. While Stanton’s an easygoing sort who enjoys ale, convivial gatherings, and women, Barling is a straitlaced fellow who prefers time at his writing desk. When it comes to their feelings about this mission, though, they’re in agreement: neither wants to go.

When they arrive at the monastery, which is nestled deep into a rocky valley, they discover the place in turmoil, although few openly admit it. Tension spills out from multiple avenues. The older monks chafe at Philip’s election to his current role, the lay brothers resent being treated like mindless workhorses, and many feel uncomfortable breaking their vows of silence to respond to outsiders’ questions. Then a second murder occurs, and another. Each is creatively gruesome.

This strongly plotted mystery is definitely not a cozy! The thawing relationship between Barling and Stanton, already begun after their joint success in The King’s Justice, helps lighten their increasingly heavy investigative burden. Barling sees it as his duty to impart periodic lessons that Stanton hates, but they acknowledge the other’s strengths and gifts. The final outcome, which arrives after a high body count, depends on their bond of mutual trust and is gratifying in that sense, and others.

The cast list isn’t solely male, and the presence of women in this highly regulated masculine environment creates disarray that’s first entertaining, and later dangerous. Hints at secrets about Barling’s past, which he’d rather not think about, contribute another intrigue-filled layer. Sometimes later volumes in a mystery series reveal the truth about earlier whodunits, but fortunately this isn't the case here.  Readers who haven’t picked up book one, which I also recommend, won't discover any clues about how that mystery was resolved.

The Monastery Murders is published by Thomas & Mercer, Amazon's crime/thriller imprint, in September.  Thanks to the author (who I'd interviewed about book one, The King's Justice) for sending me a NetGalley widget.

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The Almanack by Martine Bailey, a richly atmospheric mystery of mid-18th-century England

Saturated with beautiful images of the natural world in mid-18th century rural England, Bailey’s third mystery evokes a time when people regulated their lives according to the change of seasons and were fascinated by mechanisms, scientific and not, used to predict future events. It takes place during a pivotal period rarely seen in fiction: the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, when eleven days were “lost.” A young woman named Tabitha Hart is robbed by her latest bedmate while traveling from London to her home village of Netherlea at her ailing mother’s request. Alas, she arrives too late: the Widow Hart lies cold in her bed, presumably having drowned in the river. Although she is shamed for her loose behavior, and for leaving behind an infant girl for her mother to raise, Tabitha is well-educated, and she takes up her mother’s former post as village searcher. She also picks up her mother’s favorite Almanack, and the scribbled marginalia in the little book, along with a threa...
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The Satapur Moonstone by Sujata Massey, a mystery set in 1920s India

Perveen Mistry’s position as the only female lawyer in 1921 Bombay keeps her services in demand. When Sir David Hobson-Jones, the governor’s chief councillor, asks her to investigate a legal matter for the Kolhapur Agency, a British civil service branch, she’s wary of getting into bed with India’s colonizers. It’s a lucrative, prestigious short-term opportunity, however, and she feels compelled to accept. The maharaja of the small princely state of Satapur is a ten-year-old boy, and his widowed mother and grandmother disagree on his education. Because they live in purdah, a woman lawyer is the best choice as mediator. While this premise is similar to the series opener, The Widows of Malabar Hill , Perveen quickly finds herself in a very different situation that tests her physical strength and negotiating skills and lands her into danger. Massey devotes ample time to illustrating the politics and culture of a remote Indian princely state and the personalities of a new cast before introd...
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The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes, a novel about books, dedication, and female friendship during the Depression years

Books provide people with education and entertainment; they change lives as they introduce different worlds and unfamiliar experiences. During the Depression, the women who transported books in their horses’ saddlebags to isolated Kentucky mountain residents, in all seasons, as part of the WPA’s Pack Horse Library Initiative provided a lifeline of literacy to their audiences. Hearing about this unique job after a dull church service, Alice Van Cleve grows intrigued and immediately volunteers to join. After getting swept off her feet by Bennett Van Cleve, a burly, handsome Kentuckian visiting her native England, Alice feels stifled by the insularity in her new home of Baileyville, a small Appalachian town, and surprised by her new husband’s unexpected aloofness. Alice had never fit in at home, and with her clipped British accent and dislike for frivolous social pursuits, she’s an outsider in Kentucky, too. She finds an unofficial new family with the four other pack-horse librarians, inc...
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