historical mystery

  • Black History in Fiction

    Each February, many readers come to the library to check out the latest titles on Black history. Don’t read history books? No worries! Whether you enjoy historical or literary fiction, thrillers or fantasy, romance or mysteries, here are some recent books that immerse us in the lived experiences of Black Americans throughout our history. By… Continue reading

  • Mixing History with Mystery

    Fellow readers, there are few things I love more than crossover titles – books with footing in multiple genres. I am a huge mystery reader, and I will follow mystery plots into many other genres. Today, let’s talk about some new mysteries that are also quite good historical fiction titles. The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne… Continue reading

  • Mystery Challenge: Historical Mysteries

    ~by Jen B. If you love a good historical murder mystery, you’ll be ready for sleuths to do their own leg work and be adept at deciphering psychological clues. Although they lack modern technology and forensics, these stories, set over 50 years ago, showcase the bygone talents of great minds. A few time periods provide… Continue reading

  • Romantic Wednesdays: Making the Roaring 20s Roar

    ~posted by Marlene H. What made the Roaring 20s roar? Or in the case of romance, maybe that should be RAWR! Thanks to Downton Abbey, there has been a revival of stories set in the 1920s, and wow! Not all stories with romance in them are necessarily romances. But romance certainly adds spice to a… Continue reading

  • Extreme outdoors

    Although I’m fairly wimpy in “real life,” I enjoy the vicarious experience of reading about other peoples’ travails in harsh climates. Here are some favorite tales of true adventure and survival (with a bit of history thrown in): The Cruelest Miles by Gay Salisbury When isolated Nome, Alaska, was struck by a diphtheria epidemic in… Continue reading

  • Crime: Philip Kerr – Back to Berlin.

    Way back in 1989, British author Philip Kerr published March Violets, a hardboiled mystery in which tough, tarnished private investigator Bernhard Gunther plunged into the depthless iniquities of Nazi Berlin in search of some small sliver of justice. This was followed up by two other moody period novels featuring Gunther – The Pale Criminal and… Continue reading

  • Crime Thursday: When history and mystery mix

    Being a pacifist, I’m not sure why I find it so relaxing to read a good murder mystery. English crime writer P.D. James, in her autobiography Time to Be in Earnest, offers the following explanation for why mystery aficionados enjoy the genre: “…the catharsis of carefully controlled terror, the bringing of order out of disorder,… Continue reading

  • SPL Discoveries: David Peace

    Okay, maybe we didn’t exactly discover them,  but here are writers, old and new, that we’d love to see more readers to discover themselves. It happens this way a lot at the library: call it serendipity in the stacks. I stumbled upon David Peace’s unsettling works quite by chance. Picking up a book titled Occupied City, I was arrested… Continue reading

  • Murder at the Olympic Games

    I foolishly tried to resist getting caught up in the fervor, but it’s no use: once again my attention has been totally dominated by the Olympic Games. Such is the case for many of our patrons if the small talk at our service desk is any indication. There’s also been a run on all of our books about the Games,… Continue reading

  • Crime: Imagining Jack the Ripper

    Whitechapel, London, 1888 Would Sherlock Holmes identify Jack the Ripper using his astute powers of deduction? Arthur Conan Doyle never put Holmes on the Whitechapel set, but Lyndsay Faye pits the pipe-smoking, cognitively-advanced detective against the Ripper with disastrous results in her novel Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John… Continue reading

  • Crime: Stealing Mona Lisa

    You think someone would notice if the Mona Lisa (or La Gioconda, as I now like to call her) disappeared from a wall in the Louvre. But in 1911, the painting was gone an entire day before anyone reported it stolen. Guards actually did notice it was gone, but assumed it had been taken by… Continue reading

  • Crime: Four Felonious Frasers.

    In publishing it has always been called the “mid-list” – that amorphous body of works that don’t get the attention of heavily promoted bestsellers. It is the vast majority of what gets published, and in the mystery section of any good bookstore or library, it is the source of untold riches. Working my way through my alphabet of… Continue reading

  • Historical mysteries with an Asian flair

    Curse of the Pogo Stick by Colin Cotterill One of my favorites features a delightfully quirky 70-plus year old Dr. Siri Paiboun, a coroner living in 1970s Laos. A French trained doctor and an ex-freedom fighter who fought to throw off colonialism, he is philosophically resigned as well as amused by the inept bureaucracy that’s become… Continue reading

  • Staff Favorites: Three mysteries for spring

    Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story by Leonie Swann “Act naturally,” bleated the sheep attempting to evade notice. Standing around munching grass seems to be the most natural thing for sheep to do, but solving a murder mystery? When this Irish flock’s favored shepherd shows up dead in a field, our intrepid sheep detectives,… Continue reading