Guide to historical novels for 2020

The Historical Novel Society lists mainstream and small press titles historical titles up to the early 1970s.  Details are compiled by Fiona Sheppard (US, UK, CA, AUS) and are based on publisher descriptions.

Other than short excerpts, please link to this page rather than copying the entries – thank you!

For newer titles, check out of lists of forthcoming adult historical novels for 2021 and for children and YA for 2021.

January 2020

Johnnie Alexander, Amanda Barratt, Lauralee Bliss, Rita Gerlach, Homefront Heroines, Barbour (stories of four women of the WWII era)

Tasha Alexander, In the Shadow of Vesuvius, Minotaur (Lady Emily Hargreaves uncovers a mystery in the ancient city of Pompeii)

Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea, Bloomsbury (historical fiction about war, love, displacement and longing for home set in 1939)

Aharon Appelfeld, To the Edge of Sorrow, Schocken (Jewish resistance fighters vs Nazis during WWII)

Mike Ashley (ed.), Fighters of Fear, Talos (anthology of occult detective stories)

David Ashton, The Lost Daughter, Two Roads (Jean Brash mystery book 2)

Greg Bear, The Unfinished Land, John Joseph Adams (an historical fantasy at time of Spanish Armada invasion)

Benjamin Black, The Secret Guests, Henry Holt (as London endures nightly German bombings, Britain’s secret service whisks the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret from England, seeking safety for the young royals on an old estate in Ireland)

Kim Taylor Blakemore, The Companion, Lake Union (1855, New Hampshire―Lucy Blunt is set to hang for a double murder. Murderess or victim? Only Lucy knows the truth)

Serena Burdick, My Sister’s Way Home, Park Row (after her sister goes missing Ellie hatches a plan to be admitted to the ‘House of Mercy’, risking everything to bring her older sister home)

Cristina Cabon, (trans. Patricia Hampton), The Binder of Lost Stories, Amazon Crossing (two women, centuries apart, are bound by a love of books and a longing for self-discovery)

Andrew Caldecott, Wyntertide, Jo Fletcher (welcome back to Rotherweird, where an ancient plot is about to come to fruition – and this time the forces of darkness might actually win)

Diane Chamberlain, Big Lies in a Small Town, SMP (dual period narrative of secrets and lies set in North Carolina 2020 and 1940)

Jerome Charyn, Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin, Bellevue Literary Press (1937, a 17-year-old German naval sub-cadet is wandering along the seawall when he stumbles upon a gang of ruffians beating up a tramp, whose life he saves)

Mary Collins, Ten Bells Street at War, Piatkus (London 1940-separated by circumstances, the girls’ friendship stands strong in the face of hardship as they fight for their place in a frightening new world)

Armando Lucas Correa, The Daughter’s Tale, Washington Square (seven decades of secrets unravel with the arrival of a box of letters from the distant past)

Sandra Dallas, Westering Women, SMP (Maggie joins 43 other women & 2 reverends on a dangerous 2000 mile journey west in 1852)

Eoin Dempsey, Toward the Midnight Sun, Lake Union (adventure, suspense, and romance set against the rich and ruthless backdrop of the Klondike gold rush)

Julia Drosten, (trans. Deborah Rachel Langton), The Girl with the Golden Scissors, Amazon Crossing (the story of an ambitious young woman discovering friendship, love, and her own identity on the eve of World War I)

Lawrence Dudley, The Hungry Blade, Blackstone Publishing (WW II era spy thriller)

Caroline Dunford, Hope for the Innocent, Accent (new historical crime series set in 1939)

Emuna Elon, House on Endless Waters, Atria (novel about a writer who embarks on a transformative journey in Amsterdam, where he discovers the shocking truth about his mother’s wartime experience)

Jessica Fellowes, The Mitford Scandal, Minotaur (third book in the Mitford Murders series, lady’s maid Louisa Cannon accompanies Diana Mitford into a turbulent late 1920s Europe)

Victoria Gilbert, Bound for Murder, Crooked Lane (Librarian Amy Webber uses her reference skills to solve murders in her small Virginia home town)

C. M. Gleason, Murder at the Capitol, Kensington (July 1861, just months after the Battle of Fort Sumter, President Lincoln’s top priority is to unite the country, while Adam Quinn finds himself on the trail of a murderer)

Tessa Gratton, Lady Hotspur, Tor (novel of betrayal and battlefields in a gender-swapped historical fantasy homage to Shakespeare’s Henry IV)

Janice Hadlow, The Other Bennet Sister, Mantle (Mary Bennet’s story)

Donna Hill, Confessions in B Flat, Sideways Books (retelling of Romeo and Juliet set during the 1964 Civil Rights movement from an author who lived through it)

Grace Hitchcock, The Gray Chamber, Barbour (1887 – a young woman who inherits her father’s fortune is whisked off to an asylum by her uncle, using a loophole in the will)

M. L. Huie, Spitfire, Crooked Lane (a new historical mystery series set in post-war England)

Zora Neale Hurston, Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, Amistad (May 1925, Zora Neale Hurston was living in New York, “desperately striving for a toe-hold on the world.” During this period, she began writing short works that captured the zeitgeist of African American life)

Julia Kelly, The Whispers of War, Gallery (start of World War II looms over three friends who struggle to remain loyal as one of them is threatened with internment by the British government)

Ray Kingfisher, Under Darkening Skies, Lake Union (in the shadow of World War II, one young woman must make an unthinkable sacrifice for those she loves)

Larry Kramer, The American People, Vol 2: The Brutality of Fact, FSG (completes the radical reimagining of America’s history, ranging from the brothels of 1950s Washington, D.C., to the activism of the 1980s and beyond)

Sarah E. Ladd, The Thief of Lanwyn Manor, Thomas Nelson (1818, latest Regency romance explores Cornwall, England, and the secrets within one of its historic manor houses)

J. M. G. Le Clézio (trans. C. Dickson), The African, Gallic (a memoir of a lost childhood and a tribute to a father whom Le Clézio never really knew)

Catherine Lloyd, Death Comes to the Nursery, Kensington (Kurland St. Mary mystery 7)

Maggie Mason, Blackpool Weaver, Sphere (next in series after Blackpool Evacuee)

James L. May, The Body Outside the Kremlin, Delphinium (a political prisoner incarcerated on the island of Solovetsky, in the 1920s, is mysteriously conscripted to solve the murder of a fellow inmate)

Chris McCormick, The Gimmicks, Harper (set in the waning years of the Cold War, debut novel about a trio of young Armenians that moves from the Soviet Union, across Europe, to Southern California, and at its center, one of the most tragic cataclysms in twentieth-century history—the Armenian Genocide)

Jess Montgomery, The Hollows, Minotaur (follow-up to The Widows, murder mystery set in Ohio 1926)

Tim Murphy, Correspondents, Picador (spanning the 20th century and into the post-9/11 wars ―the legacy of immigration, the present-day world of refugeehood, the violence that America causes both abroad and at home, and the power of the individual)

Robert Newcome, The Name Beneath the Stone, Unicorn (novel asks what would happen if the identity of the Unknown Soldier was discovered? And should the secret ever be revealed?)

Lance Olsen, My Red Heaven, Dzanc Books (imagines the intersection of historic figures – artists, actors, physicists, and autocrats – on a single day in Berlin, 1927)

Tracie Peterson, Kimberley Woodhouse, Forever Hidden, Bethany House (trilogy follows the lives of three sisters in the gold-rush era of Nome’s founding)

Daniel Overdorf, A Death Well Lived, Crosslink (tale set in first century Judea that offers hope for the worst among us and the worst within us)

Gary Phillips, Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem, Agora Books (a re-imagined pulp novel that follows the exploits of Matthew Henson, a real life Arctic explorer, on his Doc Savage-style adventures through 1920s Harlem)

Steph Post, Miraculum, Polis Books (part southern gothic, part noir, part magical realism set on the Texas-Louisiana border in 1922)

Bonnie Proudfoot, Goshen Road, Swallow Press (beginning in 1967 novel captures one working-class family in rural West Virginia as they balance on the dividing line between Appalachia old and new)

M. J. Rose, Cartier’s Hope, Atria (novel follows an intrepid female journalist in Gilded Age New York as she chases the story of the Hope Diamond)

Laura Joh Rowland, The Woman in the Veil, Crooked Lane (fourth in Victorian mystery series)

Jane Thynne, The Words I Never Wrote, Ballantine (a chance discovery inside a vintage typewriter case reveals the story of two sisters on opposite sides of World War II)

Nancy E. Turner, Light Changes Everything, Thomas Dunne (Arizona Territory, 1907 ― coming-of-age of a resilient young feminist a century ahead of her time)

Douglas Valentine, TDY, Clarity Press (early 1967, a bored photojournalist on an Air Force base in Texas is offered a Temporary Duty (TDY) assignment. Story of his journey through the underworld and his awakening to the reality of the Vietnam War and the CIA role in Southeast Asia)

Roseanna M White, On Wings of Devotion, Bethany House (2nd in Codebreakers trilogy gives a glimpse into the deadly world of WWI spies and the heroes who fight to stop them)

Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, Karen White, All the Ways We Said Goodbye, Wm Morrow (historical adventure that moves from the dark days of two World Wars to the turbulent years of the 1960s)

Rita Woods, Remembrance, Forge (multi-period set in Haiti 1791, New Orleans 1857 & present day ―Remembrance…It’s a rumor, a whisper passed in the fields. A hidden stop on the underground road to freedom, if you can make it there)

Ch’oe Yun, (trans. Bruce Fulton & Ju-Chan Fulton), There a Petal Silently Falls, Columbia Univ. Press (a collection of stories ―portrayals of the psychological and spiritual reality of post-WW II Korea)

February 2020

Anita Abriel, The Light After the War, Atria (inspired by a true story of two Jewish friends who survived the Holocaust, this novel of love and friendship spans World War II from Budapest to Austria and the postwar years from Naples to Caracas)

Tessa Afshar, Daughter of Rome, Tyndale (a love story and an immersive journey through first-century Rome and Corinth)

Eleanor Anstruther, A Perfect Explanation, HMH (based on true story of author’s grandmother—about the perils of aristocratic privilege, where inheritance is everything and happiness is hard won)

Ali Aragi, Agha, Melville House (multi-generational debut tells the story of a centuries-old curse carrying one family to the brink of the 1979 Iranian revolution)

Bernardo Atxaga,(trans. Margaret Jull Costa), Memoirs of a Basque Cow, Dedalus (set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, story paints a portrait of friendship and freedom and the sometimes-difficult process of finding oneself)

Charlotte Betts, The Palace of Lost Dreams, Piatkus (romance set in 18th century India)

Rhys Bowen, Above the Bay of Angels, Lake Union (a single twist of fate puts a servant girl to work in Queen Victoria’s royal kitchen, setting off a historical mystery)

Catherine Cavendish, The Garden of Bewitchment, Flame Tree (horror thriller set in Yorkshire, 1893)

Heidi Chiavaroli, The Tea Chest, Tyndale (multi-period 1773 & present ― two women, separated by centuries, must find the strength to fight for love and freedom. . . and discover a heritage of courage and faith)

Shaun Curry, The Swords of Silence, Harper Inspire (1620 – based on historical events, this action adventure is a glimpse into the world of samurai-dominated Japan)

Susanne Dietze, The Blizzard Bride, Barbour (Daughters of the Mayflower series)

David Downing, Diary of a Dead Man on Leave, Soho Crime (April 1938― depiction of Germany in the days leading up to World War II and the difficult choices of one man of conviction)

Eric Dupont, The American Fiancée, HarperVia (over the course of the 20th century, three generations of the Lamontagnes will weather love, passion, jealousy, revenge, and death. Epic family saga)

Elizabeth Elo, Finding Katarina M., Polis Books (a contemporary surgeon goes on an extraordinary journey to find her grandmother who was sent to the Gulag, Stalin’s notorious network of labor camps)

Anne Enright, Actress, Jonathan Cape (novel about fame, sexual power, and a daughter’s search to understand her mother’s hidden truths)

Mario Escobar, Children of the Stars, Thomas Nelson (a story of escape, sacrifice, and hope amid the perils of the second World War)

Charles Finch, The Last Passenger, Minotaur (third and final in a prequel trilogy to Charles Lenox series)

Curdella Forbes, A Tall History of Sugar, Canongate UK (beginning in the late 1950s, four years before Jamaica’s independence from colonial rule, this epic love story sweeps across the following decades)

Leah Garriott, Promised, Shadow Mountain (Warwickshire, England, 1810―after a broken engagement, Margaret Brinton is determined to never allow her heart to be hurt again)

David Gilman, Cross of Fire, Head of Zeus (the Hundred Years War still rages on and the French army thirsts for Thomas Blackstone’s blood)

Guinevere Glasfurd, The Year Without Summer, Two Roads (the story of the books written, the art made; of the journeys taken, of the love longed for and the lives lost during that fateful year 1815/16)

Genevieve Graham, The Forgotten Home Child, Simon & Schuster (a young girl caught in a scheme to rid England’s streets of destitute children: multi-period Canada 2018 and England 1936)

Jocelyn Green, Veiled in Smoke, Bethany House (exploration of Chicago’s history begins with a look at the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1871 ― #1 of 3 in Windy City Saga)

Janice Hadlow, The Other Bennet Sister, Henry Holt (novel explores what if bookish Mary Bennet’s life took a different path from that laid out for her in Pride and Prejudice?)

Tina May Hall, The Snow Collectors, Dzanc (a bereaved contemporary woman delves into the mystery of a centuries-old letter regarding the Franklin expedition, which disappeared into the ice in 1845)

Stacey Halls, The Foundling, MIRA (six years after leaving her illegitimate daughter Clara at London’s Foundling Hospital, Bess Bright returns to reclaim the child she has never known)

Kiran Millwood Hargrave, The Mercies, Little, Brown/Picador (Finnmark, Norway 1617― inspired by the Vardø storm and the 1620 witch trials; story of love, evil, and obsession, set at the edge of civilization)

Ursula Hegi, The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls, Flatiron (shores of the Nordsee, 1878 ― portrait of marriage & motherhood, & the ways in which women hold each other up in the face of heartbreak)

Colin Hester, Death and the Butterfly, Counterpoint (London 1940 – multigenerational story centered around endless heartbreak and enduring love)

Juris Jurjevics, Play the Red Queen, Soho Crime (posthumous masterwork—the story of two American GI cops caught in the corrupt cauldron of a Vietnamese civil war stoked red hot by revolution)

Jim Kelly, The Night Raids (Nighthawk 3), Allison & Busby (a German bomber misses its target and drops its bomb on a neighbourhood of terraced streets on the edge of the Cambridge’s medieval centre)

Jim Kelly, Byron’s Pool, Allison & Busby (crime thriller set in 1940)

Jess Kidd, Things in Jars, Atria (Gothic mystery that collapses the boundary between fact and fairy tale and explores what it means to be human in inhumane times)

Peg Kingman, The Great Unkown, Norton (blends wit and psychological insight with a grasp of early evolutionary theories & what it means to be human. Set in 1840s Britain and France)

Paul M. Levitt, Death at the Dacha, Lyons Press (as Stalin lies dying, this novel records his last thoughts, which he renders as a movie about the people he believes envenomed his life, namely, Lenin and certain women)

Gemma Liviero, In a Field of Blue, Lake Union (a novel about a family torn apart by grief and secrets, then pulled back together by hope in the wake of World War I)

Sharlene MacLaren, Her Rebel Heart, Whitaker House (romance set during the American Civil War)

Kerri Maher, The Girl in White Gloves, Berkley (a novel of Grace Kelly)

Susan Anne Mason, The Brightest of Dreams, Bethany House (brings to a close the Canadian Crossings series)

Julian Mayfield, The Hit (c.1957), Dover (in Harlem of the 1950s, the age-old dream of sudden wealth centers on the numbers game & Hubert Cooley would do anything to get enough money to place a bet)

Peter Meech, Billy (the Kid), Sentient Publications (reimagines the figure of Billy the Kid in a story told with humor)

Andrew Meehan, The Mystery of Love, Head of Zeus (witty and unsentimental evocation of the relationship between Oscar and Constance Wilde)

Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King, Canongate UK (in 1935, orphaned servant Hirut struggles to adapt to her new household as Ethiopia faces Mussolini’s looming invasion)

Marianne Monson, Her Quiet Revolution, Shadow Mountain (biographical fiction brings to life the story of America’s first female state senator, Martha Hughes Cannon, who was also a doctor, suffragist, and champion of public health in the frontier territory of Utah in the late 19th century)

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Untamed Shore, Agora Books (thriller, set in Mexico in the 1970’s about a film-obsessed young Mexican woman who becomes infatuated with three American tourists)

Louisa Morgan, The Age of Witches, Redhook (tale of family, magic, ambition and love in Gilded Age New York and London)

Scott Oden, Twilight of the Gods, St. Martin’s Press (1218 ― fantasy adventure continues the saga of Grimnir ―the last in a long line of monsters left to plague Miðgarðrin)

Jean-Pierre Ohl, (trans. Mike Mitchell), The Devil’s Road, Dedalus (while draining a pond during work for the construction of the Stockton to Darlington Railway George Stephenson’s workers discover a female corpse with a dagger stuck between her ribs)

Alyssa Palombo, The Borgia Confessions, St Martin’s Griffin (novel of love and power set against the tumultuous backdrop of Renaissance Italy)

Georges Perec (trans. Philip Terry), I Remember, Gallic (Perec records a stream of individual memories of a childhood in post-war France, while posing wider questions about memory and nostalgia)

Melissa Anne Peterson, Vera Violet, Counterpoint (explores themes of poverty, violence, and environmental degradation as played out in the young lives of a group of close-knit friends)

Steven Price, Lampedusa, Picador (1955― a man faces down the end of his life and struggles to make something of lasting worth, while there is still time)

Alice Quinn, (trans. Alexandra Maldwyn-Davies), The Shattered Portrait, Amazon Crossing (1888―when one of the wealthiest and most hated men on the French Riviera is murdered, finding his killer becomes a privilege—and a danger)

Tracy Rees, The House at Silvermoor, Quercus (England, 1899. A new century is dawning, and two young friends are about to enter into a world of money, privilege and family secrets)

Constance Sayers, A Witch in Time, Redhook (a young witch is cursed to relive a doomed love affair through many lifetimes, as both troubled muse and frustrated artist)

Herbert J. Stern, Alan A. Winter, Wolf, Skyhorse (researched and illustrated historical novel about a man who is not yet a monster, but will soon become the ultimate one: Adolf Hitler)

Sarah-Jane Stratford, Red Letter Days, Berkley (about two daring women who escape McCarthy-era Hollywood for London, where they find creative freedom)

Sarah Sundin, The Land Beneath Us, Revell (when an Army Ranger and a librarian are bound together by a marriage of convenience, neither suspects it might lead to love. Set in 1940s)

Charles Todd, A Divided Loyalty, Wm Morrow (Scotland Yard detective Ian Rutledge is assigned one of the most baffling investigations of his career)

Liz Trenow, Under a Wartime Sky, Pan (based on real-life events at a top-secret wartime research station, and describes an invention whose significance matched that of the more famous code-breakers of Bletchley Park)

Margaret Verble, Cherokee America, Mariner Books (follows a web of complex family alliances and culture clashes in the Cherokee Nation, during the aftermath of the Civil War)

Rikke Villadsen, Cowboy, Fantagraphics (a rugged outlaw rides into a typical nineteenth-century Western town, swinging his six-guns and stirring up trouble)

Django Wexler, The Guns of Empire, Ace (4th entry in series set in an alternate 19th-c Europe)
Also: The Infernal Battalion

Paul Wolfe, The Lost Diary of M, Harper (reimagines the extraordinary life and mysterious death of bohemian Georgetown socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer— secret lover of JFK, ex-wife of a CIA chief, sexual adventurer, LSD explorer and early feminist living by her own rules)

Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, Hanover Square (story of a Latin American sci-fi writer in 1929 and the lives her lost manuscript unites decades later in post-Katrina New Orleans)

March 2020

Ibrahim al-Koni, (trans. Elliot Colla), Gold Dust, Hoopoe (classic story of the fight to endure in a world of limitless and waterless wastes, and a parable of the struggle to survive in the most dangerous landscape of all: human society)

Kirsten Alexander, Lost Boy Found, Grand Central (Southern historical novel, based on the true story of a boy’s mysterious disappearance, examines despair, loyalty, and the nature of truth)

Boris Akunin, She Lover of Death, Mysterious Press (tale of a secret suicide society in turn-of-the-century Moscow featuring a naïve young protagonist and the inimitable hero Erast Fandorin)

Laura Beatty, Lost Property, Atlantic UK (a disaffected writer roadtrips through 10,000 years of civilisation, watching humanity repeat itself with wars over borderlines)

Gretchen Berg, The Operator, Wm Morrow (debut novel, set in a small Midwestern town in the early 1950s, about a nosy switchboard operator who overhears gossip involving her own family, and the unraveling that discovery sets into motion)

Lisa T Bergren, Selah, Bethany House (last in colonial-era Sugar Baron’s Daughters trilogy)

Charlotte Betts, The Light Within Us, Little, Brown (multi-generational family drama set at the turn of the 19th-century in Cornwall, England)

John Buchan, Midwinter, Polygon (the Jacobite army marches into England and Alistair Maclean, close confident of Charles Edward Stewart embarks on a secret mission to raise support for the cause)

Maisy Card, These Ghosts are Family, Simon & Schuster (portrait of a family and individuals caught in the sweep of history, slavery, migration, and the more personal dramas of infidelity, lost love, and regret)

Amanda Cabot, Out of the Embers, Revell (when a fire destroys the orphanage where she worked, Evelyn Radcliff flees to the Texas Hill Country with an orphan in tow and a killer in pursuit)

Max Allan Collins, Do No Harm, Forge (latest in Nathan Heller mysteries set in late 40s)

Paul Colt, Destiny, Five Star (son of a shipping magnate is determined to make his fortune in the news industry)

Mary Connealy, Woman of Sunlight, Bethany House (Brides of Hope Mountain #2)

Connilyn Cossette, Like Flames in the Night, Bethany House (series end takes readers through the Israelites’ last days under Joshua)

Stephenn Cox, Our Child of the Stars, Jo Fletcher (in the year of Woodstock and moon landings, Molly and Gene Myers’ marriage is on the brink of collapse. Then a child arrives . . . .)

Curtis Craddock, A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, Tor (sequel to An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors set in 16th-century France)

Thomas Crockett, The Great Matter Monologues, Top Hat (England, 1527, King Henry seeks a divorce from his first wife, Katherine, who can’t give him the male heir he desires)

Martin Davies, Mrs Hudson and the Samarkand Conspiracy, Canelo (a Holmes and Hudson mystery)

John DeSimone, The Road to Delano, Rare Bird (while the book doesn’t revolve around Chavez himself, it does focus on the Delano grape strike of the 1970s that helped launch Chavez to international fame)

Kevin Doherty, The Leonardo Gulag, Oceanview (journeys to the sinister heart of Stalin’s regime of terror, where paranoia reigns and no one is safe)

Paul Doherty, Death’s Dark Valley, Headline (1311. Murder and mayhem prowl the highways and coffin paths of medieval England in the Hugh Corbett series #20)

Olivier Dufault, (trans. Pablo Strauss), Benediction, House of Anansi (based on the true story of Canada’s most unlikely cowboy; tale of fraud and reinvention in the old American West)

Petra Durst-Benning, (trans. Edwin Miles), The Photographer, Amazon Crossing (historical saga of a female photographer who must defy convention to live her dreams in turn-of-the-century Germany)

Jan Eliasberg, Hannah’s War, Back Bay Books (re-imagination of the final months of World War II―a love story about an exceptional woman)

Anne Enright, Actress, W.W. Norton (novel about fame, sexual power, and a daughter’s search to understand her mother’s hidden truths)

Tyler Enfield, Like Rum-Drunk Angels, Goose Lane (an offbeat, slightly magical retelling of Aladdin as an American western)

Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman, Harper (based on the life of the author’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C.)

Bernardine Evaristo, Lara (c.1997) Bloodaxe Books (explores the lives of those who leave one country in search of a better life elsewhere, but who end up struggling to be accepted even as they lay the foundations for their children and future generations)

Jess Faraday, Shadow of Justice, Blind Eye (love is a dangerous proposition for many people in 19th century London, but for an ambitious copper climbing Scotland Yard’s greasy career ladder, it’s out of the question)

Ann Friedman, A Fine Tapestry of Murder, Accent ( a mystery that spreads from the unsavoury slums of the Ile Notre-Dame to the home of the Duc de Languedoc ― set in Paris, 1676)

Iris Gower, Bomber’s Moon, Canelo (saga of the Second World War)

Iris Gower, Sea Witch, Canelo (Welsh saga of love and loss)

Romesh Gunesekera, Suncatcher, The New Press (coming-of-age novel about difficult friendships and sudden awakenings set among the tumult of 1960s Sri Lanka)

Janice Hadlow, The Other Bennet Sister, Henry Holt (Mary Bennet’s story)

Matthew Harffy, Wolf of Wessex, Head of Zeus (AD 838. Deep in the forests of Wessex, Dunston’s solitary existence is shattered when he stumbles on a mutilated corpse)

Jane Healey, The Animals at Lockwood Manor, HMH/MantleUK (when a young woman is tasked with safeguarding a natural history collection as it is spirited out of London during World War II, she discovers her new manor home is a place of secrets and terror instead of protection)

Jody Hedlund, The Runaway Bride, Bethany House (having fled a dangerous engagement in London, Arabella can’t risk pairing herself with the wrong man again – The Bride Ships #2 of 3)

Christine Dwyer Hickey, The Narrow Land, Atlantic (1950: two boys forge an unlikely friendship with artists Jo and Edward Hopper, Cape Cod 1950)

Rebecca James, The Woman in the Mirror, Minotaur (a chilling modern gothic novel of a family consumed by the shadows and secrets of its past)

Brenda Janowitz, The Grace Kelly Dress, Graydon House (imagines an iconic wedding dress, such as Grace Kelly’s and the three generations of women whose lives are touched by it)

Mai Jia, The Message, Head of Zeus (literary thriller set in Japan-occupied China)

Alka Joshi, The Henna Artist, MIRA (set in post-Raj 1950s Jaipur about a young woman struggling to shape her own destiny in a world pivoting between the traditional and the modern)

Adel Kamel, (trans. Waleed Almusharaf), The Magnificent Conman of Cairo, Hoopoe (available in English for the first time―tells a story of fathers and sons, scoundrels and the innocent, set in 1930s Cairo)

Alma Katsu, The Deep, G.P. Putnam’s Sons (an eerie, psychological twist on one of the world’s most renowned tragedies – the sinking of the Titanic)

Thomas Keneally, The Book of Science and Antiquities, Washington Square (exploration of community and country, love and morality, set in both prehistoric and modern Australia)

Vénus Khoury-Ghata, (trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan), The Last Days of Mandelstam, Seagull (the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam is 47 and dying in a transit camp near Vladivostok after having been arrested by Stalin’s government during the repression of the 1930s)

Alexandra Lapierre, The Woman of a Thousand Names, Atria (tale based on the true story of the Mata Hari of Russia, featuring a beautiful aristocrat fighting for survival during the deadly upheaval of the Russian Revolution)

John Lawton, Hammer to Fall, Atlantic Monthly (third Joe Wilderness spy thriller moves from icy Finland to tumultuous Cold War Prague)

Sarah Leipciger, Coming Up For Air, House of Anansi (set in Paris in 1899, Norway in the 1950s, and the Ottawa Valley in Canada in 2017, three lives intertwine in poignant and surprising ways)

Preston Lewis, Rio Ruidoso, Five Star (blend of history and story explores the violent years before the famed Lincoln County War in New Mexico Territory)

Zülfü Livaneli, (trans. Brendan Freely), Serenade for Nadia, Other Press (based on the real-life sinking of a refugee ship during World War II)

Kassandra Luciuk, illus. nicole marie burton, Enemy Alien, Between the Lines (graphic novel tells of Canada’s first national internment of John Boychuk, a Ukrainian internee held in Kapuskasing from 1914 to 1917)

Mary-Rose MacColl, Lost Autumn, G.P. Putnam’s Sons (a young woman’s coming-of-age in 1920 Australia and the secrets that surface more than seventy years later)

Sally Magnusson, The Ninth Child, Two Roads (novel combines Scottish folklore with hidden history)

Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light, Henry Holt (traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey)

Nikki Marmery, On Wilder Seas, Legend (novel inspired by the true story of Maria, the slave-woman who sailed to freedom on the Golden Hind during Drake’s circumnavigation voyage)

Shannon McNear, The Blue Cloak, Barbour (in 1797 Rachel Taylor attends her friend’s wedding only to watch it dissolve in horror as the groom, Wiley Harpe, and his cousin become murderers on the run)

Karen McQuestion, Dovetail, Lake Union (multi-period novel of enduring love, family secrets, and mysterious death)

Jean Moran, Summer of the Three Pagodas, Head of Zeus (saga set in post-war Hong Kong and Korea)

TaraShea Nesbit, Beheld, Bloomsbury (story of the first murder in Plymouth, Massachusetts)

Nguyễn Phan QuếMai, The Mountains Sing, Algonquin (brings to life the human costs of the Vietnam War from the point of view of the Vietnamese people, while showing us the true power of kindness and hope)

Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet, Headline(about the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son Hamnet and the years leading up to the production of his great play, Hamlet)

Pola Oloixarac, (trans. Roy Kesey), Dark Constellations, Soho Press (from the world of 19th-century science to an ultra-surveilled near future, novel explores humanity’s quest for knowledge and control, and leaps forward to the next steps in human evolution)

Sharon K. Penman, The Land Beyond the Sea, Putnam (1172. The Kingdom of Jerusalem, also known as Outremer is ‘the land beyond the sea’)

Tracie Peterson, Secrets of My Heart, Bethany House (Portland, Oregon, 1879. Nancy Pritchard finds herself a widow with a world of problems when her deceased husband’s schemes start to come to light)

Malcolm Pryce, The Corpse in the Garden of Perfect Brightness, Bloomsbury (it’s 1948 and the British railways have been nationalised, bringing to an end Jack Wenlock’s days as an elite train detective)

Natasha Pulley, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, Bloomsbury (sequel to The Watchmaker of Filigree Street takes readers to 1880s Japan, where nationalism is on the rise and ghosts roam the streets)

Julia Quinn, First Comes Scandal, Little,Brown (historical romance)

Eric Sean Rawson, Banana Republic, Regal House (loosely based on the history of U.S. intervention in the “banana wars” of the early 20th-c. A comic tale of greed, ambition, and gunboat diplomacy)

Deanna Raybourn, A Murderous Relation, Berkley (a Veronica Speedwell mystery)

Ed Ruggero, Blame the Dead, Forge (set against the heroism and heartbreak of World War II, novel captures the evocative and timeless stories of ordinary people swept up in extraordinary times)

Katrin Schumann, This Terrible Beauty, Lake Union (story of one woman’s journey to reclaim what she lost in a country torn apart by the devastating legacy of WWII)

Katy Simpson Smith, The Everlasting, Harper (set in Rome in four different centuries; explores love in all its various incarnations and ponders elemental questions of good and evil, obedience and free will that connect four lives)

Douglas Skelton, The Blood is Still, Polygon (when the body of a man in 18th-C Highland dress is discovered on the site of the Battle of Culloden, journalist Rebecca Connolly takes up the story)

Jill Eileen Smith, Star of Persia: Esther’s Story, Revell (brings to life the beloved story of Esther, Queen of Persia)

Emily Strelow, The Wild Birds, Rare Bird (cast adrift in 1870s San Francisco after the death of her mother, Olive disguises herself as a boy and works as a lighthouse keeper’s assistant)

B.A. Thomas-Peter, The Kissing Fence, Caitlin Press (two generations grapple with identity, oppression, and redemption rooted in the chilling history of the 1950s and 60s conflict between the BC government and the Doukhobor community)

Rupert Thomson, Never Anyone But You, Other Press (traces the real-life love affair of two women, recreating the surrealist movement in Paris and the horrors of the world wars)

Lavie Tidhar, By Force Alone, Head of Zeus (everyone thinks they know the story of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. But this is an historical novel with a difference)

Alan Titchmarsh, The Scarlet Nightingale, Hodder & Stoughton (set in wartime London and occupied France – a story of love, danger and sacrifice)

Christos Tsiolkas, Damascus, Atlantic UK (events surrounding the birth and establishment of the Christian Church)

Jin Yong, A Bond Undone, SMP (second book in the Chinese classic Legends of Condor Heroes series)

April 2020

Eleanor Albanese, If Tenderness Be Gold, Latitude 46 (set in 19th & early 20th-c northern Ontario and Manitoba–an Irish mother, an Italian herbalist, and a Scottish midwife come together on the night of a difficult birth)

Mark Alder, The Devil’s Blade, Gollancz (story of Julie D’Aubigny and her deal with the devil in 17th-C Paris)

Marco Balzano, I’m Staying Here, Head of Zeus (the struggle of one woman and one village against war, racism and ecological devastation – Curòn, 1920)

Barbara Barnett, Alchemy of Glass, Pyr (an historical fantasy with magical realism drawing upon cutting edge science and the most ancient of Celtic mythology)

Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons, Faber & Faber (an orphaned child of the Lakota Indians finds herself growing up in an unconventional household on a farm in west Tennessee)

Juliet Bates, The Colours, Little,Brown (living in a tiny town in the north-east of England, in a world on the cusp of war, no one has time for an orphaned girl who seems a little strange)

Deni Béchard, Song From Far Away, Goose Lane (takes readers from 19th-century Prince Edward Island to modern-day Iraq piecing together “the stories that we tell about ourselves”)

Albert A. Bell, Hiding From the Past, Perseverance Press (another mystery from the notebooks of Pliny the Younger set in Transalpine and Cisalpine Gaul)

Pamela Bell, Spring Comes to Emmerdale, Trapeze (this 2nd novel explores the lives of Emmerdale’s much-loved families during the Great War and beyond)

Cara Black, Three Hours in Paris, Soho Crime (in June of 1940, after Paris had fallen to the Nazis, Hitler spent a total of three hours in the city. Why did he leave in such a hurry—and why did he never come back?)

Robin Blake, Death and the Chevalier, Severn House (a Cragg and Fidelis mystery)

Graham Brack, Death in Delft, Sapere (a new 17th-c murder mystery series)

SJ Bradley, Zoe Lambert, Leone Ross, and more, Ra Page (ed.) Resist, Comma Press (from Boudicea’s revolt against Roman occupation in 45 AD to the protests that followed the Grenfell Tower tragedy, these 20 short stories reimagine each event through the eyes of the people involved)

Grace Burrowes, A Duke By Any Other Name, Little,Brown (Regency Romance)

Michelle Cameron, Beyond the Ghetto Gates, She Writes (set during the turbulent days of Bonaparte’s Italian campaign (1796–97), a cautionary tale with its rising tide of anti-Semitism, and a story of hope)

Megan Campisi, The Sin Eater, Atria (novel about a shunned orphan girl in 16th century England who is ensnared in a deadly royal plot and must turn her subjugation into power)

J’nell Ciesielski, The Socialite, Thomas Nelson (glamour, treachery, and espionage collide when an English socialite rushes to save her sister from the Nazis)

Mari Coates, The Pelton Papers, She Writes (based on the life of artist Agnes Pelton, novel covers everything from her shrouded Brooklyn childhood to her early success in 1913, subsequent retreat to a contemplative life and the flowering of her deeply spiritual art)

Lynn A. Coleman, Lynette Sowell, Cecelia Dowdy, Terri Haynes, A Teacher’s Heart, Barbour (4 inspirational romances set in late 19th-c)

Seth Coleman, Peppino, Elm Hill (a story of good versus evil, religion versus God, and hypocrisy versus righteousness set in 19th-c Italy)

Nicola Cornick, The Forgotten Sister, HQ (dual time mystery set in the present and Tudor England exploring the death of Amy Robsart)

F.G. Corram, The Auguries, Severn House (in the 1500s an almanac full of magic spells was put together by someone intent on bringing about The End Times. It has resurfaced and is being used indiscriminately)

Oscar de Muriel, The Darker Arts, Orion (Detective ‘Nine Nails’ McGray’s most trusted clairvoyant hosts a séance for three of Edinburgh’s wealthiest families.The following morning everyone is found dead)

Francis Desharnais, Little Russia, Pow Pow Press (tells the story of the colonisation of l’Abitibi, Quebec)

Margaret Dickinson, The Spitfire Sisters, Pan (saga set in England pre-WWII)

Nadine Dorries, The Velvet Ribbon, Head of Zeus (3rd part of Tarabeg trilogy set in post-WWII western Ireland)

Clara Dupont-Monod, The Revolt, Quercus (Richard Lionheart tells the story of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine)

Martin Edwards, Mortmain Hall, Head of Zeus (a Gothic remaking of the classic country-house murder mystery)

Pamela Binnings Ewen, The Queen of Paris, Blackstone (based on the real life of Coco Chanel, novel reveals an unseen side to the celebrated icon as she trades fashion for espionage during WW II to protect her name, her business, and her legend)

Robert Fabbri, Magnus and the Crossroads Brotherhood, Corvus (tales taken from the Vespasian series)

Vanessa Farnsworth, The Haweaters, Signature Editions (brings to life the violent, real-life double-murder of Charles and William Bryan by two members of the Amer family on Manitoulin Island, 1877)

Mick Finlay, Arrowood and the Thames Corpses, HQ (an historical crime novel set in Victorian South London, 1896)

Katie Flynn, Liverpool Daughter, Century (series about a young girl trying to make her way in war-torn Liverpool – 1940s)

Mariah Fredericks, Death of an American Beauty, Minotaur (Jane Prescott is taking a break from her duties as lady’s maid for a week, and plans to begin it with attending the hottest and most scandalous show in town – 3rd in series)

Holly Green, Workhouse Girl, Ebury (Patty Jenkins has come a long way from her poverty-stricken days in Brownlow workhouse and now has a coveted position in the kitchens at Freeman’s Department store in Liverpool)

Michelle Griep, The House at the End of the Moor, Shiloh Run (19th-century inspirational mystery romance)

Paul Griffiths, Mr Beethoven, Henningham Family Press (imagines a visit by Beethoven to the United States to write a Biblical oratorio)

Nino Haratischvili, (trans. Charlotte Collins, Ruth Martin), The Eighth Life, Scribe US (pic family saga beginning with the Russian Revolution and crossing a century)

Louise Hare, This Lovely City, Anansi International (debut novel about a Jamaican immigrant living in postwar London)

Amy Harmon, Where the Lost Wander, Lake Union (a haunting love story set on the Oregon Trail in 1853―a family and their unlikely protector find their way through peril, uncertainty, and loss)

C. S. Harris, Who Speaks for the Damned, Berkley (Sebastian St. Cyr investigates the mysterious life and death of a nobleman accused of murder in this 15th in series)

Joan E. Histon, The Senator’s Darkest Days, Top Hat (historical thriller set in 40AD)

Richard Hopton, The Straits of Treachery, Allison & Busby (Straits of Messina, 1810 – a shadowy underworld of spies, traitors and informers where nothing is quite as it seems)

Emma Hornby, A Daughter’s Price, Bantam (historical saga set in Northern England in late 1800s)

Gill Hornby, Miss Austen, Flatiron (England 1840 – witty novel about Cassandra Austen and her famous sister, Jane)

Anna Lee Huber, A Stroke of Malice, Berkley (a Lady Darby mystery set in Scotland , 1832)

Angela Hunt, Daughter of Cana, Bethany House (#1 in series of 4 New Testament novels)

Nancy Jensen, In Our Midst, Dzanc (tells the story of one family’s fight to cling to the ideals of freedom and opportunity that brought them to America)

Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler, Wm Morrow (1865 – story of an itinerant fiddle player & a ragtag band of musicians trying to make a living, and the charming young Irish lass who steals his heart)

Reinhard Jirgl, (trans. Iain Galbraith), The Unfinished, Seagull (a tale of four generations plays out between the ruins of Nazi Germany and the rise and fall of communist East Germany, the birth of the Berlin Republic, and the shadow of a new millennium)

Serge Joncour, (trans. Jane Aitken & Polly Mackintosh), Wild Dog, Gallic (in an isolated house on a French hillside, two couples, a hundred years apart, seek refuge from the outside world)

Margaret Kaine, A Daughter’s Hope, Hodder (historical saga)

Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu, (trans. Mark David Wyers), Stepmother Earth, Milet (Ahmet Celal loses his right arm as the result of a bullet wound at Gallipoli. Returning to Istanbul he is well-educated and at home in the city, but is taunted and teased because of his disability)

Imogen Kealey, Liberation, Grand Central (historical thriller of one of WWII’s most fascinating lesser-known figures: secret agent and WWII heroine Nancy Wake, once the Nazi’s Most Wanted Person)

Irene Kessler, Mountain of Full Moons, She Writes (Elisha is a 13-year-old girl living in Ancient Israel. She composes and sings songs, talks to an angel and tells other women to stand up for themselves. How can she exist in her society where women’s only choice is marry and have children?)

Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings, Viking (story set in the first century about a woman who finds her voice and her destiny in a time of great despair and great hope)

Otto Kraus, The Children’s Block, Pegasus (story of five hundred children who lived in the Czech Family Camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau between September 1943 and June 1944)

Keith Ross Leckie, Cursed! Blood of the Donnellys, Douglas & McIntyre (based on the true story of the Donnellys of Lucan Township. In the midst of the feuds and famine of Tipperary, Ireland in 1846, Jim Donnelly and Johannah McGee fall passionately in love)

Madeleine L’Engle, The Moment of Tenderness, Grand Central (collection of short stories written in 1940s and 50s traces an emotional arc inspired by L’Engle’s early life and career)

Dorothy Macardle, Dark Enchantment, Tramp Press (c.1953) (evokes a magical pre-war France)

Frances Macken, You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here, One World (a portrait of 3 girls growing up in a small village in rural Ireland)

Cathy Mansell, A Place to Belong, Headline (novel set against the sweeping backdrop of Dublin and rural Ireland in the 1940s)

Maggie Mason, Blackpool’s Angel, Sphere (saga set in Blackpool, 1873)

Carol McGrath, The Silken Rose, Headline Accent (based on the life of Ailenor of Provence)

Ellen Meeropol, Her Sister’s Tattoo, Red Hen Press (sisters Rosa and Esther march through downtown Detroit in August 1968 to protest the war in Vietnam)

Rod Miller, Pinebox Collins, Five Star (19th-c western)

Wu Ming-Yi, (trans. Darryl Sterk), The Stolen Bicycle, Text (a writer finds himself ensnared in the strangely intertwined stories of Lin Wang, the oldest elephant who ever lived, the soldiers who fought in the jungles of South-East Asia during World War II, and the secret world of butterfly handicraft makers in Taiwan)

Louisa Morgan, The Age of Witches, Redhook (tale of family, ambition, and love set in Gilded Age New York and London)

Sarah Xerar Murphy, Itzel II, Guernica (emotions range from euphoria to despair as story moves from the Oaxaca coast back to Mexico City, from Nauta’s Brooklyn streets to her time in Canada, and from the attraction between Basta and Itzel that has altered the characters’ friendship)

Annie Murray, Girls in Tin Hats, Pan (love, friendship, tragedy and courage under Birmingham’s war-torn skies)

Amy Sue Nathan, The Last Bathing Beauty, Lake Union (a former beauty queen faces the secrets of her past—for herself for her family’s future—in a story about fate, choices, and second chances)

Emily Neuberger, A Tender Thing, G.P. Putnam’s Sons (debut novel set under the dazzling lights of late 1950s Broadway)

Terri Nixon, A Cornish Inheritance, Piatkus (saga set in 1920 in south Devon, England)

Billy O’Callaghan, The Boatman and Other Stories, Harper (stories span a century and two continents, from the muddy fields of Ireland to a hotel room in Paris, a dingy bar in Segovia to an airplane bound for Taipei)

Eliot Pattison, The King’s Beast, Counterpoint (spring 1769, and war is brewing and hopes for a peaceful resolution may rest with an astonishing cache of fossils recovered in the Kentucky territories)

Molly Pohlig, The Unsuitable, Henry Holt (blend of Gothic ghost story and Victorian novel of manners)

Oliver Pötzsch, (trans. Lisa Reinhardt), The Master’s Apprentice, Amazon Crossing (a young man’s destined quest becomes a dance with the devil in this retelling of the Faust legend)

Zvi Preigerzon, (trans. Binyamin Shalom), When the Menorah Fades, Cherry Orchard (describes the life of the simple Jewish people and their suffering under the Nazis, with a Kabbalistic spiritual touch)

Bill Pronzini, The Stolen Gold Affair, Forge (8th title in the Carpenter & Quincannon historical mystery series)

Christine Raafat, The Will to Succeed, Unicorn (tells the story of Lady Anne Clifford, chronicles her brave attempt to take back what she was owed and gives readers a glimpse into some of the issues that women faced in the 17th-C)

Rishi Reddi, Passage West, Ecco (novel follows a family of Indian sharecroppers at the onset of World War I, revealing a little-known part of California history)

Jennifer Rosner, The Yellow Bird Sings, Picador (about a mother and daughter forced into hiding at the height of WWII, and the bond between parent and child that can never be broken)

Polly Samson, A Theatre for Dreamers, Bloomsbury (novel set on 1960s Hydra, a place and a bohemian society that has captivated the world for decades)

Katharine Schellman, The Body in the Garden, Crooked Lane (a Lily Adler mystery; London 1815)

William Sirls, The Crown Lord, Rare Bird (alternative history – after a successful revolt in 1846 that reversed the roles of slaves and masters, modern-day America is now dominated by a wealthy, black ruling class)

Lee Smith, Blue Marlin, Blair (book centers on the Blue Marlin Motel in 1959, where Jenny, her beautiful socialite mother, and chastened father share their sunny days with movie stars)

Wilbur Smith, Call of the Raven, Zaffre (adventure about one man’s quest for revenge, the brutality of slavery in America and the imbalance between humans that can drive – or defeat – us)

Lauraine Snelling, A Blessing to Cherish, Bethany House (finale to early 20th-c series about Norwegian immigrants)

Julia Spencer-Fleming, Hid From Our Eyes, Minotaur (Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne mystery series with a new crime that spans decades)

Katherine Stansfield, The Mermaid’s Call, Allison & Busby (Cornwall 1845: a haunting evocation of a place and time when superstition and logic coexisted)

Caroline Stevermer, The Glass Magician, Tor (magical and romantic tale set in New York’s Gilded Age)

Stephanie Storey, Raphael, Painter in Rome, Arcade (an art history thriller)

Kevin Sullivan, The Figure in the Photograph, Allison & Busby (1898. When Juan Camerón’s father is killed while working as a photographer in Cuba, he leaves behind nothing but his last photos for his son)

Karin Tanabe, A Hundred Suns, SMP (novel set in 1930s Indochina about an American who journeys there in the name of family fortune, the glamorous world she finds herself in—and the truth she may be running from)

Molly Tanzer, Creatures of Charm and Hunger, John Joseph Adams/Mariner (magic-infused universe takes readers to World War II–era England where two young women are studying witchcraft)

Andrew Taylor, The Last Protector, HarperCollins (James Marwood & Cat Lovett book 4)

Victoria Thompson, Murder on Pleasant Avenue, Berkley (Gaslight Mystery series)

Larry Tremblay, Impurity, Talonbooks (bestselling author Alice Livingston is dead, leaving her philosopher husband, Antoine, dealing with a legacy towards which he has felt increasingly estranged)

Jennifer Smith Turner, Child Bride, SparkPress (in the segregated South of the mid-1900s – coming-of-age journey of a young girl from the South who joins the African American great migration to the North)

Szczepan Twardoch, (trans. Sean Gasper Bye), The King of Warsaw, Amazon Crossing (1937. Hitler is rising. Fascism is escalating. As a specter of violence hangs over Poland like a black cloud, its marginalized and vilified Jewish population hopes for a promise of sanctuary in Palestine)

Brian Van Norman, Against the Machine, Guernica (at war against Napoleon near bankrupt English mill-masters experiment with a new factory system acquiring machines to replace men)

Erica Vetsch, The Lost Lieutenant, Kregel (Serendipity & Secrets Book 1 – Christian romance)

Megan Walker, Lakeshire Park, Shadow Mountain (Brighton, England 1820 – Regency Romance)

Alexandra Walsh, The Arbella Stuart Conspiracy, Sapere (time-shift conspiracy thriller)

Martha Waters, To Have and to Hoax, Atria (historical rom-com in which an estranged husband and wife in Regency England feign accidents and illness in an attempt to gain attention)

Katherine Webb, The Disappearance, Orion (a wartime story of WW II)

Alison Weir, The Princess of Scotland, Headline (companion piece to Kathryn Howard: The Tainted Queen)

C. M. Wendelboe, The Marshal and the Mystical Mountain, Five Star (a Nelson Lane Frontier mystery)

Jerri Westerson, Sword of Shadows, Severn House (a quest to find the ancient sword Excalibur quickly turns into a hunt for a determined killer for Crispin Guest)

Tracey Enerson Wood, The Engineer’s Wife, Sourcebooks Landmark (portrait of a woman transformed by a project of unfathomable scale, and of a husband and wife determined to build something that lasts)

Kathleen Y’Barbo, The Chisholm Trail Bride, Barbour (daughters of the Mayflower series – inspirational)

Michael Zimmer, Villa Lobos, Five Star (19th-c western)

May 2020

Sarah Ackerman, Red Sky Over Hawaii, Mira (story of a woman who has to put her safety and her heart on the line when she becomes the unexpected guardian of a misfit group)

Jane A. Adams, The Good Wife, Severn House (a Henry Johnstone mystery set in 1920s England)

W.M. Akers, Westside Saints, Harper Voyager (return to a twisted version of Jazz Age New York as relentless sleuth Gilda Carr’s pursuit of tiny mysteries drags her into a case that will rewrite everything she knows about her past)

V. S. Alexander, The Traitor, One More Chapter (about the daring White Rose group who stood up to the Nazis and paid the ultimate price)

Heather Babcock, Filthy Sugar, Inanna (set in the mid-1930s— tells the story of Wanda Whittle, a nineteen-year-old dreamer who models fur coats in an uptown department store)

Amanda Barratt, The White Rose Resists, Kregel (inspired by the true story of a group of ordinary men and women who dared to stand against evil)

Amanda Barratt, Angela K Couch, Pegg Thomas, Jennifer Uhlarik, Blacksmith Brides, Barbour (4 historical Christian romances)

Kerry Barrett, The Forgotten Girl, HQ Digital (dual-period narrative set in 1966 and present)

Tania Bayard, In the Company of Fools, Severn House (a baby abandoned in the palace gardens leads scribe-sleuth Christine de Pizan into a mystery involving murder in 14th-century France)

Johanna Bell, The Bobby Girls, Hodder (1914; while their men fight in France, at home in Britain women are finally seizing the opportunity to make a difference)

Sophie Bienvenu, (trans. Rhonda Mullins), Searching For Sam, Talonbooks (a monologue from one man’s point of view in which we discover the tragedies of his life in flashbacks to his past)

Barbara Miller Biles, Dear Hearts, Inanna (collection of short stories that focus on the ways in which girls and women who were teenagers in the 1960s experienced the changing cultural values shaped by feminism)

Alfred Birney, The Interpreter from Java, Head of Zeus (a crucial chapter in Dutch and European history that was deliberately concealed behind the ideological façade of postwar optimism)

Barbara Taylor Bradford, In the Lion’s Den, St. Martin’s (spanning the years from 1889 to 1892―second book in the House of Falconer saga)

Lisa Braxton, The Talking Drum, Inanna (set in early 70s; provides a springboard to discussions on race and class differences, on the treatment of immigrants, and the government’s relationship and responsibility to society)

Maggie Brookes, The Prisoner’s Wife, Berkley (inspired by the true story of a daring deception that plunges a courageous young woman deep into the horrors of a Nazi PoW camp)

Fiona Buckley, The Scent of Danger, Severn House (an Ursula Blanchard mystery)

Sarah Burton, The Strange Adventures of H, Legend Press (friendless, pregnant and destitute – H is forced to fend for herself on the rapidly emptying streets of London under quarantine)

Paul Butler, Mina’s Child, Inanna (imagines a second generation springing from the ‘heroes’ in Bram Stoker’s Dracula- Mina and Jonathan Harker)

Deborah Carr, Mrs Boots, One More Chapter (novel inspired by the true story behind the Boots Empire)

Charles Causey, Trains to Treblinka, Elm Hill (an historical fiction which is an authentic look at Treblinka written as a suspense novel)

Janie Chang, The Library of Legends, Wm Morrow (third in a loosely-connected trilogy—in which a young woman travels across China with a convoy of student refugees, fleeing the hostilities of a brutal war with Japan)

Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln’s Sisters, Wm Morrow (story of love, loss, and sisterhood)

Adrienne Chinn, The English Wife, One More Chapter (dual-time line novel set on VE Day 1945 and Sept 11, 2001)

Jill McCroskey Coupe, Beginning with Cannonballs, She Writes (in segregated 1940s Knoxville, Tennessee, Hanna (black) and Gail (white) share a crib as infants and remain close friends into their teenage years. Later on, it’s not so easy)

Dilly Court, The Country Bride, HarperCollins (3rd book in Village Secrets trilogy set in 1879)

Diney Costeloe, The French Wife, Head of Zeus (sequel to The Children of the Siege. Hélène and Annette are now eighteen and strive to put the horrors of their past behind them… But can they?)

Brenda Davies, The Girl Behind the Gates, Hodder (dual-narrative tale of a young woman cut down in her prime, and of the woman who finally brings her back to life)

Dan Davin, Janet Wildon (ed.), The Gorse Blooms Pale, Otago Univ. Press (gathers together twenty-six stories and a selection of poems reflecting Davin’s early 20th-c experiences of growing up in an Irish–New Zealand family)

Rusty Davis, Cheyenne Gun, Five Star (the adventures of Fox Running and John Dooley Bk 1)

Theodore Dawes, Autograph Album, Laboratory Books (in a novel of social history, a young girl’s autograph album of the late 1880s is reproduced, with biographies of everyone who signed it)

Jennifer Delamere, Line By Line, Bethany House (years of hard work enabled Douglas Shaw to escape a life of desperate poverty–and now he’s determined to marry into high society)

Christopher De Vinck, Ashes, Harper Inspire (novel about two young women whose differences, which once united them, will tear them apart forever, during Hitler’s Nazi occupation of Belgium and France)

Susanne Dietze, Patty Smith Hall, Cynthia Hickey, Teresa Ives Lilly, Carousel Dreams, Barbour (experience the early history of four iconic carousels which draw together four couples)

David C. Downing, Looking for the King, Paraclete Press (in 1940 a 23-year-old graduate student, is in England researching the historical evidence for the legendary King Arthur)

Kimberly Duffy, A Mosaic of Wings, Bethany House (determined to uphold her father’s legacy, newly graduated Nora Shipley joins an entomology research expedition to India to prove herself in the field)

Amanda Dykes, Set the Stars Alight, Bethany House (reeling from the loss of her parents, Lucie Clairmont discovers an artifact under the floorboards of their London flat, leading her to an old seaside estate)

Anne Emery, Postmark Berlin, ECW Press (story takes us from the historic Navy town of Halifax, Nova Scotia, to the history-laden city of Berlin, as Brennan and his brother Terry head to Germany in search of answers)

Loren D. Estleman, Indigo, Forge (film detective Valentino is summoned to the estate of Ignacio Bozel to collect a film from the classic noir period, thought lost for more than sixty years)

Edward Farmer, Pale, Blackstone (Mississippi, summer 1966― novel explores the ties that bind and how quickly humanity can fade and return us to primal ways)

Jessie Redmon Fauset, There is Confusion (c.1924), Dover (set in Philadelphia a century ago, novel explores the struggle for social equality as experienced by two members of the black middle class)

Louise Fein, Daughter of the Reich, Wm Morrow (story of impossible love set against the backdrop of the Nazi regime)

Louise Fein, People Like Us, Head of Zeus (love, loss and finding oneself in a nation gripped by tyranny)

Lauren Francis-Sharma, book of the little axe, Atlantic Monthly (a journey, spanning decades and oceans from Trinidad to the American West during the tumultuous days of warring colonial powers and westward expansion)

Ann H. Gabhart, An Appalachian Summer, Revell (in 1933 Louisville, most people are focused on the Great Depression but all Piper Danson can think about is how to get out of being a debutante)

Alex George, The Paris Hours, Flatiron (Paris between the wars teems with artists, writers, and musicians. But amidst the dazzling creativity of the city’s most famous citizens, four regular people are each searching for something they’ve lost)

David Gilman, Cross of Fire, Head of Zeus (the Hundred Years War still rages on and the French army thirsts for Thomas Blackstone’s blood)

Dennis Glover, The Last Man in Europe, Polygon (1947. In a damp, run-down farmhouse on the island of Jura, George Orwell is embarking on his greatest work – Nineteen Eighty-Four)

Gail Godwin, Old Lovegood Girls, Bloomsbury (the story of two remarkable women and the complex friendship between them that spans decades)

Adrien Goetz, (trans. Natasha Lehrer), Villa of Delirium, New Vessel Press (on the French Riviera in the early 1900s, an illustrious family builds a villa–a replica of a Greek palace, complete with marble columns and frescoes depicting mythological gods)

C. W. Gortner, The First Actress, Ballantine (tumultuous life of the legendary French star Sarah Bernhardt–the world’s first modern actress and international celebrity)

Kester Grant, The Court of Miracles, HarperVoyager (a young thief finds herself going head to head with leaders of Paris’s criminal underground in the wake of the French Revolution)

Jean-Claude Grumberg, The Most Precious of Cargoes, HarperVia (set during the height of WW II, an unsettling tale about a woodcutter whose wife finds a mysterious parcel thrown from a passing train)

Kimiko Guthrie, Block Seventeen, Blackstone (an exploration of a dark passage of American history)

Charlaine Harris, An Easy Death, Gallery / Saga (alternative historical adventure following a young gunslinging mercenary on a deadly mission through the American Southwest)

Kate Heartfield, The Humours of Grub Street, ChiZine Publications (after watching his hero Daniel Defoe stand in the pillory, a young lawyer named Rye Hackett gets the courage to publish a political essay)

Jody Hedlund, A Bride of Convenience, Bethany House (book 5 in The Bride Ships series)

Conn Iggulden, The Gates of Athens, Michael Joseph (set in the bloody, brutal world of Ancient Persia, an age of ever-shifting loyalties and epic battles. Athenian book 1))

Mark C. Jackson, The Great Texas Dance, Five Star (The Tales of Zebadiah Creed, Bk 2)

Natalie Jenner, The Jane Austen Society, St Martin’s (just after the Second World War, in the small English village of Chawton (Jane Austen’s last home), an unusual but like-minded group of individuals band together to attempt something remarkable)

Catherine Jinks, Shepherd, Text (thirteen-year-old shepherd Tom must defend himself against a ruthless killer, tracking him through the outback. Set in colonial era Australia 1840)

Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints, Tor (dawn of WWII―amidst the whir of city life, a girl from Harlem is drawn into the glittering underworld of Manhattan, where she’s hired to use her knives to strike fear amongst its most dangerous denizens)

Stephen P. Kiernan, Universe of Two, Wm Morrow (fictionalized account of the life of Charlie Fisk, a gifted mathematician who was drafted into the Manhattan Project and ordered to build the detonator for the atomic bomb)

Josi S. Kilpack, Rakes and Roses, Shadow Mountain (Regency Romance)

Carolyn Kirby, When We Fall, No Exit (1943. In England, Vee Katchatourian is training to be a ferry pilot and, in spite of her sex and her foreign name, she is determined to get her Wings)

Linda Lafferty, Fierce Dreamer, Lake Union (an historical novel about a defiant seventeenth-century artist who dared to feed her passions and explore the limitless possibilities of art)

Nathaniel Lande, While the Music Played, Blackstone (beginning in 1939 pre-war Prague, novel focuses on the story of young Max Mueller, a curious bright romantic,-a budding musician, piano tuner, and nascent journalist)

Jenny Lecoat, Hedy’s War, Polygon (in June 1940, Hedy Bercu, a young Jewish girl from Vienna, finds herself once more entrapped by the Nazis on the Channel Islands)

Maureen Lee, Goodbye Liverpool, Orion (Liverpool 1937 – story of wartime love, loss and courage)

Aimee Liu, Glorious Boy, Red Hen Press (after five years in the remote Andaman Islands, aspiring anthropologist Claire Durant and her husband Shep, must evacuate with their beloved but mysteriously mute four-year-old)

Posy Lovell, The Kew Gardens Girls, Trapeze (inspired by real life events, about the brave women during WWI who worked in the historic grounds of London’s Kew Gardens)

Lee Martin, Yours, Jean, Dzanc (set in 1950s ―about small town manners and the loneliness that drives people to do things they never imagined)

Maggie Mason, Blackpool Sisters, Sphere (2nd book in trilogy set in 1902 and 1914)

Andrew McBride, Coyote’s People, Five Star (western historical fiction)

Kathleen McGurl, The Pearl Locket, HQ Digital (when a scrawled message from 1944 is found under the wallpaper in her room, Ali begins to question the history of the house left to her by her great-aunt)

Kathleen McGurl, The Emerald Comb, HQ Digital (dual narrative moves between the 19th century and present)

Brian Moreland, Tomb of the Gods, Flame Tree (in 1935, British archaeologists vanished inside an Egyptian cave. Egyptologist Imogen Riley desperately wants to know what happened to the ill-fated expedition)

Isla Morley, The Last Blue, Pegasus (inspired by the fascinating real case of “the Blue People of Kentucky” that probes questions of identity, love, and family)

Tara Moss, The War Widow, Dutton (the war may be officially over, but journalist Billie Walker’s search for a missing young immigrant man will plunge her right back into the danger)

Abir Mukherjee, Death in the East, Pegasus (Calcutta police detective Captain Sam Wyndham and his Indian Sergeant are back for another adventure set in 1920s India)

Janette Oke, Laurel Oke Logan, Unyielding Hope, Bethany House (inspirational romance)

Amanda Quick, Close Up, Berkley (Burning Cove, California is where 1930s Hollywood glamour conceals a ruthless killer)

Anne Raeff, Only The River, Counterpoint (a novel of two families set in New York and Nicaragua over several generations as their lives collide in mysterious ways)

Jan Rehner, The House of Izeiu, Inanna (inspired by the life and experiences of Sabine Zlatin who, as a Jew using a fake identity, managed to find families to care for Jewish children in French refugee camps)

Lucinda Riley, The Sun Sister, Atria (transports readers from the dazzling streets of modern-day New York City to the breathtaking plains of 1940s colonial Kenya)

Carol Rivers, Rose of Ruby Street, S&S UK (family saga set in the East End of London)

Lilly Robbins, The Nightingales in Mersey Square, Orion (world war two saga of friendship and hope in the face of adversity)

Ralph Rothmann, The God of that Summer, Picador (novel of World War II and the final months of a war that forever darkened the souls of the civilians who lived through it)

Gareth Rubin, The Winter Agent, Michael Joseph (thriller set in occupied France, 1944)

Adania Shibli, (trans. Elisabeth Jaquette), Minor Detail, New Directions (a novel meditating on war, violence, memory, and the sufferings of the Palestinian people- multi-period – 1949 & present)

Anna Solomon, The Book of V., Henry Holt (intertwines the lives of a Brooklyn mom in 2016, a senator’s wife in the 1970s, and the Bible’s Queen Esther, whose stories of sex, power and desire surprisingly converge)

Karen Lee Street, Edgar Allan Poe and the Empire of the Dead, Pegasus (the third novel in the author’s Poe and Dupin series)

Ashley E. Sweeney, Answer Creek, She Writes (shadows the Donner Party as they trek west ―chronicles one young woman’s descent into depravity as she risks values, faith, reputation, for the mirage of a better life in California)

Terry Lynn Thomas, House of Lies, HQ Digital (World War II murder mystery)

Sam Thompson, Jott, JM Originals (February 1935, two young Irishmen walk in the grounds of a London mental hospital. Arthur Bourne, a junior psychiatrist, is about to jeopardise his future for his closest friend)

Joanna Toye, Heartache for the Shop Girls, HarperCollins (1942 — 3rd in a wartime drama set around a town’s department store)

Dejan Trajkoski, (trans. Paul Filev), Infidelity, Dalkey Archive Press (set in Macedonia at the beginning of the 20th century, the novel draws on myth and history to tell an unusual story of star-crossed lovers)

Jen Turano, Storing Up Trouble, Bethany House (discovers the curious way feelings can grow between two very different people in the midst of chaos)

Richard Vission, The Foundations of Kindness, Guernica (tale of love, politics, murder and assassination in sixties’ Chicago)

James Wade, All Things Left Wild, Blackstone (a botched robbery sets two men on conflicting journeys across the untamed landscape of the American West)

Alison Weir, Six Tudor Queens: Katheryn Howard, The Tainted Queen, Headline (fifth book in the Tudor Queens series)

Robert Wexelblatt, The Hsi-Wei Tales, Regal House (story set against the historical background of the Sui Dynasty in China)

Abigail Wilson, Masquerade at Middlecrest Abbey, Thomas Nelson (historical Regency romance)

Phyllis Brett Young, The Ravine (c.1962), Véhicule Press (when two students are assaulted, a small-town teacher gets a fleeting look at the perpetrator)

Alice Zeniter, The Art of Losing, Picador (novel of family, history, immigration and identity, spanning three generations and some seventy years across the shores of the Mediterranean)

June 2020

Hope Adams, Conviction, Michael Joseph (July 1841 – tale about female anger, subservience and strength)

Katherine Addison, The Angel of the Crows, Tor (in an alternate 1880s London, angels inhabit every public building, and vampires and werewolves walk the streets with human beings under a well-regulated truce)

Ellen Alpsten, Tsarina, Bloomsbury (debut novel about the serf’s daughter who became the Empress of Russia)

JM Alvey, Scorpions in Corinth, Orion (the Persian War is over and wealthy Athenians are looking to expand alliances overseas)

Taylor Anderson, Winds of Wrath, Ace (the crew of the WWII destroyer USS Walker is mysteriously transported to an alternate version of earth – alternate history fantasy series)

Jean-Baptiste Andrea (trans. Sam Taylor), A Hundred Million Years and a Day, Gallic (summer 1954: a tale of self-discovery)

Rosie Archer, Victory for the Bluebird Girls, Quercus (final chapter in the Bluebird Girls series)

Michael Arditti, The Anointed, Arcadia (novel centres on three fascinating, formidable women in Ancient Israel, whose voices have hitherto been silenced)

Rachel Beanland, Florence Adler Swims Forever, Simon & Schuster (over the course of one summer three generations of the Adler family grapple with heartbreak, romance, and the weight of family secrets)

Lawrence Reid Bechtel, That Dazzling Sun, BQB Publishing (in this second book, Rachel Bringhouse sails to England to work alongside the famous social activist and poet, Hannah More)

Misty M. Beller, Love’s Mountain Quest, Bethany House (inspirational romance)

Marlowe Benn, Passing Fancies, Lake Union (2nd in Julia Kydd series set in 1920s New York)

L. Annette Binder, The Vanishing Sky, Bloomsbury (story about a family of German citizens during World War II)

Shelley Blanton-Stroud, Copy Boy, She Writes (it’s 1937, the height of the Great Depression, and there are almost no jobs for girls, so Jane turns herself into Benny and gets hired as a newspaper copy boy)

Kate Brelland, The Way Home, Piatkus (next book in the saga series set during WW1, based on the lives of the female factory workers at Barratt’s Sweet Factory)

Derek Burnett, The Fortunes and Vicissitudes of Stern Whitman, Five Star (Prospector Stern Whitman and his little brother, Johnny, have made a once-in-a-lifetime strike high up in the Sierra Nevada)

Linda Byler, The Dakota Series Trilogy, Good Books (three Amish novels set during the Great Depression)

Elizabeth Camden, A Gilded Lady, Bethany House (Hope and Glory book 2)

Christian Cameron, The Last Greek, Orion (211BCE. The Roman invasion from the western seas is imminent, and from the south the Spartans are burning and pillaging their way north)

Mathew Carr, Black Sun Rising, Pegasus (a sinister detective story of eugenics, racism, and nationalist paranoia set in early 1900s)

Janet Skeslien Charles, The Paris Library, Atria US/Two Roads UK (based on the true WW II story of the heroic librarians at the American Library in Paris; a story of romance, friendship, and the power of literature to bring us together)

Alys Clare, The Indigo Ghosts, Severn House (forensic mystery set in Stuart England. Gabriel Taverner uncovers a series of shocking secrets when he’s summoned by his former naval captain to investigate strange goings-on aboard his ship)

Cassandra Clark, The Hour of the Fox, Severn House (introducing reluctant spy and friar-sleuth Brother Rodric Chandler in the first of a medieval mystery series set in 1399)

Chanel Cleeton, The Last Train to Key West, Berkley (in 1935 three women are forever changed when one of the most powerful hurricanes in history hits the Florida Keys)

Tea Cooper, The Woman in the Green Dress, Thomas Nelson (a mystery surrounding an opal and a green dress links two women—one in the mid-1800s and the other at the close of WW I)

Christina Courtenay, Echoes of the Runes, Headline (dual-narrative romantic history set in present day and 869AD Sweden)

Shaun Curry, Of Blood and Flame, Harper Inspire (set between the years 1627-1637, Book 2 in The Swords of Fire Trilogy witnesses the continuation of the Shogun’s Christian extermination)

Margaux DeRoux, The Lost Diary of Venice, Ballantine (two love stories are fatefully connected by one artist’s mysterious diary in this debut that leaps between the mysteries of late Renaissance Venice and the dramas of present-day America)

Marina Endicott, The Voyage of the Morning Light, W.W. Norton (novel set aboard the Morning Light, a Nova Scotian merchant ship sailing through the South Pacific in 1912)

Elaine Everest, Wedding Bells for Woolworths, Pan (1947 – historical saga series)

Stuart Evers, The Blind Light, Picador (from the 1950s to now―story of the interconnected lives of two families from very different backgrounds)

Robert Fabbri, To the Strongest, Corvus (Babylon, 323 BC―first book in bloody and brutal series set after the death of Alexander the Great)

W. Michael Farmer, The Odyssey of Geronimo: Twenty-Three Years a Prisoner of War, Five Star (based on history and Apache culture)

Ellen Feldman, Paris Never Leaves You, St. Martin’s Griffin (alternating between wartime Paris and 1950s New York publishing ― a story of resilience, love, and impossible choices, exploring how survival never comes without a cost)

Susie Finkbeiner, Stories That Bind Us, Revell (family saga set in 1960s Michigan)

Kathleen O’Neal Gear, W. Michael Gear, People of the Canyons, Forge (a tale of trapped magic, a tyrant who wants to wield its power…and a young girl who could be the key to save a people)

Tim Glister, Red Corona, Point Blank (it’s 1961 and the white heat of the Space Race is making the Cold War even colder)

Leonard Goldberg, The Art of Deception, Minotaur (Daughter of Sherlock Holmes series book 4)

Theodora Goss, The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl, Gallery (Mary Jekyll and the Athena Club foil a plot to unseat the Queen and race to save one of their own)

Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, Pack Up Your Troubles, Sphere (War At Home book 6)

John Hart, The Unwilling, SMP (set in the South at the height of the Vietnam War―combines crime, suspense and searing glimpses into the human mind and soul)

Sarah Hawkswood, Vale of Tears, Allison & Busby (1144. When a man is found stabbed to death, he provides the link tying together several seemingly random deaths. But with a multitude of suspects, who’s to blame?)

Ursula Hegi, The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls, Flatiron (1878―a portrait of marriage and motherhood, and of the ways in which women hold each other up in the face of heartbreak)

Michael Januska, St. Luke Road, Dundurn (bootleggers, cops, and corruption collide along the Detroit River, where Jack McCloskey smuggles his illegal liquor, in this Prohibition-era mystery)

Jane Johnson, The Sea Gate, Head of Zeus (after her mother ‘s death, Rebecca discovers family secrets buried for more than seventy years)

M.R.C. Kasasian, The Ghost Tree, Head of Zeus (multi period Betty Church murder mystery set in 1914 and 1940¬)

Gordon Kerr, The Partisan Heart, Muswell Press (while the brutal repercussions of WWII are still reverberating, Michael uncovers the truth of his wife’s affair and reveals five decades of duplicity and deception)

Laurie R. King, Riviera Gold, Bantam (Europe 1920s – Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes turn the Riviera upside-down to crack their most captivating case)

Matthew Kneale, Pilgrims, Atlantic UK (1289. A rich farmer fears he’ll go to hell for cheating his neighbours)

Nella Larsen, Passing, Macmillan Collector’s (novel about racial identity set in New York in 1929)

Valerie Fraser Luesse, The Key to Everything, Revell (after WWII and a family tragedy, Peyton Cabot seeks connection with his troubled veteran father)

David Mack, The Shadow Commission, Tor (November 1963. Cade and Anja have lived in hiding for a decade, training new mages. Then the assassination of President Kennedy triggers a series of murders whose victims are all magicians)

Edward Marston, Rage of the Assassin, Allison & Busby (murder mystery set in London 1817)

Clara McKenna, Murder at Blackwater Bend, Kensington (romantic murder mystery set in 1920s England)

Martha McPhee, An Elegant Woman, Scribner (multigenerational saga that explores one family’s story against the sweep of 20th-century American history)

Alice Miller, More Miracle Than Bird, Tin House (charts the iconic love story between W. B. Yeats and his wife Georgie, against the backdrop of WWI)

Judith Miller, A Single Spark, Bethany House (wanting to do her part in the Civil War effort, Clara McBride goes to work in the cartridge room at the Washington Arsenal)

David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue, Random House (over two years and two albums, novel navigates the dark end of the Sixties: its parties, drugs and egos, political change and personal tragedy; and the trials of life as a working band in London, the provinces)

Allison Montclair, A Royal Affair, Minotaur (more goes wrong than could be imagined when Iris Sparks and Gwendolyn Bainbridge are unexpectedly engaged to dig into the past of a suitor of a royal princess)

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic, Del Rey (gothic suspense novel about an isolated mansion in 1950s Mexico—and the brave socialite drawn to its treacherous secrets)

Lars Mytting (trans. Deborah Dawkin), The Bell in the Lake, Overlook (novel set in 1897 Norway, of a young woman whose fate plays out against her village’s mystical church bells)

Sten Nadolny (trans. Breon and Lynda Mitchell), The Joy of Sorcery, Paul Dry Books, (Pahroc writes about his extraordinary life in 20th-c Germany for his young granddaughter, who, like him, has secret magical abilities)

John D. Nesbitt, Great Lonesome, Five Star (a Wyoming western)

Gerard O’ Donovan, The Doom List, Severn House (new 1920s mystery featuring Irish-born cop turned private investigator Tom Collins)

S. J. Parris, Execution, Pegasus (historical thriller featuring  finds Bruno going undercover to prevent an assassination plot on Queen Elizabeth)

H. G. Parry, A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians, Redhook (a genre-defying story of magic, war, and the struggle for freedom in the early modern world)

David Peace, Tokyo Redux, Knopf (novel about a high-profile crime that occurrs in Tokyo during the occupation and goes cold, haunting the lives of both American and Japanese investigators for the next forty years)

Tracie Peterson, The Way of Love, Bethany House (Faith Kenner is pursuing her dream to become a doctor and use her gift to help the native populations on reservations)

Alice Poon, Tales of Ming Courtesans, Earnshaw Books (a tale of female friendship, honor, and sacrifice for love, set in 17th Century China)

Laura Purcell, The House of Whispers, Penguin (Victorian tale set on the Cornish coast in a rambling house by the sea in which a maid cares for a mute old woman with a mysterious past)

Karen Quevillon, The Parasol Flower, Regal House (working from 19th-c letters and paintings a PhD student reconstructs a year in the life of Hannah Inglis, an unknown artist who slipped from the history books)

Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints, Amistad (pays tribute to Detroit’s legendary neighborhood, a mecca for jazz, sports, and politics)

Deborah Reed, Pale Morning Light with Violet Swan, Mariner (story of a famous abstract painter at the end of her life—her family, her art, and the long-buried secrets that won’t stay hidden for much longer)

Rachel Rhys, Island of Secrets, Black Swan (set in the city of Havana on the cusp of revolution)

Michael R. Ritt, The Sons of Philo Gaines, Five Star (Philo Gaines is a mountain man, Indian fighter, Texas Ranger and army scout, a father with three sons, a scholar, a gambler, and a gunman)

Karen Robards, The Black Swan of Paris, Mira (novel about a celebrated singer in WWII occupied France who joins the Resistance to save her estranged family from being killed in a German prison)

Frank Robbins, Johnny Hazard: The Newspaper Dailies Vol. Eight: 1956-1957, Hermes (continues the comic-strip adventures of Johnny Hazard picking up the storyline where Volume Seven left off)

Diana Rosie, The Girl Who Turned Right, Mantle (Italy, 1938. Mussolini is in power and war is not far away)

James Ross, Hunting Teddy Roosevelt, Regal House (it’s 1909, and Teddy Roosevelt is not only hunting in Africa, he’s being hunted)

Anbara Salam, Belladonna, Berkley (coming-of-age novel set in 1950s Italy that looks at the friendships that have the power to save and destroy us)

Marjorie Sandor, The Secret Music at Tordesillas, Hidden River Press (1555 – the subversive tale of Juan de Granada, Juana I’s last musician – a ballad of lost love and a last gambit to save a life)

Susie Orman Schnall, We Came Here to Shine, St. Martin’s Griffin (set during the iconic 1939 New York World’s Fair, two intrepid young women form an unlikely friendship as they navigate a world of endless possibility, adversity, and find what they are made of)

Connie Schultz, The Daughters of Erietown, Random House (hidden desires, long-held secrets, and the sacrifices people make for family are at the heart of this novel about people in a small town)

Laura Shepherd-Robinson, Daughters of the Night, Mantle (story follows Lady Caroline Corsham as she seeks to avenge the death of a woman who society would rather forget)

Susan Richards Shreve, More News Tomorrow, W.W. Norton (multi-period follows daughter and parents on parallel trips up the Bone River, weaving together the hope of June 2008 with the injustices of June 1941)

Luanne G. Smith, The Glamourist, Amazon (2nd in series after The Vine Witch set in early 20th-c France)

Cindy K. Sproles, What Momma Left Behind, Revell (after the death of her mother, Worri Dressar takes on the care of orphans near their Appalachian mountain home)

Katherine Stansfield, The Mermaid’s Call, Allison & Busby (1845. When a man is found dead along the Cornish coast, Shilly and Anna are asked to investigate)

June Tate, The Girl from Kingsland Market, Allison & Busby (when her father never returned from the war, Phoebe Collins was left to run the family fruit and veg stall. But then she witnesses something terrible)

Liz Tolsma, The Green Dress, Barbour (Strange But True History series: Boston, 1886, Harriet Peters and Sarah Robinson are widows struggling to make ends meet, and they strike up a quick friendship)

Marisel Vera, The Taste of Sugar, Liveright (novel set in Puerto Rico on the eve of the Spanish-American War 1898)

Peter J. Wacks, Eytan Kollin, Caller of Lightning, Baen (Book 3 in the Arcane America series)

Peter Watt, The Queen’s Colonial, Pan Australia (1845: two men cross paths in New South Wales and agree to exchange places ― one to leave the army and the other to join it)

Thelma Wheatley, Tamarind Sky, Inanna (when problems in a multi-cultural marriage arise, Canadian wife Selena gradually understands the full tragedy of the civil war in Sri Lanka as it relates to her husband’s family)

Beth White, A Reckless Love, Revell (last in Daughtry House series)

Beatriz Williams, Her Last Flight, Wm Morrow (in 1947, photographer and war correspondent Janey Everett arrives on the Hawaiian island of Kauai to research a planned biography of forgotten aviation pioneer Sam Mallory)

Karen Witemeyer, At Love’s Command, Bethany House (inspirational romance set in 1890s Texas)

Jake Wolff, The History of Living Together, Picador (this globe-trotting, century-spanning adventure story, follows two young men on separate quests for the Elixir of Life)

Mary Wood, The Brave Daughters Who Went to War, Pan (WW II historical saga)

Glenda Young, Pearl of Pit Lane, Headline (when her mother dies in childbirth, Pearl Edwards is left in the care of her aunt, but it isn’t easy to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table)

July 2020

Alina Adams, The Nesting Dolls, Harper (spanning nearly a century, from 1930s Siberia to contemporary Brighton Beach, a family saga centering on three generations of women in one Russian Jewish family—each striving to break free of fate and history)

Amanda Barratt, Gabrielle Meyer, Jennifer Uhlarik, Kathleen Y’Barbo, Courting Calamity, Barbour (four historical Christian romance stories)

Johanna Bell, The Bobby Girls’ Secrets, Hodder (1915. Three friends are members of the Women’s Police Service. While Britain’s men are away fighting in France, the girls are doing their bit by keeping the peace at home)

Misty M. Beller, Love’s Mountain Quest, Bethany House (Hearts of Montana book 2)

Michael Blake, Dances With Wolves: The Complete Epic, Head of Zeus (the book that inspired the movie, and its sequel, The Holy Road, together in one volume for the first time)

Susanna Calkins, The Fate of a Flapper, St. Martin’s Griffin (second mystery in new series takes readers into the dark, dangerous, and glittering underworld of a 1920’s Chicago speakeasy)

Megan Campisi, The Sin Eater, Mantle (novel about a shunned orphan girl in 16th century England who is ensnared in a deadly royal plot and must turn her subjugation into power)

Brenden Carlson, Night Call, Dundurn (in a alternate 1933, self-styled detective Elias Roche and his robot partner, Allen, immerse themselves in the criminal underworld to find a killer and hopefully prevent war on New York’s streets)

Clare Chambers, Small Pleasures, W & N (a novel of unexpected second chances set in 1950s England)

Eve Chase, The Daughters of Foxcote Manor, G.P. Putnam’s Sons (story of mothers, daughters, and belonging—and the devastating lies families tell themselves in order to survive)

Barbara Cleverly, Invitation to Die, Soho Crime (DI John Redfyre returns for his second investigation in the hallowed halls of Cambridge academia)

Julie Cohen, Spirited, Orion (novel about faith, grief, courage and love, set in Victorian England)

Paul M. M. Cooper, All Our Broken Idols, Bloomsbury (an epic of worlds ancient and modern, of treasures lost and stolen, of those who make beauty and those who seek to destroy it)

Ida Curtis, The Nun’s Betrothal, She Writes (a suspenseful, romantic tale of court intrigue and forbidden love set in ninth-century France)

Richard Dargie, The Nazis’ Flight from Justice, Arcturus (there were millions of Nazis after World War II and the Allied powers set up an extensive programme to identify and prosecute members, but they knew they couldn’t rebuild Germany without its elites)

Fiona Davis, The Lions of Fifth Avenue, Dutton (a series of book thefts roils the iconic New York Public Library, leaving two generations of strong-willed women to pick up the pieces)

Lindsey Davis, The Grove of the Caesars, Minotaur (in the sacred grove of Julius Caesar, something deadly stirs in the undergrowth—a serial killer, who haunted the gardens for years, has claimed another victim)

Marjorie DeLuca, The Savage Instinct, Inkshares (one woman’s struggle for her sanity, set against the backdrop of the arrest and trial of Mary Ann Cotton, England’s first female serial killer)

P. T. Deutermann, The Hooligans, St. Martin’s Press (World War II naval adventure)

David Donachie, Blood Will Out, Allison & Busby (naval adventure set in 1787)

Emma Donoghue, The Pull of the Stars, HarperCollins Canada/Little, Brown/Pan (Dublin, 1918: three days in a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu)

Dianne Freeman, A Lady’s Guide to Mischief and Murder, Kensington (in this Victorian-era mystery series, Frances Wynn finds her sister’s wedding threatened by a vow of vengeance)

Arjun Raj Gaind, The Missing Memsahib, PPP (set against the backdrop of princely India during the heyday of the British Raj – third in trilogy)

Matthew Harffy, Fortress of Fury, Head of Zeus (Bernicia Chronicles Book VII set in Dark Age Britain)

Kristin Harmel, The Book of Lost Names, Gallery (inspired by a true story from World War II, a young woman with a talent for forgery helps hundreds of Jewish children flee the Nazis)

Cora Harrison, Death of a Prominent Citizen, Severn House (a Reverend Mother mystery)

Helen A. Harrison, An Exquisite Corpse, PPP (set in the sexually liberated New York art world of the 1940s – first in new mystery series)

Sarah Hawkswood, Faithful Unto Death, Allison & Busby (June 1144. When the naked corpse of an unknown man is discovered, Catchpoll and Walkelin head to Wales to confirm his identity)

Arlene Heyman, Artifact, Bloomsbury (novel that follows the fortunes of biologist Lottie Kristin―Lottie is independent from the start, fascinated with the mysteries of nature and the human body)

Paulus Hochgatterer (trans. Jamie Bulloch), The Day My Grandfather Was a Hero, MacLehose (an observation of small shifts from apathy in a community not directly affected by the war, but exhausted by it nonetheless)

Steven Hopstaken, Melissa Prusi, Stoker’s Wilde West, Flame Tree Press (Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker are once again pulled into the world of the supernatural, this time in the American West)

Marion Husband, All the Beauty of the Sun, Accent Press (The Boy I Love, Book Two)

Cynthia Jefferies, The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne, Allison & Busby (with England on the brink of civil war, exile Thomas Chayne finally has the chance to redeem himself by leading a troop of royalists to defend Oxford)

Dinah Jefferies, The Tuscan Contessa, Penguin (novel set in wartime Tuscany)

Ben Kane, Lionheart, Orion (1179. Henry II’s Norman conquerors have swept through England, Wales – and now Ireland)

Leslie S. Klinger, Weird Women, Pegasus (new volume of supernatural stories showcasing the forgotten female horror writers from 1852–1923)

Alex Landragin, Crossings, St. Martin’s Press (genre-bending debut—a novel in three parts, designed to be read in two different directions, spanning a hundred and fifty years and seven lifetimes)

Joe R. Lansdale, More Better Deals, Mulholland (1960s Texas story of a no-nonsense used car salesman ready to turn his life around)

Odie Lindsey, Some Go Home, W.W. Norton (debut novel that follows three generations in Mississippi—fractured by murder, seeking redemption. Civil rights era through present)

S. G. MacLean, The House of Lamentations, Quercus (Damian Seeker historical thriller)

Stefano Massini (trans. Richard Dixon), The Lehman Trilogy, HarperVia (spanning 150 years, an epic that tells the story of modern capitalism through the saga of the Lehman brothers and their descendants)

Tiffany McDaniel, Betty, Knopf (novel set in the rolling foothills of the Appalachians in which a young girl discovers stark truths that will haunt her for the rest of her life)

Kerry McDonald, Bob Coles, Into Africa, Level 4 Press (story of Janet Livingston, her clash with Henry Stanley, and her surprising relationship with their guide, Goma Foutou)

Carol McGrath, Mistress Cromwell, Headline Accent (Elizabeth and Thomas Cromwell’s marriage begins in mutual love and respect – but it isn’t easy being the wife of an ambitious courtier in Henry VIII’s London)

Chris Nickson, The Molten City, Severn House (a Tom Harper mystery set in 1908 Leeds, UK)

J. L. Oakley, The Quisling Factor, Fairchance Press (WWII thriller set in Norway in 1946)

Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet, Knopf (about the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son Hamnet and the years leading up to the production of his great play, Hamlet)

S J Parris, Execution, HarperCollins (historical thriller finds Bruno going undercover to prevent an assassination plot on Queen Elizabeth)

Lesley Pearse, You’ll Never See Me Again, Penguin UK (when Betty’s husband returns from the war broken and haunted, she knows her marriage is doomed)

S. C. Perkins, Lineage Most Lethal, Minotaur (second mystery in the Ancestry Detective series, in which Texas genealogist Lucy Lancaster deals with murders in both the past and present)

Celia Rees, Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook, Wm Morrow (about an ordinary young British woman sent to uncover a network of spies and war criminals in post-war Germany)

Suzanne Rindell, The Two Mrs. Carlyles, G.P. Putnam’s Sons (a descent into obsession, love, and murder in the wake of San Francisco’s most deadly earthquake in 1906)

Philip Roth, The Plot Against America, HMH (alternative history set when renowned aviation hero Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election and fear invades every Jewish household in America)

Michael Russell, The City Under Siege, Constable (murder mystery set during WWII)

Anbara Salam, Belladonna, Fig Tree (coming-of-age novel set in 1950s Italy that looks at the friendships that have the power to save and destroy us)

Christina Schwarz, Bonnie, Atria (evokes the fascinating true crime love affair of Bonnie and Clyde in this fictional portrait of Bonnie Parker)

Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means, Penguin UK (a bevy of well-bred girls of slender means and intriguing morals are plotting amongst themselves for the suitors who call to confer favour)

Bryn Turnbull, The Woman Before Wallis, Mira (debut set in the glamorous world of British and American royalty in the 1920s)

S. J. A. Turney, The Crescent and the Cross, Canelo (an epic battle of the Reconquista)

Gail Tsukiyama, The Color of Air, HarperVia (historical novel about a Japanese-American family set against the backdrop of Hawai’i’s sugar plantations)

Erica Vetsch, Susanne Dietze, Susan Page Davis, A Place to Call Home, Barbour (three romantic adventures bring the Old West to life – inspirational)

Erica Vetsch, The Gentleman Spy, Kregel (Serendipity & Secrets Book 2 – Christian romance)

Eley Williams, The Liar’s Dictionary, Heinemann (celebrates the rigidity, fragility and absurdity of language)

August 2020

Suzanne Allain, Mr. Malcolm’s List, Berkley (Regency romance)

Nancy Campbell Allen, Brass Carriages and Glass Hearts, Shadow Mountain (steampunk retelling of Cinderella – Victorian Proper Romance series)

Lindsay Jayne Ashford, The House at Mermaid’s Cove, Lake Union (as World War II rages, love, mystery, and secrets collide on the English coast)

Jennifer Ashley, Murder in the East End, Berkley (a Below Stairs mystery #4)

Finola Austin, Brontë’s Mistress, Atria (explores the scandalous love affair between Branwell Brontë and Lydia Robinson, giving voice to the woman who allegedly corrupted her son’s innocent tutor and brought down the entire Brontë family)

Mary Balogh, Someone to Romance, Piatkus (Westcott Regency romance series)

Marie Benedict, Lady Clementine, Sourcebooks Landmark (novel that focuses on one of the people who had the most influence during World War I and World War II — Clementine Churchill)

James R. Benn, When Hell Struck Twelve, Soho Crime (14th Billy Boyle mystery)

Rhys Bowen, The Last Mrs. Summers, Berkley (next entry in Royal Spyness Mystery series)

John Boyne, A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom, Hogarth (human stories which intertwine and evolve over the course of 2000 years)

Kay Brellend, A Workhouse Christmas, Piatkus (new saga series set in the Whitechapel Union workhouse in East London, between 1904 and 1916)

Emily Brightwell, Mrs. Jeffries Demands Justice, Berkley (latest entry in Victorian mystery series)

Betsy Carter, Lost Souls at the Neptune Inn, Grand Central (quirky, darkly comic historical novel set in the 1950s about three generations of women whose lives are changed when a mysterious stranger comes to town)

Elizabeth Chadwick, The Coming of the Wolf, Sphere (prequel to The Wild Hunt)

William Coles, Mr Two Bomb, Legend Press (one man miraculously survives the Atomic Bomb of Hiroshima and returns to his home in Nagasaki)

Sheila Connolly, The Secret Staircase, Minotaur (cosy mystery – a Victorian murder in a contemporary Victorian Village)

Patty Dann, The Wright Sister, Harper Perennial (epistolary novel that imagines the life of Katharine Wright and her relationship with her famous brothers)

J. D. Davies, Armada’s Wake, Canelo (1588 – final instalment of the Navy Royal trilogy)

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (trans. Margaret Jull Costa, Robin Patterson), Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Liveright (enigmatic, amusing and insufferable anti-hero describes his Rio childhood spent tormenting household slaves, his bachelor years of torrid affairs, and his obsessive final days)

Oscar de Muriel, The Dance of the Serpents, Orion (English Inspector Ian Frey, and his Scottish boss ‘Nine-Nails’ McGray murder mystery)

Susanne Dietze, Janette Foreman, Gabrielle Meyer, Lorna Seilstad, The Soldier’s Lady, Barbour (four adventurous women make their home at Old West forts)

Farzana Doctor, Seven, Dundurn (while researching her great-great grandfather on a trip to India, Sharifa stumbles upon family secrets and must face the indelible mark they’ve left on her life)

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (c.1911), Dover (set against the turbulent background of the cotton industry, novel traces an ambitious young man’s journey to Washington to pursue his dreams as a senator’s assistant)

Clara Dupont-Monod, The Revolt, Quercus (Richard Lionheart tells the story of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine)

Anne Edwards, Wallis, Lyons Press (a presentation of the tumultuous events surrounding a king’s abdication)

Mario Escobar, Children of the Stars, Thomas Nelson (a story of escape, sacrifice, and hope amid the perils of the Second World War)

Lissa Evans, V For Victory, Doubleday UK (late 1944. Allied victory is on its way, but Hitler’s rockets are slamming down on London with vicious regularity and it’s the coldest winter in living memory)

David Field, Death Comes But Twice, Sapere (Carlyle & West Victorian Mysteries #2)

TP Fielden, Stealing the Crown, Thomas & Mercer (1941 – Britain is at war—but the greatest threat to the Crown might be within the palace walls)

Eric Flint, Walter Hunt, 1636: The Atlantic Encounter, Baen (steampunk alternative history)

Rachel Fordham, A Life Once Dreamed, Revell (a schoolteacher must face her past when a familiar doctor arrives in town and threatens to unlock the heart she’s guarded so tightly)

Caro Fraser, The Summer House Party, Head of Zeus (multi-generational tale set in a grand country house in the run-up to World War II)

E. C. Fremantle, The Honey and the Sting, Michael Joseph (historical thriller set in England 1628)

Hazel Gaynor, The Bird in the Bamboo Cage (UK) / When We Were Young and Brave (US & CAN) HarperCollins (1941 – inspired by true events surrounding the Japanese Army’s internment of teachers and children from a British-run missionary school)

Mary Gibson, The Bermondsey Bookshop, Head of Zeus (1920s―Kate’s childhood is haunted by mystery surrounding her mother’s death. When she finds a job will she find all the answers she needs?)

Diana Giovinazzo, The Woman in Red, Grand Central (life story of Anita Garibaldi, the courageous, headstrong revolutionary who fought for freedom and self-determination in 19th-century Brazil, Uruguay, and Italy)

George Green, Hound, Canelo (tale of heroism and friendship during the Roman Empire)
Also: Hawk

Kate Grenville, A Room Made of Leaves, Canongate (New South Wales 1788 – based on real life events from the early days of European settlement in Australia)

Jean-Claude Grumberg, The Most Precious of Cargoes, Picador (tells a story of the Holocaust and the remarkable acts of kindness of which people are capable)

Helen A. Harrison, An Accidental Corpse, Poisoned Pen (the glamor and grit of the 1950s comes to life in a retelling of a murder that rocked the art world)

Elsa Hart, The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne, Minotaur (new mystery series set as England teeters on the edge of the scientific revolution)

Max Hennessy, Picture of Defeat, Canelo (WWII espionage thriller)
Also: Harkaway’s Sixth Column and Up for Grabs

Annette Hess (trans. Elisabeth Lauffer), The German House, HarperVia (coming-of-age story set against the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963)

Victoria Hislop, Those Who are Loved, Headline (novel takes you into the darker days of Greek history through the eyes of its heroine)

Antonia Hodgson, The Silver Collar, Hodder & Stoughton (fourth in the series featuring Thomas Hawkins)

Jennifer Hofmann, The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures, Little, Brown (novel about what happens when ideologies crumble and the betrayer himself is betrayed)

Wendy Holden, The Royal Governess, Berkley (a novel of Queen Elizabeth)

Nazanine Hozar, Aria, Pantheon (saga of rags-to-riches-to-revolution that follows an orphan girl coming of age at a time of dramatic upheaval)

Kristi Ann Hunter, Vying for the Viscount, Bethany House (when a strange man appears to be stealing horses at the neighboring estate, Bianca Snowley jumps to their rescue until she discovers he’s the new owner)

Marion Husband, Paper Moon, Accent Press (third installment of The Boy I Love)

John Ironmonger, The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild, W&N (from revolutionary France to post Brexit Britain and beyond, a story of an extraordinary woman, her talented ancestors and the curious memories they share)

Roy Jacobsen (trans. Don Bartlett and Don Shaw), Eyes of the Rigel, MacLehose (third novel in a historical trilogy that began with The Unseen)

Dilesh Jagdish, Shadow of Kamakura, Vanguard Press (betrayed by the samurais he once called brothers and inducted into a ninja clan as a fully-fledged shinobi, Tetsu Itsuki forges a new path in life)

Harper Jameson, Satchel Paige, Level 4 Press (a black man in his 70s discovers a mint condition Satchel Paige baseball card worth over $100,000, and is magically transported back to 1936)
Also: I Wasn’t Really Naked (when the Nazis occupied France with their Vichy allies, Josephine Baker’s seeming ambivalence and notorious eccentricity gave her unique access behind enemy lines)

Harper Jameson, Peg A. Lamphier, The Last Witch, Level 4 Press (WWII; a crackpot spiritualist accurately describes the highly classified sinking of a Navy warship. To silence her, she is hunted down, arrested and found guilty of being a witch)

Harper Jameson, Rosanne M. Welch, Hate Radio, Level 4 Press (personal story of the rise and fall of Father Coughlin, as his pro-fascist, anti-Jewish message becomes too much for the US government to take)

Harper Jameson, Tamara Merrill, No Hatred or Bitterness, Level 4 Press (story of Edith Cavell’s improbable success, her capture and her defiance, even as she faced a German firing squad)

Michael Jecks, The Boy-Bishop’s Glovemaker, Canelo (a Last Templar Mystery)
Also: The Traitor of St. Giles

Sarah Jio, The Last Camellia, Orion (an amateur American botanist is contracted by an international ring of flower thieves to steal the last surviving specimen of a camellia, secreted away on the eve of WWII)

Juris Jurjevics, Red Flags, Soho Crime (a novel of soldiers and spies during the Vietnam War)

Margaret Kaine, A Life of Secrets, Allison & Busby (deploring social injustice, Lady Deborah Claremont opens a staff agency, concealing the fact that she’s a member of the aristocracy)

Christina Baker Kline, The Exiles, Custom House (captures the hardship, oppression, opportunity and hope of three women’s lives in untamed 19th-century Australia)

Anabelle Leigh, The Dare, Vanguard Press (Charlotte, a noble-born lady, witnesses the first social changes in Victorian England and goes through the self-assertion challenges of her time)

Jonathan Lunn, Kemp: Riders of Fury, Canelo (the Hundred Years War sets Brittany ablaze)

Jason Lutes, Berlin, Drawn and Quarterly (graphic novel explains the rise of Nazism in Germany)

Cauvery Madhavan, The Tainted, HopeRoad (story of political and social unrest set in Nandagiri in southeast India in 1920)

George Mann, The Albion Initiative, Tor (steampunk mystery series concludes as our special agent heroes discover a plot of empire-changing proportions)

Kirsty Manning, The Lost Jewels, Wm Morrow (multi-period based on true events)

Clare Marchant, The Secrets of Saffron Hall, Avon (dual time-line set at the Tudor court in 1538 and in 2019)

Edward Marston, Fear on the Phantom Special. Allison & Busby (Railway Detective series)

Faith Martin, A Fatal Obsession, HQ Digital (Ryder and Loveday, Book 1 – murder mystery set in Oxford in 1960)

Kate Mascarenhas, The Thief on the Winged Horse, Head of Zeus (The Kendrick family have been making world-famous dolls since the early 1800s and each doll has a specific emotion laid on it by its creator)

Valerie Martin, I Give It To You, Nan A. Talese / PenguinRandomHouseUS (story of family, war, art, and betrayal set around an ancient, ancestral home in the Tuscan countryside)

Alyssa Maxwell, Murder at Kingscote, Kensington (in late nineteenth-century Newport, Rhode Island, journalist Emma Cross discovers the newest form of transportation has become the newest type of murder weapon)

Julie McElwain, Shadows in Time, Pegasus (in 1816 London, Kendra Donovan tracks down a missing man, but finds trouble brewing closer to home. Fifth book in time-travel mystery series)

Rachel McMillan, The London Restoration, Thomas Nelson (historical romance that takes place in post-World War II London)

Karen Miller, Purple Velvet Slippers, Vanguard Press (dual-narrative set in late 1800s and present explores individuality, uniqueness, and the mystery of our pasts, presents, and futures)

Alice Mitchell, The Mortimer Affair, YouCaxton Publications (novel of political Intrigue during the reign and abdication of Edward II seen through the eyes of the traitor Roger Mortimer’s wife, Joan de Joinville)

Thorne Moore, The Covenant, Honno Press (a family thriller set in 19^th – century Wales. Prequel to A Time for Silence)

R.N. Morris, The Music Box Enigma, Severn House (a Silas Quinn mystery set in London 1914)

Jamie Lee Moyer, Divine Heretic, Jo Fletcher (a reimagining of the story of Joan of Arc)

Patrice Nganang (trans. Amy B. Reid), When the Plums are Ripe, Picador (second volume in a magisterial trilogy, the story of Cameroon caught between empires during World War II)

Gill Paul, Jackie and Maria, Wm Morrow (story of love, passion, and tragedy as the lives of Jackie Kennedy and Maria Callas are intertwined)

Kate Pullinger, Forest Green, Doubleday (on a rain-soaked Vancouver sidewalk in 1995, a homeless man fights for breath. This is the story of how he ended up there)

Joanna Rees, The Hidden Wife, Pan (2nd novel in historical trilogy set in 1928)

Anthony Riches, River of Gold: Empire XI, Hodder & Stoughton (set in AD 187, story takes Marcus Aquila up the Nile from the Romans’ stronghold in Alexandria to the frontiers of the Empire)

Mike Ripley, Mr Campion’s Séance, Severn House (an Albert Campion mystery set in London 1946)

Julie Roberts, A Tainted Marriage, Headline Accent (Regency Romance)

Charles Rosenberg, The Day Lincoln Lost, Hanover Square (thriller that reimagines the tumultuous presidential election of 1860)

Aimie K. Runyan, Across the Winding River, Lake Union (a woman unlocks the mystery of her father’s wartime past)

Constance Sayers, A Witch in Time, Redhook (1895― a young witch is cursed to relive a doomed love affair through many lifetimes, as both troubled muse and frustrated artist)

Omer M Shurkian, Curse of the Raven, Vanguard Press (novel about the horrors of slavery, set in Egypt and the Sudan, 1821)

Daniel Speck (trans. Jaime McGill), Anywhere But Home, Amazon Crossing (crosses continents, cultures, and generations to tell a sweeping story of self-discovery and finding your own place in a new world)

Darin Strauss, The Queen of Tuesday, Random House (love story starring Hollywood’s first true media mogul, and a look at America’s most fascinating era)

Matteo Strukul (trans. Richard McKenna), Medici – Supremacy, Head of Zeus (2nd instalment charting the rise of the House of Medici as they become Masters of Florence and progenitors of the Renaissance)

Daisy Styles, Home Fires and Spitfires, Michael Joseph (saga set in WWII 1940)

A.D. Swanston, Chaos, Bantam (historical thriller set against the backdrop of treason, terror and civil unrest in Elizabethan England)

Liza Nash Taylor, Etiquette for Runaways, Blackstone (Jazz Age tale of regret, ambition, and redemption inspired by true events)

Carrie Vaughn, The Heirs of Locksley, Tor.com (King John is dead, 13yr-old King Henry is crowned, but John of Locksley, son of Robin Hood, only sees a lonely boy in need of friends)

Rhiannon Ward, The Quickening, Trapeze (feminist gothic fiction set between the late 19th century and the early 20th century)

Edmund White, A Saint From Texas, Bloomsbury (traces the fates of twin sisters, one destined for Parisian nobility and the other for Catholic sainthood)

Kathleen Y’Barbo, The Black Midnight, Barbour (a series of murders in London 1889 and Austin, Texas 1884 seem to be connected)

Glenda Young, The Girl With the Scarlet Ribbon, Headline (domestic saga in the vein of Catherine Cookson)

Ovidia Yu, The Mimosa Tree Mystery, Constable (murder mystery set in 1930s Singapore)

September 2020

Kristine F. Anderson, Crooked Truth, Mercer Univ. Press (a novel of family set in South Georgia late 1940s)

Libby Ashworth, A Lancashire Lass, Arrow (2nd in inspirational Milltown Lasses series)

Ronald H. Balson, Eli’s Promise, SMP (multi-period historical explores the human cost of war, the mixed blessings of survival, and the enduring strength of family bonds)

J.S. Barnes, Dracula’s Child, Titan (the dark heart of Bram Stoker’s classic is reborn, following Jonathan and Mina Harker as they return to England to try to live ordinary lives)

Vicky Beeby, Christmas with the Ops Room Girls, Canelo (second book in the Women of the Auxiliary Air Force series)

James R. Benn, The Red Horse, Soho Crime (murder mystery thriller set in WWII France)

Clara Benson, The Stolen Letter, Bookouture (about the impossible tragedies of war and the miraculous possibilities of love)

Lori Benton, Mountain Laurel, Tyndale (North Carolina, 1793―story of choice and consequence, of bondage and freedom, of faith and family)

Norman Bissell, Barnhill, Luath Press (biographical fiction about George Orwell)

Carol Bruneau, Brighten the Corner Where You Are, New Vagrant Press (inspired by the life of Maud Lewis)

Wanda E. Brunstetter, Brides of Lehigh Canal Trilogy, Barbour (three inspirational historical romances)

Grant Buday, Orphans of Empire, Touchwood Editions (a narrative that spans half a century and converges in a hotel in historic New Brighton, BC)

Maggie Campbell, Nurse Kitty’s Secret War, Trapeze (novel inspired by the brave nurses and doctors from the first NHS hospital)

K-Ming Chang, Bestiary, One World (three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in debut about one family’s queer desires, violent impulses, and buried secrets)

Catherine Chidgey, Remote Sympathy, Europa Editions (a couple move from Munich to the countryside where the husband, SS Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn, takes up a powerful new position as camp administrator at Buchenwald)

Beatrice Colin, The Glass House, Flatiron (novel set on a remote Scottish estate, about the heiress and the mysterious woman from India who shows up on her doorstep)

Mary Collins, Victory on Ten Bells Street, Piatkus (with the war finally behind them, the Ten Bells Street girls are building new lives)

Mia Couto (trans. David Brookshaw), The Sword and the Spear, FSG (second novel in the Sands of the Emperor trilogy set in Mozambique in 1895)

Dede Crane, One Madder Woman, Freehand Books (love story between two visionary artists in 19th-century Paris)

Lesley Crewe, The Spoon Stealer, New Vagrant Press (brings readers from WWI England to 1960s Nova Scotia, following a spoon-stealing memoirist who inherits the family farm—and the family)

Jude Deveraux, Tara Sheets, Thief of Fate, Mira (a contemporary love story and an historical mystery with an element of magical realism)

Paul Doherty, Hymn to Murder, Headline (Hugh Corbett thriller #21)

Bonnie Dunlop, Raft Baby, Thistledown Press (an historical novel set in the Peace River country in the early 1900’s―story has multiple narrators and interwoven stories)

Evie Dunmore, A Rogue of One’s Own, Piatkus (historical romance)

Petra Durst-Benning (trans. Edwin Miles), An Artificial Light, Amazon Crossing (Germany 1911 – a defiant woman in pre–WW I Germany carves out her own unconventional destiny as the Photographer’s Saga continues)

Samuel Endicott, Molly Lake in the Quebec Affair, Guernica (captures the essence of colonial Quebec as a teenager comes of age within a besieged city’s stone walls)

Mario Escobar, Remember Me, Thomas Nelson (a 20th-century historical novel of tragedy and resilience inspired by Spain’s famed Children of Morelia and the true events that shaped their lives)

Natalie Meg Evans, Into the Burning Dawn, Bookouture (saga about the bravery of ordinary people in times of war)

Jennie Fields, Atomic Love, Michael Joseph (Chicago 1950 – a Manhattan Project physicist is recruited to spy on her former lover)

Bill Flanagan, Fifty in Reverse, Tiller (time-traveling adventure novel about how the past never gives up its hold on the present and how even sixty-five-year-olds are still kids at heart)

Katie Flynn, Under the Mistletoe, Century (1940 – when war comes to Britain, Jessica Wilson and her friend Ruby seize the opportunity to leave behind the orphanage they grew up in and start new lives in the NAAFI)

Ken Follett, The Evening and the Morning, Macmillan/Viking (prequel to Pillars of the Earth)

John M. Ford, The Dragon Waiting (c. 1983), Tor (a Byzantine mercenary, a Florentine physician, a Welsh wizard, and the uncanny Duke Sforza wage an intrigue-filled campaign to secure the English throne for Richard, Duke of Gloucester)

Hester Fox, The Orphan of Cemetery Hill, Graydon House (Boston, 1844: Tabby has a peculiar gift: she can communicate with the recently departed. It makes her special, but it also makes her dangerous)

Elizabeth Fremantle, The Poison Bed, Pegasus Crime (thriller set in the Jacobean Court of 1615)

Charlie Garratt, Where Every Man, Sapere (4^th wartime Inspector James Given Investigation)

Éric Giacometti, Jacques Ravenne (trans. Maren Baudet-Lackner), The Four Symbols, Hodder (in a Europe on the verge of collapse, the Nazi organisation, Ahnenerbe, is pillaging sacred landmarks across the world. Black Sun series Book 1)

Éric Giacometti, Jacques Ravenne (trans. Maren Baudet-Lackner), Good & Evil, Hodder & Stoughton (Black Sun series Book 2)

Gloria Goldreich, The Paris Children, Sourcebooks Landmark (as the shadows of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party fall over Paris, Madeleine Levy draws on the spirit of her WWI hero grandfather and defends her beloved France in the only way she knows how)

Evie Grace, The Golden Maid, Arrow (2nd in Smuggler’s Daughter trilogy set in Deal, Kent, 1812)

Jean-Claude Grumberg (trans. Frank Wynne), The Most Precious of Cargoes, HarperVia (set against the horrors of the Holocaust, a fable about family and redemption which reminds us that humanity can be found in the most inhumane of places)

Emily Gunnis, The Lost Child, Headline (dual timeline mystery set in 1960 and 2014)

Meredith Hall, Beneficence, David R. Godine (illuminates the effects of love and loss while exploring the meaning of family, and the possibilities of forgiveness, both of others and ourselves. WWII after-years)

Elizabeth Hardinger, All the Forgivenesses, John Scognamiglio (set in Appalachia and the Midwest at the turn of the 20th-C, novel paints a portrait of one resilient farm family’s challenges and hard-won triumphs)

Robert Harris, V2, Knopf/Hutchinson (a WWII thriller about a German rocket engineer, a former actress turned British spy, and the Nazi rocket program)

Neil Hegarty, The Jewel, Head of Zeus (novel centres on a strange painting by a woman who committed suicide. It hangs in a Dublin gallery, and is desired by a collector willing to pay to have it stolen)

Denise Heinze, The Brief and True Report of Temperance Flowerdew, Blackstone (story of America’s original colony, Jamestown, through the lens of two pioneering women)

Nydia Hetherington, A Girl Made of Air, Quercus (brings the circus to life in all its grime and glory)

Joseph Heywood, Beyond Beyond, Lyons Press (historical mystery thriller in the Lute Bapcat series set in 1917)

Alice Hoffman, The World That We Knew, S&S (on the brink of World War II, with the Nazis tightening their grip on Berlin, a mother’s act of courage and love offers her daughter a chance of survival)

Emily Hourican, The Glorious Guinness Girls, Headline (inspired by real events and a true story, from the the brittle glamour of 1920s London to the turmoil of Ireland’s War of Independence)

Anna Lee Huber, A Pretty Deceit, Kensington (London 1919 – in the aftermath of the Great War, the line between friend and foe may be hard to discern even for former Secret Service agent Verity Kent)

M. L. Huie, Nightshade, Crooked Lane (second Livy Nash mystery takes Livy on a search for a fellow agent who disappeared when on a mission in WWII)

Sam Hurcom, Letters from the Dead, Orion (gothic historical crime novel)

Jerry B. Jenkins, Dead Sea Rising, Worthy Books (an archaeologist believes she has found concrete evidence of a biblical patriarch that could change history books forever)

Alexandra Joel, The Paris Model, Harper Perennial (a beautiful woman working as a model for Christian Dior in postwar Paris discovers astonishing secrets about herself and the people around her)

Katherine Johnson, Paris Savages, Allison & Busby (Fraser Island, 1882. In the wake of brutal massacres, three Badtjala people go to Europe to perform to huge crowds and hopefully bring their plight before the Queen of England)

Mitchell James Kaplan, Into the Unbounded Night, Regal House (follows the lives of five troubled individuals as they struggle for survival and purpose in the first century Roman empire)

Einar Kárason (trans. Quentin Bates), Storm Birds, MacLehose (based on a true story in February 1959, when several Icelandic trawlers were caught in a storm off Newfoundland’s Grand Banks)

M.R.C. Kasasian, Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire, Head of Zeus (while the locals gossip about the Suffolk Vampire, Betty Church steels herself to hunt a dangerous killer)

Susanna Kearsley, C.S. Harris, Anna Lee Huber, Christine Trent, The Deadly Hours, PPP (four historical mystery novelists weave the tale of a priceless and cursed gold watch as it passes through time)

Jane Kirkpatrick, Something Worth Doing, Revell (1853 – based on a true story, pioneer Abigail Scott denies herself the joys of a simpler life to achieve her dream of securing rights for women)

Julie Klassen, An Ivy Hill Christmas, Bethany House (tale of a prodigal’s return to the village of Ivy Hill)

Volker Kutscher (trans. Niall Sellar), The March Fallen, Sandstone Press (5^th Gereon Rath noir set in Berlin 1933)

Asha Lemmie, Fifty Words for Rain, Dutton (spanning decades and continents, epic about the ties that bind, the ties that give you strength, and what it means to be free)

Natasha Lester, The Paris Secret, Forever (a secret collection of Dior gowns ties back to the first female pilots of WWII)

Siegfried Lenz, The Turncoat (c. 1951), Other Press (story of a German soldier defecting to the Soviet side – manuscript was originally rejected by publisher and found after the author’s death)

Alan Lightman, Three Flames, Counterpoint (portrays the struggles of a Cambodian farming family against the extreme patriarchal attitudes of their society and a cruel and dictatorial father)

Erin Lindsey, The Silver Shooter, Minotaur (third historical mystery follows Rose Gallagher as she tracks a monster and searches for treasure in the wilds of the Dakota Territory, 1887)

Chris Lloyd, The Unwanted Dead, Orion (first in a new Second World War-set crime series)

Maxim Loskutoff, Ruthie Fear, W. W. Norton (a haunting parable of the American west where a young woman faces the violent past of a remote Montana valley)

James Lovegrove, Sherlock Holmes & the Beast of the Stapletons, Titan (continues the story of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles, as five years later, another monstrous creature stalks across Dartmoor)

Charlie Lovett, Escaping Dreamland, Blackstone (in 1906 New York City a trio of young people come together to write a series of children’s books)

C D Major, The Other Girl, Thomas & Mercer (New Zealand, 1942 – a young doctor in an insane asylum begins to question the reasons for his patient’s initial incarceration)

Tina Makareti, The Imaginary Lives of James Poneke, Lightning Books (a young Maori orphan agrees to become a living exhibit in a Victorian artist’s London show)

Nathan Makaryk, Lionhearts, Forge (second installment in the Nottingham series)

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, A Girl is a Body of Water, Tin House (a testament to the true and lasting connections between history, tradition, family, friends, and the promise of a different future)

Allan Mallinson, The Tigress of Mysore, Bantam Press (set against the backdrop of an India in transition, as series’ hero unwittingly takes his first steps on the tumultuous road leading to the Indian Mutiny)

Edward Marston, Slaughter in the Sapperton Tunnel, Allison & Busby (1862. A goods train is speeding through the Sapperton Tunnel when it hits a makeshift pen of sheep inexplicably set up near the exit)

Christina McDowell, The Cave Dwellers, Gallery (what Washington, DC’s high society members do away from the Capitol building and behind the closed doors of their suburban mansions)

Clare McHugh, A Most English Princess, Wm Morrow (the tragic story of Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, Victoria, Princess Royal)

Rosie Meddon, Her Patriotic Duty, Canelo (WWII saga)

Heather B. Moore, The Paper Daughters of Chinatown, Shadow Mountain (story about Donaldina Cameron and other brave women who fought to help Chinese-American women escape discrimination and slavery in late 19th century California)

Ruth Moore, The Weir (c. 1943), Islandport Press (chronicles universal human drama as the two primary families feud, gossip, and struggle all while being battered by the relentless tides of change sweeping over their community)

Laura Morelli, The Night Portrait, Wm Morrow (dual timeline historical fiction novel about da Vinci’s Portrait of a Lady with an Ermine, and the woman who saved it from Nazi destruction in World War II)

Patricia Morrisroe, The Woman in the Moonlight, Little a (romantic historical novel about 19th-c Vienna and the tragedy and passion that inspired Ludwig van Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata)

Oezguer Mumcu (trans. Mark David Wyers), The Peace Machine, Pushkin Press (steampunk adventure set at the turn of 20th-century)

James L. Nelson, The Maddest Idea, McBooks (saga of the American Revolution)

Gill Paul, The Second Marriage, Avon (story of love, passion, and tragedy as the lives of Jackie Kennedy and Maria Callas are intertwined)

Marcus Palliser, A Devil of a Fix, Mcbooks (1702 – next in the Matthew Loftus series)

Johnny Payne, Confessions of a Gentleman Killer, City of Light (asks readers just what motivates a man who, otherwise, would be the perfect gentleman. Thriller set in London, 1843)

Andrea Penrose, Murder at Queen’s Landing, Kensington (a Wrexford and Sloane murder mystery)

Anne Perry, A Question of Betrayal, Ballantine (on her first mission for MI6, a young photographer travels to Mussolini’s Italy to rescue the lover who betrayed her)
Also: Death With a Double Edge (4^th in new Daniel Pitt series)

S. W. Perry, The Angel’s Mark, Atlantic Books (an historical murder mystery set in London, 1590)

Angela Petch, A Tuscan Memory, Bookouture (dual narrative set in present day and 1930s)

Signe Pike, The Forgotten Kingdom, Atria (the second book in the Lost Queen trilogy set in AD573)

Janet Post, Cracker Justice, Pineapple Press (explores the true story of the Sara Sota Vigilance Committee in the 1880s)

Eyre Price, Sinner and Saint, Blank Slate (portrayal of Francis of Assissi who struggled to find meaning in a time marked by greed, war, and political machinations)

Andrew Pyper, The Residence, Gallery (horror story set in 1853 when the President’s late son haunts the White House wreaking havoc on the family—and America)

C. S. Quinn, The Scarlet Code, Corvus (1789 – the Bastille has fallen and a killer stalks the streets of Paris killing women aristocrats)

Thomas H. Raddall, Roger Sudden (c. 1944), Nimbus (set in Nova Scotia during the English/French rivalry over the possession of North America)

Deborah Raney, Shannon McNear, Susanne Dietze, Janine Rosche, Love’s Pure Light, Barbour (4 stories follow an heirloom nativity set through four generations)

Heather Redmond, A Christmas Carol Murder, Kensington (mystery series finds young Charles Dickens suspecting a miser of pushing his partner out a window)

Kathleen Williams Renk, Vindicated, Cuidono Press (justifying their unconventional life and personal tragedies, Mary Goodwin (Shelley) follows in her mother’s footsteps, as she contemplates a woman’s place in literature and the world)

Debbie Rix, The Italian Girls, Bookouture (inspired by the true stories of two women in wartime Italy)

Marilynne Robinson, Jack, FSG (final installment of the Gilead novels set in Iowa sometime after WWII)

Suzzy Roche, The Town Crazy, Gibson House Press (Pennsylvania 1961 – novel delves into the cruelty of childhood, the loneliness of failing marriages, sexual repression and desire, and the intersection of art and religion)

Rudy Ruiz, The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez, Blackstone (offers a vision of how the past has divided us, and how the future could unite us)

Michael Russell, The City Under Siege, Constable (World War II thriller)

Yishai Sarid (trans. Yardenne Greenspan), The Memory Monster, Restless Books (ironic parable of how we reckon with human horror, in which a young, present-day historian becomes consumed by the memory of the Holocaust)

Kim Vogel Sawyer, The Librarian of Boone’s Hollow, Waterbrook (a traveling librarian ventures into the mining towns of Kentucky on horseback and rediscovers her passions)

Bianca M. Schwarz, The Innkeeper’s Daughter, Central Avenue (with time running out and the fate of one girl hanging in the balance, Henry and Eliza must find a way to outwit a nasty pimp and eliminate a dangerous enemy agent)

Jack Sheffield, Back to School, Bantam (a humorous story set in the early 1960s, England)

Michelle Shocklee, Under the Tulip Tree, Tyndale (in 1929, eager for any writing job, Rena accepts a position interviewing former slaves for the Federal Writers’ Project)

Zoë Somerville, The Night of the Flood, Head of Zeus (1952 – literary thriller set in north Norfolk in the shadow of the Cold War, in which a love triangle turns murderous)

Jonathan Spencer, Napoleon’s Run, Canelo (London, 1798 on the eve of the launch of Napoleon’s largest invasion fleet)

David Stafford, Skelton’s Guide to Domestic Poisons, Allison & Busby (Arthur Skelton takes the case of a woman accused of murdering her husband, however unlikely her innocence is)

Mel Starr, The Easter Sepulchre, Lion Fiction (medieval mysteries of Hugh de Singleton)

Alexander Starritt, We Germans, Little, Brown (written in the form of a letter from a German WW II veteran to his grandson; story of one man’s quest for goodness and humanity in his desperate escape from the Eastern Front)

Ilan Stavans, illus. Gabriela Larios, Popol Vuh, Restless Books (offers insight into the Mayan way of life before 1492, their code of ethics, their views on death and the afterlife, and their devotion to passion, courage, and the natural world)

Danielle Steel, Royal, Macmillan (a princess is sent away to safety during WWII, where she falls in love and is lost forever)

Sarah Steele, The Missing Pieces of Nancy Moon, Headline (using a box of vintage 60s dress patterns, a woman re-creates a Grand Tour of 1962 unraveling a story of love and loss in her family’s past)

Julian Stockwin, Balkan Glory, Hodder & Stoughton/Quercus (Thomas Kydd book 23)

Graham Swift, Here We Are, Knopf (a story of delicate illusions where what one chooses to believe can unearth the most revealing connections)

Marie-Helene Therrien and Steve Garvie, Captain Morgan’s Treasure, Vanguard Press (based on real events, evokes Captains Kidd and Morgan’s lives. The Adventure Galley, Volume 1)

Joe Thomas, Bent, Arcadia Books (story of the rise and fall of SAS commando, and notorious Detective Sergeant, Harold ‘Tanky’ Challenor)

Gill Thompson, The Child on Platform One, Headline (inspired by the real-life escape of thousands of Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Europe on the Kindertransport trains to London)

Peter Tremayne, The Shapeshifter’s Lair, Severn House (31^st Sister Fidelma Celtic mystery)

L.C. Tyler, Death of a Shipbuilder, Constable (sixth John Grey historical mystery)

Fiona Valpy, The Skylark’s Secret, Lake Union (dual period novel set in Scotland 1940 and present day

Jeremy Vine, The Diver and the Lover, Coronet (Spain, 1951 – story of love, sacrifice, and what we do for those we love)

Ashley Weaver, A Deception at Thornecrest, Minotaur (the next Amory Ames mystery, set in 1930s England)

Roseanna M. White, A Portrait of Loyalty, Bethany House (WWII espionage thriller)

Sue Wilsher, The Copperettes at War, Sphere (wartime saga from author of The Tilbury Poppies)

Edward Wilson, The Portrait of a Spy as a Young Man, Arcadia (dual-narrative set in 1941 and 2014 recounts a life of spying and the trauma of war, but also hope for the future)

Wolf Wondratschek (trans. Marshall Yarbrough), Self-Portrait with Russian Piano, FSG (a literary sonata circling the eternal question of whether beauty, music, and passion are worth the sacrifices some people are compelled to make)

Val Wood, The Long Walk Home, Corgi (saga of two children trying to make their way home)

Jamie Jo Wright, The Haunting at Bonaventure Circus, Bethany House (multi period murder mystery set in 1928 and present day)

Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock, Pantheon (the fates of three women are inextricably linked to one another across centuries)

Anzia Yezierska (trans. Catherine Rottenberg), All I Could Ever Be, Persea (a young Polish Jew transforms herself from shirt factory worker on the Lower East Side to successful author)

Jin Yong (trans. Anna Holmwood and Gigi Chang), A Snake Lies Waiting, St. Martin’s Griffin (third in Legends of the Condor Heroes series)

October 2020

Rasha Adly (trans. Sarah Enany), The Girl with Braided Hair, Hoopoe (merging fiction with history, art, and politics, modern day Cairo with its opulent past– story of two women caught between worlds and entangled in matters of the heart)

Ellen Alpsten, Tsarina, SMP (story of Catherine Alexeyevna whose bid for power transformed the Russian Empire)

Tamera Alexander, Colors of Truth, Fountain Creek Press (follows the journey of an Irish immigrant arriving in a country where her kind isn’t wanted, and of a former Federal soldier returning to the scene of a battle that almost destroyed him)

Jeffrey Archer, Hidden in Plain Sight, PanMacmillan (second installment of the William Warwick series)

John Banville, Snow, Hanover Square (1957 – the story of an aristocratic family whose secrets resurface when a parish priest is found murdered in their home)

Olivier Barde-Cabucon (trans. Louise Lalaurie Rogers), The Inspector of Strange and Unexplained Deaths, Pushkin Vertigo (a macabre romp through Versailles Palace by way of the shady criminal underworld of Paris on the brink of the revolution, Paris 1759)

Pepper Basham, The Red Ribbon, Barbour (new historical romance series set in 1912)

M. C. Beaton, Hot to Trot, Constable (Agatha Raisin mystery)

Pete Beatty, Cuyahoga, Scribner (tragedy and farce jumble together evoking Greek classics and the Bible – a revisionist (mid)Western with universal themes of family and fate—an old, weird America that feels brand new)

Kerry Bell, The Emmerdale Girls, Trapeze (exploring the lives of Emmerdale’s much-loved families during World War II)

Lenora Bell, Love is a Rogue, Piatkus (historical romance)

Kate Belli, Deception by Gaslight, Crooked Lane (in Gilded-Age New York, reporter Genevieve Stewart uncovers a trail of corruption and murder. Winter 1888)

Laura Best, Good Mothers Don’t, Nimbus (shifting through time and points of view, novel allows us to see the ripple effects of mental illness and its treatment in the mid-twentieth century)

Mark Blagrave, Lay Figures, Nimbus (Saint John, New Brunswick, 1939 – Elizabeth and her fellow artists make life-changing discoveries about politics and social responsibility, desire and betrayal)

Neil Bockoven, Moctu and the Mammoth People, Rare Bird (story of a strong, young Cro-Magnon boy who must fight his rival for leadership of his tribe)

William Boyd, Trio, Viking (the story of three people living secret lives in the tumultuous summer of 1968 ―A producer; A novelist; An actress)

Graham Brack, Dishonour and Obey, Sapere (next in the Master Mercurius series set in 17^th-c England)

Frances Brody, Murder is in the Air, Crooked Lane (12th Kate Shackleton mystery set in Yorkshire 1930)

Frances Brody, Death and the Brewery Queen, Piatkus (Kate Shackleton mysteries)

Caraline Brown, The Candlelit Menagerie, Arcade (set in late 18th-century London, this debut novel features Lillian, a freakishly tall woman who struggles to fit into society)

Eric Brown, Murder Served Cold, Severn House (the theft of a painting takes crime-writer sleuth Donald Langham to a country house full of seething tension and dark secrets)

Cathy Marie Buchanan, Daughter of Black Lake, Riverhead (in a world of pagan traditions and deeply rooted love, a girl in jeopardy must save her family and community)

Deborah Burrows, Resistance Girls, Ebury Press (first in historical saga series set in WWII)

Emily Carpenter, Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters, Lake Union (dual period set in Tuscaloosa 1934 and present; Eve Candler risks everything to unravel the truth behind the accusations against her grandmother)

P. Djèlí Clark, Ring Shout, Tor.com (a dark fantasy historical novella that gives a supernatural twist to the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror. Set in 1915)

Oliver Clements, The Eyes of the Queen, Atria/Leopoldo & Co. (a man who will become the original MI6 agent protects England and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I from Spain’s nefarious plan to crush the Age of the Enlightenment)

Barbara Cleverly, Invitation to Die, Soho Crime (an invitation to dine turns deadly as DI John Redfyre returns for his second investigation)

Paul Fraser Collard, Fugitive, Headline (roguish hero Jack Lark crosses borders once more as he pursues a new adventure in Africa)

Mary Connealy, Her Secret Song, Bethany House (Brides of Hope Mountain #3)

Douglas Cornelius, Freedom’s Call, Crosslink Publishing (based on true stories featuring the lives of two noted figures of the pre-Civil War era: Elijah Lovejoy, Christian newspaper abolitionist, and William Wells Brown, a fugitive slave)

Christopher Cosmos, Once We Were Here, Arcade (as World War II intrudes upon their home, three young friends risk everything for freedom, love, and a chance at a better life)

Dilly Court, The Cockney Angel, Arrow (saga set in East London, 1865)

Emily M. Danforth, illus. Sara Lautman, Plain Bad Heroines, Wm Morrow (multi-period horror-comedy centered around a cursed New England boarding school for girls, a wickedly whimsical celebration of the art of storytelling, sapphic love, and the rebellious female spirit)

David Diop (trans. Anna Moschovakis), At Night All Blood is Black, FSG (blends oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day horror of life in the trenches, and a touch of black magic)

Paul Doherty, The Devil’s Domain, Canelo (summer of 1380, a French captain is murdered in Hawkmere Manor and Brother Athelstan investigates)

Donna Douglas, A Mother’s Journey, Trapeze (new saga series set during World War II)
Also: A Sister’s Wish (2nd in series)

Jan Drexler, Softly Blows the Bugle, Revell (the Amish of Weaver’s Creek #3)

Caroline Dunford, A Death in the Hospital, Headline Accent (Euphemia Martins mystery series set in August 1914)

Marie-Bernadette Dupuy, The Manhattan Secret, Hodder (saga of secrets, love and betrayal set in late 1800s)

Erik Dussere, The West House, Regal House (literary work about the traumatic pasts that haunt the book’s characters, and about the stories that it is possible for us to tell about those pasts)

Kate Eastham, An Angel’s Work, Bookouture (a wartime novel about friendship and love in the most terrible of circumstances)

Jim Eldridge, Murder at the Manchester Museum, Allison & Busby (1895. Former Scotland Yard detective Daniel Wilson is summoned to investigate the murder of a young woman)
Also: Murder at the Natural History Museum

Jessica Ellicott, Murder Comes to Call, Kensington (fourth Beryl and Edwina mystery)

Christine Evans, Twist of the Thread, Sapere (1865, Lancashire, England – three women carve out their own paths in a time of great change)

Elaine Everest, Christmas with the Tea Shop Girls, Macmillan (a story of wartime love, bravery and hope set in 1940)

Stuart Evers, The Blind Light, W. W. Norton (spanning decades, from the 1950s to the present, novel offers a portrait of friendship and rivalry that explores class divisions and the psychological legacy of the nuclear age)

Fannie Flagg, The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop, Random House (coming-of-age, 1930-40s and present)

Darlene Franklin, Patty Smith Hall, Cynthia Hickey, Marilyn Turk, The Heart of the Midwife, Barbour (4 romance stories set in late 1800s)

Stephen Fry, Troy, Michael Joseph (the great myth revisited with humour and pathos)

Lucy Gannon, The Amazingly Astonishing Story, Seren (a classic story of a working-class girl growing up in the fifties and sixties, where dreams and reality seem irreconcilable)

Charlie Garratt, Where Every Man, Sapere (March, 1940-James Given has left his job as an inspector in England and moved to France, but when a local woman dies under suspicious circumstances, Given comes out of retirement)

Hazel Gaynor, When We Were Young and Brave US & CAN) / The Bird in the Bamboo Cage (UK), Wm Morrow (1941 – inspired by true events surrounding the Japanese Army’s internment of teachers and children from a British-run missionary school)

Sulari Gentill, A House Divided, PPP (murder mystery set in 1931 Sydney)

Alex Gerlis, Ring of Spies, Canelo (Richard Prince WWII espionage thriller)

Sara Gethin, Emmet and Me, Honno Press (a young girl forms a precarious relationship with a boy from a local orphanage, changing their lives forever)

T. Greenwood, Keeping Lucy, Griffin (Dover, Massachusetts, 1969― inspired by true events ― how far must one mother go to protect her daughter)

Euron Griffith, Miriam, Daniel and Me, Seren (story of relationships and simmering unrest in 1960s Gwynedd)

Sophie Hardach, Of Love and Other Wars, Head of Zeus (story of a Quaker family and a Jewish family in love and at war during World War Two)

Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches, Redhook / Orbit (late 1800s, three sisters use witchcraft to change the course of history)

Kathryn Haueisen, Mayflower Chronicles: The Tale of Two Cultures, Green Place Books (in 1620 the Mayflower delivered 102 refugees and fortune seekers from England to Cape Cod, where the British first encountered North American natives)

Finbar Hawkins, Witch, Zephyr (set in the 17th century, debut about the power of women, witchcraft, fury, revenge and the ties that bind us)

William Hjortsberg, Angel’s Inferno, No Exit Press/Centipede (takes readers on a macabre journey into the occult, from mid-fifties New York to Paris to the Vatican)

Noel Hodson, Isaac Newton’s 21st Century Entanglement, Lightning Books (while quietly studying prisms and light on his family’s Lincolnshire farm in the plague year of 1666, Isaac Newton suddenly finds himself transported to 2020)

Alice Hoffman, Magic Lessons, S & S (prequel to Practical Magic ― love has plagued the Owens family for centuries and it all began with Maria Owens, who arrived in America in 1680, with a baby in tow…)

Jenny Holmes, Christmas with the Spitfire Girls, Corgi (WWII saga)

Angela Hunt, The Shepherd’s Wife, Bethany House (when her husband is thrown into debtor’s prison, Pheodora pins her hopes on the birth of two spotless goats to sell for the upcoming Yom Kippur sacrifice)

Eloisa James, My Last Duchess, Piatkus (a continuation of the Wildes series)

Jane Johnson, The Tenth Gift, Head of Zeus (dual-narrative romantic mystery set in Cornwall, 1625 and present-day London)

Joy Jordan-Lake, Under a Gilded Moon, Lake Union (a novel of secrets and murder as classes collide in the shadow of Biltmore House)

Lesley Kagen, Every Now and Then, Alcove Press (story about three young girls searching for adventure during the summer of 1960)

Elmer Kelton, Hard Ride, Forge (a collection of tales from the early days of the Wild West into the 20th century)

Wolfgang Koeppen, Pigeons on the Grass, New Directions (literary fiction told over a single day in Munich, 1948)

Sarah E. Ladd, The Light at Wyndcliff, Thomas Nelson (3rd in Regency Cornwall series)

Vicki Lane, And the Crows Took Their Eyes, Regal House (during the Civil War, in bitterly divided western North Carolina, Confederate troops execute thirteen men and boys from a rural community opposed to secession)

Sarah Lark (trans. Kate Northrop), Fires of Change, Amazon Crossing (continues the family saga as a defiant new generation of women comes of age amid social unrest and precarious love in 19^th-c colonial New Zealand)

Zhang Ling (trans. Shelly Bryant), A Single Swallow, Amazon Crossing (epic about the devastation of war, forgiveness, redemption, and the enduring power of love)

Bryan Litfin, The Conqueror, Revell (Rome stands at the brink of war. Constantine’s army is on the move. Will the barbarian warrior and the senator’s daughter live to see the Empire bow the knee to Christ?)

Robert Littell, Comrade Koba, The Overlook Press (a naive child’s encounters with a Soviet dictator)

Debra May Macleod, Brides of Rome, Blackstone (a novel of the Vestal Virgins who protect the Eternal City)

Gregory Maguire, A Wild Winter Swan, Wm Morrow (transforms Hans Christian Andersen’s The Wild Swans into an Italian-American girl’s poignant coming-of-age story, set amid the magic of Christmas in 1960s New York)

Laura Martínez-Belli (trans. Simon Bruni), The Empress, Amazon Crossing (1863 – historical novel about the tragic reign of Empress Carlota of Mexico)

Robert Masello, The Haunting of H. G. Wells, 47North (1914 – from the Western Front a story emerges of St. George and a brigade of angels descending from heaven to fight beside the beleaguered British troops)

Susan Anne Mason, A Haven for Her Heart, Bethany House (homeless after being released from a women’s reformatory in 1939 Toronto, Olivia Rosetti is taken in by an angel of mercy)

Marga Minco, Bitter Herbs, Ebury Press (historical fiction set in Holland 1940)

Caroline Montague, A Paris Secret, Orion (tale of ambition and passion in the shattered world of post-war Paris)

Lars Mytting (trans. Deborah Dawkin), The Bell in the Lake, MacLehose (novel set in 1897 Norway, of a young woman whose fate plays out against her village’s mystical church bells)

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, The Perfect Nine, The New Press (tells the story of the founding of the Gĩkũyũ people of Kenya, from a strongly feminist perspective)

Shelley Noble, A Resolution at Midnight, Forge (next in Lady Dunbridge series)

Samantha Norman, Death and the Maiden, Wm Morrow (England 1191 – final installment in Mistress of the Art of Death historical mystery series set in Norman England)

Tracie Peterson, Forever by Your Side, Bethany House (accompanied by her best friend, Thomas Lowell, Constance Browning returns from studying in the East to catalog the native peoples of Oregon)

Joanna Davidson Politano, The Love Note, Revell (laced with mysteries large and small, this Victorian-era tale is of love lost, love deferred, and love found)

Samantha Rajaram, The Company Daughters, Bookouture (Amsterdam 1616 – based on true history, virtuous young ladies become the brides of industrious settlers in a foreign land)

Fanny Reybaud (trans. Barbara Basbanes Richter), Mademoiselle de Malepeire (c.1854), Bancroft Press (romance and murder mystery, where a captivating portrait of a beautiful aristocrat inspires a young scholar to discover the subject’s true identity uncovering murder and deception)

M. J. Rose and Fiona Davis, Stories From Suffragette City, Henry Holt and Co. (collection of short stories all set on the same day, October 23, 1915, on which over a million women marched for the right to vote in New York City)

Andrzej Sapkowski (trans. David French), The Tower of Fools, Gollancz/Orbit (historical fantasy -first in new trilogy set during the Hussite Wars)

Helen Scarlett, The Deception of Harriet Fleet, Quercus (Victorian chiller mystery set in brooding County Durham)

Ben Schott, Jeeves and the Leap of Faith, Little, Brown/Hutchinson (Jeeves and Wooster return in a new espionage caper)

V. E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, Tor/Titan (a French woman longing for freedom strikes a bargain with a god named Luc)

Regina Scott, Nothing Short of Wondrous, Revell (1886 – can two wounded hearts share one powerful love when God is in control?)

Seth, George Sprott (1894-1975), Drawn and Quarterly (a series of “interviews” with the people who cared about George, flashbacks, and personal reminiscence – graphic novel)

Lea Singer (trans. Elisabeth Lauffer), The Piano Student, New Vessel (centers on an affair between one of the 20th century’s most celebrated pianists, Vladimir Horowitz, and his young male student, Nico Kaufmann, in the late 1930s)

Fiona Veitch Smith, The Art Fiasco, Lion Fiction (1924 – Poppy Denby Investigates series)

Stephen Spotswood, Fortune Favours the Dead, Doubleday (introducing Pentecost and Parker, two unconventional female detectives who couldn’t care less about playing by the rules; set in 1942)

Danielle Steel, Spy, Pan (a young woman is caught up in a dangerous double life on behalf of her country during World War Two)

Ann Tatlock, The Names of the Stars, New Hope Publishers (1900s historical novel shares Anna Rycroft’s life, which is changed by some startling encounters with Dickins’s A Christmas Carol characters)

Jodi Taylor, An Argumentation of Historians, Headline (ninth book in Chronicles of St Mary’s series which follows a group of tea-soaked disaster magnets as they hurtle their way around History)

Patrick Taylor, An Irish Country Welcome, Forge (next installment in Irish Country series)

Stephen Taylor, A Canopy of Stars, Sapere (dual-timeline courtroom drama set in Georgian England)

Jodi Thomas, Sharla Lovelace, Scarlett Dunn, The Cowboy Who Saved Christmas, Kensington (three adventure romances set in Texas after the Civil War)

Maisie Thomas, Secrets of the Railway Girls, Arrow (2nd in series. Manchester, November 1940)

Sherry Thomas, Murder on Cold Street, Berkley (Charlotte Holmes, Lady Sherlock, investigates a puzzling new murder case)

Victoria Thompson, City of Schemes, Berkley (latest entry in the Counterfeit Lady Novels)

Sarah Tolmie, The Fourth Island, Tor.com (story of life and death on the hidden Irish island of Inis Caillte)

Michel Tremblay (trans. Sheila Fischman), The Grand Melee, Talonbooks (May 1922 – fifth novel in the Desrosiers Diaspora family saga)

TJ Turner, Angel in the Fog, Oceanview (an espionage thriller amidst the Civil War)

Stuart Turton, The Devil and the Dark Water, Sourcebooks Landmark (a murder on the high seas; a detective duo and a demon which may or may not exist)

Nicola Upson, The Secrets of Winter, Crooked Lane (a Christmas gathering on an island off the Cornish coast goes murderously wrong in this Golden Age mystery)

Pablo Urbanyl (trans. Natalia Heroux), God’s Zoo, Guernica (recounts childhood experiences of Fénix, a boy in the Hungarian city of Ipolyság, within the context of the German invasion and the subsequent Russian advance and domination of Hungary)

J.A. Wainwright, This Cleaving and This Burning, Guernica Editions (two unrelated, aspiring writers, (Hemingway and Crane) born on the same day, in the same year, to parents with the same first names, grow up together and eventually gain national prominence as authors)

Jess Walter, The Cold Millions, Harper (story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America that echoes our own time)

Rachel Wesson, A Home for Unloved Orphans, Bookouture (hopeful tale about a brave young woman who gives up everything to help unloved children)

Tori Whitaker, Millicent Glenn’s Last Wish, Lake Union (debut inspired by a true story – multigenerational family drama drawn from a tragedy suffered in a 1950s maternity ward)

John Wilde, Gimpy, Bluewater Publications (after being given a rough hand in life—born into poverty, a father gone to war, and a permanent limp—Gimpy’s incredible smarts help him make it to college)

Reavis Z. Wortham, The Rock Hole, PPP (1964: farmer and part-time constable Ned Parker joins forces with John Washington, the black deputy sheriff from nearby Paris, to track down a disturbed individual)

November 2020

Diane Allen, The Girl from the Tanner’s Yard, Pan (family drama about a girl who rises to prosperity from humble beginnings)

Ahmet Altan (trans. Brendan Freely, Yelda Türedi), Love in the Days of Rebellion, Europa Editions (weaving through tortured love affairs, political intrigue, power struggles, and social upheavals, novel offers a vivid tableau of the crisis of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century)

Jenny Ashcroft, Under the Golden Sun, Sphere (a hired companion escorts a young, orphaned child home to Australia)

Tracy Baines, Christmas with the Variety Girls, Ebury Press (after war is declared and the theatres begin to close, Frances and the variety girls must search for work elsewhere)

Amanda Barratt, Carrie Fancett Pagels, Kathleen Y’Barbo, A Place to Dream, Barbour (3 romance stories)

Johanna Bell, Christmas with the Bobby Girls, Hodder (WWI saga)

David Biro, This Magnificent Dappled Sea, Lake Union (two strangers—generations and oceans apart—have a chance to save each other)

Tracy Borman, Fallen Angel, Hodder/Atlantic Monthly Press (conclusion to Stuart-era trilogy, Frances Gorges must face a dangerous new enemy deep within the court of James I)

Adrien Bosc (trans. Frank Wynne), The Exiles, Serpents Tail (story of eccentrics and geniuses on a voyage of escape from Nazi-occupied Europe)

Paula Brackston, The Garden of Promises and Lies, SMP (3rd in the Found Things time-slip series)

Rita Bradshaw, The Storm Child, Pan (saga set in the years leading up to the Second World War)

Verity Bright, Murder in the Snow, Bookouture (a Lady Eleanor Swift mystery set in England, 1920)

Kenneth Bromberg, City of Angels, Flame Tree (1924: a homicide detective follows his own unique code of conduct within the racist and corrupt Los Angeles Police Department)

Bill Brooks, The Pistoleros, Five Star (stories of three different men, all pistoleros who live by the gun)

Karen Brooks, The Lady Brewer of London, Wm Morrow (an historical tale set in fifteenth-century England tells of a brilliant woman’s defiance, courage, and ingenuity)

Grace Burrowes, The Truth About Dukes, Piatkus (Regency romance)

D.J. Butler, Serpent Daughter, Baen (new entry in the Witchy War series, blending alternate history, Appalachian Folklore, and fantasy)

Annie Clarke, Christmas on the Home Front, Arrow (saga set during WWII)

Manda Collins, A Lady’s Guide to Mischief and Mayhem, Piatkus (an intrepid female reporter matches wits with a serious, sexy detective)

Michael Conant, A Garden in Winter, Incorgnito Publishing (historical novel about a dark time in American history and a young man’s unknowing journey to uncover his own past)

Cressida Connolly, After the Party, Pegasus (novel of manners that tells the story of a dark and disturbing period of British history)

Nicola Cornick, The Forgotten Sister, Graydon House (dual time mystery set in the present and Tudor England exploring the death of Amy Robsart.)

Bernard Cornwell, War Lord, Harper (13th installment in 10th-C series featuring Uhtred of Bebbanburg)

Paul Cox, Black Sun, Five Star (historical western)

Kitty Danton, A Wartime Wish, Orion (saga set in England 1944)

Jeff Dawson, Hell Gate, Canelo (third instalment of the Ingo Finch crime series set in early 1900s)

Margaux DeRoux, The Lost Diary of Venice, Trapeze (two love stories are fatefully connected by one artist’s mysterious diary in this debut that leaps between the mysteries of late Renaissance Venice and the dramas of present-day America)

David Diop (trans. Anna Moschovakis), At Night All Blood is Black, Pushkin Press (blends oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day horror of life in the trenches, plus a touch of black magic)

Sarah M. Eden, The Gentleman and the Thief, Shadow Mountain (a gentleman writes penny dreadful novels by night and falls in love with a woman who is a music teacher by day and a thief at night)

Bella Ellis, The Diabolical Bones, Berkley (a Brontë sisters mystery)

Graham Faiella, Mysteries & Sea Monsters Vol. 4, The History Press (true-life stories of seafarers facing danger and death in the 19th and early 20th centuries)

Jessica Fellowes, The Mitford Trial, Sphere (next in series with the Mitford sisters)

Eric Flint, Charles E. Gannon, 1637: No Peace Beyond the Line, Baen (Commander Eddie Cantrell and his ally Admiral Martin Tromp start 1637 off with some nasty surprises for Spain)

Fiona Ford, A Christmas Wedding, Arrow (a WWII romance)

Vivien Freeman, The Escape of Rose Alleyn, Headline Accent (family saga of love and the sacrifice of family duty – set in 1900)

Marie-Louise Gagneur, An Atonement and Three Rival Sisters, Gallic (translated into English for the first time, novellas comment on the restrictions of late nineteenth-century society)

Craig Gallant, Rise of the Alchemist, Zmok Books (steampunk alternative history set in the US, 100 years after the failed revolution)

Sulari Gentill, A House Divided, PPP (meet Rowland Sinclair, gentleman and bohemian artist living in 1931 Sydney, who shares the family mansion with a poet, a painter, and a feminist sculptress)

Noel Gerson, Rock of Freedom, Sapere (November 1620 – will the harmony of the Pilgrims, embodied by their newly signed Mayflower Compact, survive as relationships fracture?)

David Gilman, Night Flight to Paris, Head of Zeus (an SOE agent is sent into Nazi-occupied France to track down and extract a missing radio operator)

Nicole Glover, The Conductors, John Joseph Adams (as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Hetty Rhodes helped usher dozens of people north with her wits and magic – speculative fiction delving into important historical events)

Susanne Goldring, The Girl Without a Name, Bookouture (dual-narrative story of the bravery and courage of a young woman in wartime and another woman’s quest to put things right)

S. M. Goodwin, Absence of Mercy, Crooked Lane (a string of grisly murders in Pre-Civil War New York propels an unlikely pair of detectives into a deadly tinderbox)

Amy Lynn Green, Things We Didn’t Say, Bethany House (in this epistolary novel from the WWII home front, Johanna Berglund is forced to return to her small Midwestern town to become a translator at a German prisoner of war camp)

Philippa Gregory, Dark Tides, Simon & Schuster UK/Atria (tracks the rise of the Tidelands family in London, Venice, and New England – sequel to Tidelands)

Aaron Gwyn, All God’s Children, Europa Editions (in 1827, Duncan Lammons, a disgraced young man from Kentucky, sets out to join the American army in the province of Texas, hoping that here he may live – and love – as he pleases)

C.B. Hanley, Cast the First Stone, The History Press (November 1217 – murder mystery set in a time of violent civil war and featuring commoner-turned-earl’s man, Edwin Weaver)

Pamela Hart, The Charleston Scandal, Hachette Australia (London, 1920s: Kit Scott, a privileged young Australian aiming to become a star, finds herself at the centre of a major scandal)

Sarah Hawkswood, River of Sins, Allison & Busby (July 1144, ‘the finest whore in Worcester’ is found butchered on an island a few miles up the River Severn)

Sam Hurcom, A Shadow on the Lens, Orion (historical crime fiction set in 1904)

Pam Jenoff, The Diplomat’s Wife, Park Row (one woman faces danger, intrigue, and love in the aftermath of World War II)

Jane Johnson, The Sea Gate, S & S (tale of love and courage set during the Second World War)

Sarah Anne Johnson, The Last Sailor, Sourcebooks Landmark (turn of the century Cape Cod, a fishing family struggles with the fractures caused by a tragic accident to a young boy)

Gaëlle Josse (trans. Natasha Lehrer), The Last Days of Ellis Island, World Editions (New York, November 3, 1954: The last immigration officer of Ellis Island looks back at 45 years as gatekeeper to America)

Rachel Joyce, Miss Benson’s Beetle, Bond Street Books (1950 – an adventure story and a tender exploration of a friendship that defies all boundaries)

R. F. Kuang, The Burning God, Harper Voyager (conclusion of The Poppy War fantasy trilogy that combines history of 20th-c China with a world of gods and monsters)

Emma Kennedy, The Things We Left Unsaid, Century (dual-timeline story of love and family)

Soraya M. Lane, The Last Correspondent, Lake Union (a woman who has been writing under a male pseudonym takes a job as a correspondent in war-torn France)

H.B. Lyle, The Year of the Gun, Quercus/Hodder & Stoughton (1912. Released from the Secret Service, Wiggins sets out for New York and his lost-lover Bela – follow up to The Red Ribbon)

C. S. Malerich, The Factory Witches of Lowell, Tor.com (faced with abominable working conditions the mill girls of Lowell are going on strike, using a little witchcraft to ensure that no one leaves the picket line)

Cathy Mansell, The Dublin Girls, Headline (1950s Dublin saga)

Nev March, Murder in Old Bombay, Minotaur (hero, Captain Angihotri, channels his idol, Sherlock Holmes, in 19th century Bombay in this debut historical novel)

Maggie Mason, A Blackpool Christmas, Sphere (final book in saga trilogy)

Roland Merullo, From These Broken Streets, Lake Union (novel of Nazi-occupied Naples and the rage and resistance of a people under siege)

Catriona McPherson, The Turning Tide, Quercus (a Dandy Silver mystery set in 1930s Scotland)

Simon Michael, Force of Evil, Sapere (historical thriller set in London 1965)

Ellie Midwood, The Violinist of Auschwitz, Bookouture (brings to life one of history’s most fearless, inspiring and courageous heroines, Alma Rosé)

Naomi Miller, Imperfect Alchemist, Allison & Busby (a novel of Mary Sidney Herbert)

Hubert Mingarelli (trans. Sam Taylor), The Invisible Land, Granta (Dinslaken, Germany, July 1945 – a war photographer, reluctant to return home sets out to photograph ordinary German people)

Elizabeth Morton, A Last Dance in Liverpool, Ebury (WWII family saga)

Chloe Neill, The Bright and Breaking Sea, Berkley (sea faring adventure fantasy set in 18^th-c)

Olivia Newport, What You Said to Me, Shiloh Run (multi-period historical romance)

Martha Ostenso, Prologue to Love (c. 1931), Invisible Publishing (portrait of early 20th century BC ranch life, and an intergenerational tale of love and loss)

Markoosie Patsauq (trans. Valerie Henitiuk, Marc-Antoine Mahieu), Hunter with Harpoon (c. 1970), McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press (based on an Inuit legend; story of Kamik, a young hero who comes to manhood while on a perilous hunt for a wounded polar bear)

Anne Perry, A Christmas Resolution, Ballantine (late 1800s, Kent – a smitten young woman is about to marry a dangerous man—unless Detective Hooper and his new girlfriend can prevent it)

Nicola Pryce, A Cornish Betrothal, Atlantic (family saga set in 18^th-c Cornwall)

Alex Reeve, The Butcher of Berner Street, Raven Books (an anonymous letter summons fledgling journalist Leo Stanhope to a London club, only to find the owner murdered)

Nancy Revell, A Christmas Wish for the Shipyard Girls, Arrow (Sunderland, 1943: As Christmas approaches in the shipyards, everyone is hoping for a little magic)

Daniela Sacerdoti, The Lost Village, Bookouture (historical romance about the secrets we keep to protect the ones we love – told in dual-narrative – 1945 and 2006)

Constance Sayers, A Witch in Time, Piatkus (a young witch is cursed to relive a doomed love affair through many lifetimes, as both troubled muse and frustrated artist)

Simon Scarrow, The Emperor’s Exile, Headline (series featuring Tribune Cato and Centurion Macro, book 19)

Bernard Schlink (trans. Charlotte Collins) Olga, W&N (personal history of an ordinary and yet remarkable woman, told against the devastating canvas of 20th century Germany)

James D. Shipman, Irena’s War, Kensington (based on true story of an unlikely Polish resistance fighter who helped save thousands of Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during World War II)

Rosemary Simpson, Death, Diamonds, and Deception, Kensington (heiress Prudence MacKenzie and ex-Pinkerton Geoffrey Hunter are in pursuit of stolen diamonds once belonging to Marie Antoinette)

Minerva Spencer, Notorious, Kensington (new series featuring women who have no qualms about breaking the strict rules of Regency-era London)

Stephen Spotswood, Fortune Favours the Dead, Headline (introducing Pentecost and Parker, two unconventional female detectives who couldn’t care less about playing by the rules; set in 1942)

Susan Stinson, Martha Moody, Small Beer Press (an unexpected story of a woman’s life and love living in the old American west)

Sarah Loudin Thomas, The Right Kind of Fool, Bethany House (a murder investigation in 1934 leads a father to discover a great deal of courage in his deaf son)

The Goggles, The Book of Darryl, MCD (graphic format story of a sixteen-year-old who discovers heavy metal and the son of god in one heady summer in Roman-occupied Nazareth)

Lynne Truss, Murder by Milk Bottle, Bloomsbury (murder mystery set in 1957 Brighton)

Jen Turano, To Steal a Heart, Bethany House (Gabriella Goodhue had put her past as a thief behind her, until a woman in her boardinghouse is unjustly accused and Gabriella is caught gathering evidence)

Nicola Upson, The Dead of Winter, Faber & Faber (murder mystery set in Cornwall 1938)

S.S. Van Dine, The Garden Murder Case, Felony & Mayhem (a classic house-party murder mystery)

Marjolijn van Heemstra, In Search of a Name, Atria (explores the burden of legacy as a young woman wrestles with discoveries that contradict her great-uncle’s supposed heroism during World War II)

Eric Vuillard (trans. Mark Polizzotti), The War of the Poor, Other Press (tells the story of one man whose terrible and novelesque life casts light on the times in which he lived)

Jane Walsh, Her Lady to Love, Bold Strokes Books (Country mouse Lady Honora Banfield arrives in London with one mission: to catch a husband. LGBTQ, Romance )

David Wharton, Finer Things, Sandstone Press (in London: 1963, the lives of a professional shoplifter and a young art student collide)

Zoë Wicomb, Still Life, The New Press (juggles our perception of time and reality and tells the story of an author struggling to write a biography of long-forgotten Scottish poet Thomas Pringle)

Darcie Wilde, A Lady Compromised, Kensington (mystery series featuring Rosalind Thorne, a young woman adept at helping ladies of the ton navigate the darker corners of Regency England)

Donald Willerton, Teddy’s War, Terra Nova (a young man learns the truth about his father during WWII and discovers that dying a hero does not absolve a person from the sins of his past)

Carol Windley, Midnight Train to Prague, Grove Press (a timeless tale of friendship, romance, betrayal, and survival set in a Europe torn apart by world war)

Val Wood, The Lonely Wife, Bantam (story about a woman’s struggle to claim what is rightfully hers set in 1850)

James C. Work, The Stones of Peril, Five Star (book 3 in Ranger McIntyre series set in 1920s)

Glenda Young, The Paper Mill Girl, Headline (family saga of triumph in adversity)

Ella Zeiss (trans. Helen MacCormac), On the Wings of Hope, Lake Union (as World War II draws to a close, can two young people find love, hope—and freedom?)

December 2020

Jasmine Aimaq, The Opium Prince, Soho Press (debut explores the far-reaching events that unfold when a young US foreign aid official kills a Kochi girl outside Kabul)

Willem Anker (trans. Michiel Heyns), Red Dog, Pushkin Press (an epic tale of Africa in a time before boundaries between cultures and peoples were fixed – set in 18th-c)

Tessa Arlen, Poppy Redfern and the Fatal Flyers, Berkley (a Woman of World War II mystery)

Elizabeth Bailey, Marriage for Music, Sapere (Brides By Chance Regency adventure series)
Also: Damsel to the Rescue

Marco Balzano (trans. Jill Foulston), I’m Staying Here, Other Press (a mother recounts her life story to her long-lost daughter in a novel about a community torn between Italian fascism and German Nazism)

Alys Clare, The Outcast Girls, Severn House (1881 – private investigators Lily Raynor and Felix Wilbraham get more than they bargain for when they take on a case in a girls’ boarding school)

Ashley Clark, The Dress Shop on King Street, Bethany House (Heirloom Secrets)

Connilyn Cossette, To Dwell Among Cedars, Bethany House (The Covenant House #1 – biblical fiction)

Paul French, Strangers on the Praia, Blacksmith Books (stories of Jewish refugees who moved on from wartime Shanghai to seek a possible route to freedom via the Portuguese colony of Macao)

Harald Gilbers, Germania, Thomas Dunne (story of Jewish detective Richard Oppenheimer as he hunts for a serial killer through war-torn Nazi Berlin)

Stephanie Graves, Olive Bright, Pigeoneer, Kensington (set in a British village during WW II, new mystery series introduces a spirited young pigeon fancier who finds herself at the heart of a baffling murder)

Sumi Hahn, The Mermaid from Jeju, Alcove Press (a saga set in the aftermath of WWI where a young Haenyeo diver must learn to navigate a tumultuous world unlike anything she has ever known)

Kate Hewitt, Dreams of the Island, Bookouture (Amherst Island, book 2 – historical romance)

Joseph Heywood, Beyond Beyond, Lyons Press (a Lute Bapcat alternative fantasy mystery set in Russia, 1917)

Mike Hollow, The Stratford Murder, Allison & Busby (during an air raid, the body of a young woman is found, strangled)
Also: The Custom House Murder

Elizabeth Hoyt, When a Rogue Meets His Match, Piatkus (2^nd novel in Greycourt series)

Catherine Ryan Hyde, My Name is Anton, Lake Union (1965 – a hopeful novel of sacrifice, two lost souls, and enduring love)

Michael Jecks, Death Comes Hot, Severn House (Jack Blackjack’s search for an executioner’s son ensnares him in a fiendish mesh of schemes in this Tudor mystery)

Regina Jennings, Courting Misfortune, Bethany House (assigned to find the kidnapped daughter of a mob boss, Pinkerton operative Calista York is sent to a rowdy mining town in Missouri)

Mary Kelly, The Spoilt Kill, PPP (murder, espionage, and sabotage are all fair play in 1950s Staffordshire)

Irmgard Keun (trans. Michael Hofmann), Ferdinand, The Man With the Kind Heart, Other Press (paints a shrewd portrait of postwar German society)

Laurie R. King, (edit. Leslie S. Klinger), In League with Sherlock Holmes, Pegasus (featuring fifteen authors and a multitude of new cases for Arthur Conan Doyle’s most acclaimed detective)

T E Kinsey, The Fatal Flying Affair, Thomas & Mercer (a Lady Hardcastle mystery)

Julie Klassen, A Castaway in Cornwall, Bethany House (when ships sink, wreckers scour the shore for valuables, while Laura collects clues to the lives lost. And when a man is washed ashore, she collects him too)

Judithe Little, The Chanel Sisters, Graydon House (novel narrated by Coco Chanel’s younger sister about their struggle to rise up from poverty and orphan-hood and establish what became the world’s most iconic fashion brand in Paris)

Greer Macallister, The Arctic Fury, Sourcebooks Landmark (Virginia Reeve is summoned by Lady Jane Franklin who wants her to lead a dozen women into the Arctic in search of the ships of her husband’s lost expedition)

Carla Malden, Shine Until Tomorrow, Rare Bird (time-slip tells the story of a girl obsessed with the future who must visit the past to learn to live in the present)

Beryl Matthews, From This Day Forward, Allison & Busby (Victorian romance family saga)

Matthew P. Mayo, Dilly, Five Star (coming-of-age story of an abused orphan boy)

Julie McElwain, Betrayal in Time, Pegasus Crime (Kendra Donovan’s adventures in 19th-century England continue when she is called upon to investigate the murder of a spymaster)

Kristina McMorris, Letters From Home, Kensington (a moving tale of friendship, family, and the twists of fate that change us forever – inspired by the author’s grandparents’ WWII letters)

Phil Mills Jr., Where the Wildflowers Dance, Five Star (a Good Wind Western)

Laura Morelli, The Night Portrait, One More Chapter (dual timeline historical fiction novel about da Vinci’s Portrait of a Lady with an Ermine, and the woman who saved it from Nazi destruction in World War II)

Terri Nixon, A Cornish Promise, Piatkus (second in new series set in the 1920s in a glamorous hotel on the Cornish coast)

S. J. Parris, Conspiracy, Pegasus Crime (murder mystery set in 16th-century France)

Karen Powell, The River Within, Europa Editions (murder mystery set in North Yorkshire, 1955)

Mandy Robotham, The Berlin Girl, HarperCollins (Berlin 1938; a country on the brink of war)

Larry D. Sweazy, The Return of the Wolf, Five Star (a Josiah Wolfe, Texas Ranger novel)

Charles Todd, A Hanging at Dawn, Witness Impulse (a Bess Crawford mystery short story)

Liz Tolsma, The Gold Digger, Barbour (fiction based on ‘Strange but True’ history set in 1907 Indiana)

Janet MacLeod Trotter, The Sapphire Child, Lake Union (Raj Hotel book 2)

Simon Turney, Gordon Doherty, Sons of Rome, Head of Zeus (end of 3rd century AD – Emperor Diocletian takes steps to allow for not one emperor to rule the Empire, but four)

S.S. Van Dine, The Kidnap Murder Case, Felony & Mayhem (a Philo Vance mystery)

Marlene Van Niekerk, Agaat (c 2004), Tin House (in the waning days of South African apartheid, novel portrays how two women—and, perhaps, a nation—can forge a path toward understanding and reconciliation)

T.A. Willberg, Marion Lane and the Midnight Murder, Park Row (locked room murder mystery set in 1950’s London, introducing Marion Lane, a bookish detective-in-training)

Mary Wood, The Jam Factory Girls, Pan (saga about female friendship)