This post's purpose is to collect my common tags in one place, so readers (and I!) can easily access entries on several subjects.

I'm reading Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death, first in a series of historical mysteries about a female forensic doctor in the 12th century.

I'm finding bits of it depressing, but am still very involved in the story. There is a serial killer (well, at least this one's historical!) who's killing children in Cambridge, and the local Jewish population is instantly accused of ritual murder. Two are murdered and the rest take refuge in the local castle. The detective, Adelia, is clearly a stand-in for us modern readers who are appalled by 12th century England and its mores. She's been sent, along with a Jewish spy and a Muslim eunuch manservant, by the king of Sicily to find the real killer. It isn't made clear why the king of Siciliy has an interest, but I suspect money is involved. The king of England, Henry II at this period, is also appalled, because the Jewish population - "his Jews" - are a very lucrative source of tax money. When Adelia arrives, it's been a year since the first murder and three more victims have just been found. Luckily, she saves the life of the local Prior, which gives them an entrée into the local society so they can discreetly investigate.

I have no idea how accurate the forensic science in this book might be. It's given more plausibility by Adelia's training in Salerno, a renowned center of medical study that allowed women to practice and teach. For the purposes of the story, that's been enough for me. It's been holding my attention more than most of the books I've read lately.

Another badgermirlacca rec that turned out well!

Kerry Greenwood, Cocaine Blues (Phryne Fisher Mysteries): a very fun mystery set in Australia in the late 1920s. The heroine, Phryne Fisher, has multiple talents and quite a lot of money, and goes to investigate the daughter of acquaintances, at their request, because she's bored. She quickly becomes involved in what looks like two mysteries, and ends up with a maid and two cab drivers and various other friends, of whom my favorite was a woman doctor. The tone is very light and suited to the period. I'm definitely getting more of these.

C.S. Harris, When Gods Die: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery: I loved this one, second in the series, too; I wasn't all on fire with discovery while reading, but it was still really good and I was never bored, and since I read it so close to the first one, that's an achievement. The best part was that the ongoing love interest and investigative contributor, Kat Boleyn, was very, very smart in this one and I love her a lot.

Deanna Raybourn, Silent In The Grave: a mystery set in Victorian London. It's first person, from the pov of a woman (Julia Grey) whose husband dies at the beginning, and later she suspects it's murder. She learns how to be a detective as she goes, with the help of investigator Nicholas Brisbane. Brisbane's many talents and Interesting Secrets are revealed as the book progresses, and there is a nifty subplot involving a bird whom I suspect will feature in future books

Brisbane becomes more and more Swoonily Interesting as the book goes on, and I am hoping he does not become So Interesting that the narrator is excluded. Her naievety might have been exacerbated in this book by her inexperience as a detective, so might improve.

All in all, this had much more of a romance feel to it than the C.S. Harris Regency mysteries.

( Spoiler that gives away solution to mystery. )

Other than that, I liked the book. I got the second one, just to see.

If you've read any good mysteries lately, particularly historical mysteries, please tell me about them!

I'm currently reading C. S. Harris (Regency England) and Deanna Raybourn (Victorian England). I've already come to love Lindsey Davis (Flavian Rome).

EDITED TO ADD: My older posts on mysteries, at least the ones I had the foresight to tag.

C.S. Harris, What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery: I loved this; it's a mystery set in Regency England, or rather on the brink of the Regency. The hero, Sebastian St. Cyr, is accused of murder and, using skills he gained as an intelligence officer on the Peninsula, decides the only way out is to find the real killer. It's very tautly structured and never lets you rest, because the information of one chapter might turn out to be a lie in the next. I also liked the intense romance element when St. Cyr is reunited with the courtesan who was his first love, and the hints of family secrets that I am sure will play out in future books of the series.

I haven't enjoyed a mystery this much since the last of Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series. I've ordered the next two in this series already.

Harris also writes romance as Candace Proctor; I plan to read a couple of her romances, as well.

Special thanks to badgermirlacca for the rec!

A long while back, I asked for recommendations of mysteries, and some nice person suggested S.J. Rozan. I've been reading the first in her series about P.I.s Lydia Chin and her sometime sidekick Bill Smith, China Trade (Bill Smith/Lydia Chin Novels).

The book is set, mostly, in New York City. Lydia is the daughter of Cantonese immigrants; she lives with her mother, who is "traditional" so far as it suits her, and is not happy with Lydia's choice of profession (Lydia has a close childhood friend who is a cop, and Mary's mother isn't happy with it, either). Nor does her mother approve of her friendship with Bill Smith, a white man; he does not even call her at home, and has never visited.

Lydia narrates first-person, slipping in many details of life as a Chinese person: noticing how her method of eating in a Chinese restaurant is different from the white people also eating there, her insider knowledge of how to speak to older Chinese people with whom she works, and her deep understanding of how crime works in the Chinatown neighborhood. All of these details are interesting me more than the mystery, though, which involves stolen export porcelains. I am wishing there was more sense of urgency about recovering them, so the plot would move faster.

I like the book, but don't love it. Will probably give the next one a chance.

I bought Nicola Griffith's noir mystery The Blue Place at WisCon, and read it on the plane and finished it after I got home. I could feel the story careening towards tragedy, but with so many twists I wasn't quite sure how it would happen, which I think means it was good noir. Afterwards, I felt a lingering grief. I will be very interested to see how things work in the second book, Stay--I couldn't read it immediately because it went home from WisCon with friends in their car.

The prose in The Blue Place is beautiful and strong, as I expected it would be. When I learned Griffith had written noir mysteries, I thought of certain bits of Slow River and thought, "Of course." The whole book has a hard yet somehow otherworldly tone. One thing I'm not sure I liked was that in certain spots, the dialogue is the same style as the first-person narrator's narration, a little too formal for "real" speech--but I am pretty sure Griffith did this to keep you in the noir world she'd created, where everything is heightened. Several times in the book, the narrator makes it clear that the world she lives in, of sudden violence and constant danger, is different from the world where most people live.

The book ate my brain. At the beginning, the narrator dropped tantalizing, seemingly impossible hints of things she'd done, drawing me farther and farther in, until suddenly nothing seemed so impossible. Go, buy, read!

Charlaine Harris, Dead Until Dark (Southern Vampire Mysteries, No. 1):

Several people have recced the Sookie Stackhouse series to me, most recently Harris' agent, and since I was interested in the other stuff he recced to me at the time, I decided to buy Dead Until Dark. Of course, the next five or six bookstores where I looked for it had later books in the series, but not that one. I finally found it at the bookstore nearest my work, and bought it there.

Sookie Stackhouse, the first-person narrator, is a waitress in northern Louisiana who has, she tells us, a disability, but not one that is immediately obvious. Also, we learn that vampires are real and have recently come into public consciousness as a disease/series of allergies caused by a mysterious virus. Sookie is insanely curious and would like to meet one. When the book opens, she is about to get her wish.

( Spoilers ahoy. )

This weekend, I finished rereading Sarah Smith's trilogy of mysteries, The Vanished Child, The Knowledge of Water, and A Citizen of the Country. I believe she is working on a fourth book in this series now.

I love these for many reasons. First, I love the characters. Second, I love the historical detail, from Reisden's lab work on frog muscle to the Paris Flood of 1910 to the filming of early silent movies. Third, the prose is involving. Fourth, the mysteries don't fall out exactly as you expect (or as I expected). Fifth, these aren't just mysteries, they are novels, in the best sense of the word--I find a thematic richness in them that many books just don't possess. This time around, freed from wondering how the story would come out, I picked up more of that richness and appreciated it more; also, since I accidentally reread the third book before the second, I saw how large elements and important characters of the third book made small appearances in the second, which I might not have noticed had I read them again in the correct order.

If you haven't read at least the first book yet (and these should be read in order, because of the ending of The Vanished Child), do yourself a favor and stop here. ( Heavy, heavy spoiler territory begins here. )

Dick Francis' 10 Lb Penalty, another one that didn't quite coalesce for me, but that had potential.

( Spoilers. )

I'm running out of Dick Francis novels to reread--left are the ones I don't feel like reading again just now, and maybe four or five others. Yesterday was Straight, one of his last few, which I don't think is one of his best.

( Spoilers follow. )

In the midst of my vast re-reading of Dick Francis' novels, I'm trying to decipher the reason they're so appealing to me, and why I've read most of them several times, and why they were/are so popular generally.

( A numbered list sometimes helps. )

Two Dick Francis novels from the early to mid-1960s. ( Here be spoilers. )

I finished rereading Kate Ross' Cut to the Quick last night, and was still charmed with it. It's the first of four mysteries featuring Julian Kestrel, a young dandy in Regency England. His sidekicks are his valet Dipper, a former pickpocket; Dr. McGregor, a crusty but sweet country doctor; and, to a lesser extent, a young girl named, possibly in homage to Dunnett, Phillipa Fontclair.

Kestrel is a mysterious young man of little fortune, whose parents are dead and who posseses no talent except for music. And, it turns out, he has a talent for detecting. He's an outsider detective, who begins with no real friend except Dipper, and ends having gained a father-figure in McGregor. Just the sort of story I like.

I noticed on this read, however, that the tenets of modern mystery writing had overwritten some of the historical elements; that is, Kestrel's methodology is very much that of the modern police detective and not what one might expect from someone truly of the period. This didn't bother me too much, but it might bother other readers.

Laurie R. King, The Game

Those who have read Laurie King's series of Sherlock Holmes pastiches featuring Mary Russell know that Mary can easily be fitted into the category of "Mary Sue." But she's an interesting, well-rounded Mary Sue, whose personal Angst does not impinge terribly on her life after the first couple of books in the series, and whose eventual marriage to Sherlock Holmes is not portrayed in too much sickening detail. I can accept all this for purposes of pastiche. Holmes fanfiction does, after all, have a long and storied (heh) history.

( More. Spoiler warning! (sorry, yonmei...) )

It's query-time!

Who is your favorite series detective/author?

Or do you hate series detectives? If so, why?

I finished The Knowledge of Water this weekend, by Sarah Smith; it's the sequel to The Vanished Child. What a stunner of a book. It's a mystery, but the mystery isn't what the book's really about. Women and art are the most major theme. It's well-written, complex, and subtle.

I'm working on the new Mary Jo Putney, The Bartered Bride. So far, it seems a little formulaic, despite starting out in the East Indies. I was glad to see she was slightly more subtle about stunt-casting the characters from her previous books, since they are becoming unwieldy.