by Mark N. Drake Rating: ***** The sixth installment * in Drake’s Glennison Darkisle series begins in Spring 1925, and Jack and Josine’s relationship is strained after events in the Grainger Case. Josine briefly returns to America to visit family, and Jack is invited to join a university archaeological dig on Ben Cattrick Hill back on Darkisle in July.  While waiting, he decides to investigate a niggling connection between a painting in Charles Deverby’s art collection and t

by Phil Smart Rating: **** In April 1815, former Royal Navy Commander Stephen Cowen chooses to start a new life in India with his wife, Elspeth, and their three children. When a powerful storm hits their boat, The Cumberland, the Cowen children—sixteen-year-old Nathaniel, fourteen-year-old Andrew, and twelve-year-old Beatrice—are swept overboard, believed to have drowned. However, safely inside The Cumberland’s longboat, the children wash ashore on the East African coast, whe

by Jonathan Chalstrey Rating: *** Heart  follows the adventures of Hernando Bustamante, a sixteenth-century surgeon. Apprenticed at sixteen to the renowned Doctor Bartolo in Seville, he is forced to flee to Italy by the Spanish Inquisition, where he becomes a professor of medicine at Bologna University. But when Hernando falls in love with Euphemia, a nun, he is expelled from Bologna and takes up a position as an assistant surgeon in Padua. Yet fate conspires again, and Busta

by Nino Gugunishvili Rating: **** There Was a Garden Once  is a concise collection of twenty-four autobiographical musings and essays, some just a couple of pages long. Interwoven with humorous reflections on everyday life are deeper meditations on grief and aging. Gugunishvili’s latest compilation * is a little book of delights, leaving the reader smiling despite the plaintive tone of several narratives. Gugunishvili writes with a natural, chatty intimacy that never feels f

by John A. Heldt Rating: ***** The Winding Road  continues the Maclean Brothers' time-traveling saga from the first installment, The Patriots * . Despite the entreaties of his fiancée, Abigail Ward, Noah rides out to enlist in the Continental Army, ready for war in the late eighteenth century, yet armed with a secret cache of modern weaponry. Jake stays behind with the Wards, helping however he can while growing inseparable from their younger daughter, Rachel, Abby’s sister.

by Jennifer Wizbowski Rating: ***** Set in early eighteenth-century Venice, Poinsettia Girl unfolds the story of Agata della Pietà, who, at age ten, was placed by her dying Nonna , Guilelma, at the Ospedale de la Pietà , an orphanage that placed emphasis on nurturing musical talent and housed its own prestigious and mysterious conservatoire, the Figlie del Coro , for whom Vivaldi was a teacher and composer. Agata is supremely gifted, not only as a soprano but also as a copyi