In Case You Missed It: Backlist Book Love (July 7)
Murder mystery edition!
Welcome to ICYMI, where I share my love for books that aren’t recent releases! Maybe they’re a few years old; maybe they’re a lot of years old. Why am I doing this? Check out the first installment for the full explanation! But in brief, it’s because books shouldn’t have to thrive or die based on their first months or weeks of existence.
This month, I’m sharing the first books in three historical murder mystery series that I quite adore. I think murder mysteries make for excellent summer reading, so I heartily encourage you to pick these up!
Links in this post are affiliate links to Bookshop; if you buy a book using them, then I get a little somethin’-somethin’ from Bookshop, which I will then use to… buy more books.
The Anatomist’s Wife (Lady Darby #1) by Anna Lee Huber
Published November 2012
The Lady Darby mysteries are set in Scotland in the early 1830s, and our heroine, Kiera, is a widow with an unusual and through-no-fault-of-her-own scandalous background: her husband was an anatomist and forced her to use her artistic skills to illustrate his work. The unlooked-for skill comes in handy, though, when a guest drops dead during a house party, and Kiera ends up assisting inquiry agent Sebastian Gage investigate. The whole series is enthralling, set against a backdrop of cholera outbreaks, labor reform, and a rapidly changing United Kingdom.
A Curious Beginning (Veronica Speedwell #1) by Deanna Raybourn
Published September 2015
The Veronica Speedwell mysteries are set in 1887, mostly but not exclusively in London. Veronica is a far more boisterous and independent heroine than Kiera. From an early age, she’s disdained convention, making a living for herself as a world-traveling lepidopterist. This life is disrupted when someone tries, seemingly inexplicably, to abduct her. She’s rescued by a baron, who is then murdered before he can reveal what he knows about the reason for the attempted abduction. Over the course of the series, Veronica gets entangled with a number of strange and deadly happenings, many with political angles to them. These books are lively and have a wonderful sense of humor!
The Body in the Garden (Lily Adler #1) by Katharine Schellman
Published April 2020
The Lily Adler mysteries take us back to the Regency era, set in London and elsewhere in England in 1815. Newly-widowed Lily Adler is trying to reconstruct her life — but she wasn’t counting on tripping over a corpse in her friend’s garden. With the aid of a dashing navy captain and an heiress from the West Indies, Lily decides she can’t let the matter lie — especially not when she finds out the magistrate has been bribed to put the case to rest. This draws her into a whirl of secrets worth killing for. This series has such emotional heart alongside the twists and turns of its mysteries!
Go forth and read! And, I’ve tragically run out of all the books in these series (and Schellman’s other series, and Sherry Thomas’s Lady Sherlock novels), so if you know of other historical mysteries led by wonderful women, please leave me a recommendation in a comment!
(And a sidebar plug: The Worldbuilding for Masochists anthology is ongoing! We had a strong start, but there’s still a long way to go over the next month to hit our funding goal. Check it out; tell a friend; we appreciate all support!)
