Month: March 2025

‘The Girl from Greenwich Street’ by Lauren Willig takes us back to Alexander Hamilton’s trial career and a real murder

/ Pamela Kramer

Lauren Willig’s historical fiction is always meticulously researched, and if she seems to demonstrate a superpower, it’s her ability to draw the readers in through her fictional characters. Her novels make reading—and learning about history—extremely enjoyable. In “The Girl from Greenwich Street,” Willig doesn’t create fictional characters—the real characters are compelling enough for her to work with. She has created a wonderful murder mystery based on a real trial in which Alexander Hamilton and his nemesis, Aaron Burr, were co-counsel.

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‘The Women on Platform Two’ by Laura Anthony is the inspirational story behind the women’s movement in Ireland

/ Pamela Kramer

There are three female main characters in Laura Anthony’s “The Women on Platform Two,” and they couldn’t be more different.

The story opens with Saoirse in 2023, finding out that she is not pregnant. She is relieved; her fiancé is not. We quickly learn that while she doesn’t want a child, her fiancé Miles is desperate to have a child with her. They cannot reconcile their differences, and she leaves the apartment after they argue. She accidentally ends up on a train headed for Belfast as she returns a photograph to an elderly woman who dropped it in the station. The train leaves the station before Saoirse can get off, so she joins Maura, the woman who dropped the photograph. Maura is making her yearly pilgrimage to Belfast, and this year she tells Saoirse the story of why, every year on May 22, Maura travels from Dublin to Belfast on this train.

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‘The Story She Left Behind’ by Patti Callahan Henry

/ Pamela Kramer

“The Story She Left Behind” is filled with characters who have experienced a rollercoaster of emotions and life events. It’s about women and creativity and living a life differently from those around us, and being ostracized for those choices. Patti Callahan Henry presents loss in many of its varieties: abandonment, death, divorce. In Henry’s capable hands, the story of a daughter searching for her mother is beautiful, made more lovely by the choice of two idyllic settings. The main character Clara is raised in South Carolina on the coast near Savannah. Her early days are spent fishing, searching for oysters, playing imaginary games with her creative, clever, doting mother. It’s a perfect childhood until the night in 1927 when her mother disappears.

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‘The Vanishing Kind’ by Alice Henderson is a thrilling new suspense novel in the Alex Carter series

/ Pamela Kramer

“The Vanishing Kind” is definitely the kind of book that you might want to read in one sitting to find out how the enthralling action ends, yet I found myself doing the opposite. Alice Henderson creates characters so likable, a plot so gripping, and a setting so idyllic, that I just didn’t want it to end. I kept putting off finishing the book because I wanted to stay with main character Alex Carter in the New Mexico desert setting just a bit longer.

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‘Track Her Down’ by Melinda Leigh is the 9th book in the gripping Bree Taggert series

/ Pamela Kramer

While “Track Her Down” is the ninth book in Melinda Leigh’s Bree Taggert series, like all the mysteries featuring sheriff Taggert, it works well as a stand alone novel. Of course, starting with the first mystery gives readers a chance to understand Taggert’s whole backstory and how she came to be the sheriff in upstate New York. But each mystery, featuring, of course, a murder that Taggert must solve, provides enough about all the main characters to ensure a satisfying read, and each mystery is unique enough to keep our interest.

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‘Last Twilight in Paris’ by Pam Jenoff is a stunning glimpse into a little known WWII “camp” in the middle of Paris

/ Pamela Kramer

Fans of Pam Jenoff know that her historical fiction novels don’t just tell a story. Instead, they insert us right into the middle of events most of us had never heard of — real events that are shocking and which deserve to be exposed. The French capitulated to the Germans during WWII, and many didn’t seem particularly opposed to assisting when it came to the impoundment of the Jewish French population. The French police joined in with the Gestapo to help round up the Jews of Paris, and many of the French population were only too happy to take for their own apartments that had belonged to Parisian Jews. Acclaimed author Pam Jenoff shares a little known facet of that war in “Last Twilight in Paris,” a fictional account that takes place partly in Lévitan, the French furniture store that served as both a Jewish detention center and a shopping mecca for Nazi officers during the war.

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‘Blood Moon’ by Sandra Brown: a murder investigation leads to hot romance

/ Pamela Kramer

Take a tough, intelligent, competent woman and have her butt heads with a handsome, rugged, maverick detective, and you get what Sandra Brown does best in her newest release, “Blood Moon.” In addition to the usual ingredients that make us devour her novels quicker than a box of handmade Belgian chocolates, she adds a time element in this thrilling novel. Another murder will happen in four days if the killer is not found.

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‘Bird of a Thousand Stories’ by Kiyash Monsef is the fantastic sequel to his first fantasy tale

/ Pamela Kramer

In his new novel, “Bird of a Thousand Stories,” which is billed as young adult, but which all adults will find charming, Kiyash Monsef continues the story he began in “Once There Was.” It’s the tale of Marjan, who comes from a long line of Persian healers of fantastical animals. Marjan didn’t realize her talents until her father died, and those who needed her services came for her.

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‘There’s Something About Mira’ by Sonali Dev is a story about love in all its permutations

/ Pamela Kramer

One might be tempted to look at the cover of “There’s Something About Mira” and think that Sonali Dev’s newest novel is a romcom. While there is plenty of romance in this very touching story that spans generations, states, continents, cultures, and social status, there are also quite a few situations that force readers to examine our own prejudices and misconceptions. Even in how we express ourselves, we often reveal our inner, often very unintentional microaggressions.

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‘Cold as Hell’ by Kelley Armstrong is a chilling tale of life and death

/ Pamela Kramer

“Cold As Hell” is a title that is extremely appropriate for Kelley Armstrong’s newest addition to her gripping “Haven Rock” series. Not only is the novel set in the Yukon in March, but there are events in the story that bring the title to mind as we read. “Cold As Hell” is the third book in this series, and while it could be read as a stand alone novel, there would be so much missing from the backstory that it makes more sense to either start with the first novel in the series, “Murder at Haven’s Rock,” or go back to the first novel in the previous series, “City of the Lost,” and read forward from there. That way you’ll be able to savor how Armstrong expertly develops the characters and uses the unique setting as almost another character, because it’s so much a part of each novel.

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