|summary=A woman with a distinguished scent about her appears flustered at a concert recital. A famous landlady gets kidnapped while on an innocent holiday to the west country. A malformed, brilliant modern-day alchemist gets murdered. There is only one person, who famously went over a certain Alpine waterfall, who could piece all this and more into a threat to the Royalty and Empire itself. But there is also only one person, who famously seemed to have stayed dead in going over the same Alpine waterfall, with the strength of mind to put the whole game into play.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857681214</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Philip Jose Farmer
|title=The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Peerless Peer
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime (Historical)
|summary=It's World War One, and Britain has got wind of some brilliant scientific research, that has created a new bacterial weapon capable of wiping out the world's supply of sauerkraut. But a dastardly German has stolen the formula. Before he can give a variant based on boiled meat, cabbage and potatoes to the kaiser, his most recent nemesis - Sherlock Holmes, no less - must be brought out of beekeeping retirement. Cue an adventure and a half, as he and Watson take to the skies for the first time in their hectic lives, end up in darkest Africa, and encounter a certain yodelling, long-haired nobleman, more than up to the name of King of the Jungle...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857681206</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Rory Clements
|title=John Shakespeare: Prince
|rating=4
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=This is the third in the excellent Elizabethan murder mystery series, featuring John Shakespeare, brother of Will. An inexplicable murder is linked to a much deeper plot of political dimensions, leading Shakespeare into danger and tragedy. A series of bombings, which appear to be targeting the immigrant population causes huge unrest and fear, and leads to the uncovering of further political dimensions.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848544251</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Anne Perry
|title=Betrayal at Lisson Grove
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime (Historical)
|summary=After recently reading Perry's [[Acceptable Loss by Anne Perry|Acceptable Loss]] and thoroughly enjoying it, I was looking forward to reading this book and hoping it would be as good as read. The novel opens with Pitt, Special Branch, in the midst of frenzied action trying to catch a suspect. Suspected of murder, it's imperative that he's caught. They weave between crowds, duck through alleys, but their best efforts are simply not good enough. The man is not caught. He's free to strike again. This all makes for a good, old-fashioned chase as Pitt makes up his mind to board a ferry for France, believing that's where the suspect could be heading. Pitt is extremely thorough and meticulous in all matters of policing but this may very well bode ill later on in the story. We learn of deep unrest in parts of the world: Europe and Ireland in particular. And Perry is good at giving her readers a little palatable history here and there, to keep us all in the loop.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>075537682X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Anne Perry
|title=Acceptable Loss
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime (Historical)
|summary=I must admit to not taking to the rather stylized front cover and nor did I take to the title. I got the initial impression that this novel was going to be all about heaving bosoms and manly men without too much substance. Was I right though? I gave a bit of a sigh as I started on chapter one. Straight away we meet two of the central characters, Mr and Mrs Monk. Mrs Monk (Hester) seems to have brought a local street urchin into her lovely home. All sounds a bit odd and also a bit intriguing. Perry back-tracks a little for the benefit of her readers and lets us know how this situation has come about. The boy is street-wise but he's also now desperate for a warm, safe bed and regular meals if he's lucky. He's had a dreadful life up till now and has somehow survived a terrible ordeal - and yes, you could say that it's the stuff of nightmares. I loved his name - Scuff and I automatically called him Scruff in my head, every time.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755376846</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alan Bradley
|title=A Red Herring Without Mustard
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime (Historical)
|summary=Eleven year old Flavia is the youngest daughter of the de Luce family and she doesn't get on all that well with her elder sisters, Feely (Ophelia) and Daffy (Daphne). It could be rather lonely for her as her father is an eccentric stamp collector and her mother died in the Himalayas some ten years before, but she has her faithful bicycle, Gladys, for company and when she's not doing some sleuthing she's tinkering in her laboratory, where she has enough chemicals and poisons to give the modern-day Health and Safety person a heart attack.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0752897152</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Cassandra Clark
|title=Abbess of Meaux: The Law of Angels
|rating=4
|genre=Crime (Historical)
|summary=A widow who remarried in the Middle Ages became, once again, subject to her husband, and many women of independent means preferred, therefore, the greater financial freedom afforded by taking the veil. After the death of her husband Hildegard joins the Cistercians, one of the richest and most powerful groups in Europe at the time, and sets out to found a small convent near her childhood home. Chance leads her to investigate the death of several men whose bodies she finds on her way, and in each subsequent book in the series she finds herself yet again risking her life to investigate and solve crimes.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>074900942X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Robert Dinsdale
|title=Three Miles
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Captain Abraham Matthews is so desperate to catch the villainous Albie Crowe and bring the youngster to justice that some people would say he was obsessed. After six months, Matthews has finally tracked down his prey, and captures him just three miles from the police station. But with Albie's boys trying to rescue him, other men without Abraham's moral compass more interested in vengeance than justice, and the Luftwaffe dropping bombs on Leeds, this is set to be the longest three miles of either of their lives...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>057126025X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ben Pastor
|title=Lumen
|rating=4
|genre=Crime (Historical)
|summary=Cracow, Poland, October 1939: The Germans have recently occupied Poland and are seeking to establish their authority. Captain Martin Bora of the Wehrmacht (the German army) has just arrived in the city from the battlefield to take up a posting to Intelligence. His boss asks Bora to drive him to a convent every day to see the renowned Abbess, rumoured to have mystic and healing powers. A few days later, though, she is found shot dead in the grounds of her convent. Bora is asked to investigate and report back. He proceeds to investigate who shot her and why, but as his investigation continues, there are more questions for Bora and the reader. Where does this case fit in with the priorities of the occupying forces?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1904738664</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Frank Tallis
|title=Death and the Maiden
|rating=3
|genre=Crime (Historical)
|summary=Just to clear the confusion out of the way, this book has nothing to do with the novel of the [[Death and the Maiden by Gladys Mitchell|same name]] by Gladys Mitchell. Both take their name from an early Schubert piece, in which Death entices the Maiden to leave the world of men. The maiden resists. It was a common enough theme at the time: the death of beauty.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846053579</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=C J Sansom
|title=Dark Fire
|rating=5
|genre=Crime (Historical)
|summary=1540 was the hottest summer of the sixteenth century but Matthew Shardlake was doing his best to hold his legal practice together, which was made more difficult by the fact that he believed himself to be out of favour with Thomas Cromwell. He tried to keep a low profile but when he defended the accused in a most unpopular case – that of a girl accused of brutally murdering her cousin – he found that the king's chief minister had a new assignment for him. Unless he could solve Cromwell's problem his client was likely to die a slow and nasty death.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330450786</amazonuk>
}}
