Bookshelf, Fall 2025

Yes, the fall equinox has just taken place, but it’s already the last week of September, and September feels like fall to me. So here are the books I have on hand. Some I’ve already read but will covering in the weeks to come; others are genuinely on the (virtual) bookshelf, waiting for me to get to them.

S.J. Bennett, The Queen Who Came in from the Cold (Crooked Lane Books, Nov. 2025)

To someone who spent her first eleven years in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s, there is only one queen: Elizabeth II. And turning her into fiction, at least during my childhood, was considered at best unfair (because the queen could not respond) and at worst as a kind of lèse-majesté. But fortunately those days have gone, and S.J. Bennett has produced this wonderful series of murder mysteries that brings the queen to life while expressing both sympathy and respect for the burdens imposed by a role with much privilege but also great responsibility and surprisingly little freedom.

In addition to the amusing setup, in which the queen can solve crimes but can’t admit to solving them, forcing her to manipulate the police into reaching the right conclusions, one of the charming features of the series is the queen’s reliance on a series of female assistant private secretaries who, unlike the men, understand that Elizabeth actually doesn’t consider it a “bother” to stay informed about what’s going around her. The interactions between her and the other members of the royal family, especially Prince Phillip, are also delightful.

I’ve read the first four books—three set in 2016 and the fourth going back in time to 1957—and look forward to finding out what case the queen has to tackle during the Cold War. My New Books in Historical Fiction interview with S.J. Bennett should go up in early to mid-December.

Mimi Matthews, The Marriage Method (Berkley, Nov. 2025)

The Marriage Method features Miles Quincey and Penelope (Nell) Trewlove—friends of the lead couple in Rules for Ruin, the first Crinoline Academy story, which came out earlier this year. Miles runs the local newspaper, The London Courant. Nell sees her future as a teacher at the Academy; marriage has never entered into her plans—in part because a fall in her teen years left her with an incurable limp and scars that she has long considered off-putting.

Like its predecessor, The Marriage Method mixes a budding romance and the gradual acclimation of two strangers to each other with a darker plot, here involving the abduction of young women into prostitution. One of the victims comes from the aristocracy, so there is an element of social commentary here, too. The fun is in following its complex and sympathetic leads as they juggle their mutual attraction, the schemes of their adversaries—and Miles’s five cats—in a fast-moving, captivating plot.

Mirta Ojito, Deeper Than the Ocean (Union Square Publishing, Nov. 2025)

Five generations of the women from a single Spanish/Cuban/US family form the backbone of this novel, which focuses on the attempt by Mara Denis, a twenty-first-century journalist specializing in immigration stories, to discover the birth certificate of her great-grandmother, born in the Canary Islands in the late nineteenth century.

Mara’s efforts to untangle the family history she’s been taught and experienced are counterposed to the lived experience of her great-grandmother, Catalina Quintana Cabazas, which is in turn intertwined with the histories of the generations before and after her, as well as the close ties of sisterhood and female friendship. Everything comes to a head with the ill-fated voyage of the cruise ship Valbanera, a historical incident that in some ways resembled the destruction of the better-known Titanic.

Find out more from my interview with Mirta Ojito on this blog around the time of the book’s release in early November.

Andrea Penrose, Murder at Somerset House (Kensington, 2025)

It’s no secret that I love Andrea Penrose’s Wrexford and Sloane Mysteries, and this new one is no exception. In some ways, it goes in a different direction from its predecessors, introducing a fascinating new character into the Wrexford household. It also expands the usual exploration of technical and scientific developments during the Regency to include social and economic changes that we now take for granted.

Nonetheless, the usual cast of characters is present and at the top of their game, and the mystery, which includes elements of espionage as well as the usual historical references and humorous moments, is well plotted and satisfying. I’ve already interviewed the author several times, here and on the New Books Network, so I can’t cover this latest installment other than here, but you can find an introduction to the series as a whole on New Books in Historical Fiction.

Katie Tietjen, Murder in Miniature (Crooked Lane Books, 2025)

Maple Bishop didn’t expect to become a war widow. Not that anyone does, exactly, but after marrying a doctor with a country practice—someone who had no need to rush off and join the army—Maple feels especially ill-used by her husband’s rapid demise after signing up late in World War II.

When her government-issued survivors’ check turns out to be $12.67 once her husband’s lawyers clear his debts, her distress multiplies. Now she has no means to support herself and she’s stuck in a tiny Vermont town where people consider her an outsider because her family has not lived there for generations.

To make a living, she begins selling the dollhouses she’s been building to keep her occupied while she grieves. But one thing leads to another, and soon Maple is dragged into investigating a murder, where it turns out her photographic memory and her ability to put everything she sees into a dollhouse may just crack the case.

Murder in Miniature is Maple’s second case, which takes her back to South Boston, where she grew up, as well as the small town in Vermont. It’s the followup to last year’s Death in the Details, and I’ll be interviewing Katie Tietjen about both books and the real-life investigator who inspired Maple Bishop for the New Books Network in October.