Bookshelf, Summer 2025

Just about caught up on the many books I agreed to cover in the spring—most of them already read but just being released now or due for release before August, but here’s the list of what’s on my bookshelf for the summer. Assuming things go as planned, I’ll be hosting interviews with all but one of these authors, three here on the blog and two for the New Books Network. Read on to find for suggestions on what to add to your reading list.

Rachel Louise Driscoll, The House of Two Sisters (Ballantine, June 2025)

Although it’s 1887, eighteen-year-old Clementine (Clemmie) Attridge works with her Egyptologist father as a hieroglyphist. One night, Clemmie realizes that the signs she’s translating are highly unusual. She calls out for her father to stop unwrapping the mummy, but like many Victorian gentlemen, he’s unwilling to accept advice from his daughter. The skeleton, when unwrapped, is even more startling than the inscriptions.

Fast forward five years, and Clemmie is in Cairo, convinced that this trip is her sole opportunity to reverse the curse that has plagued her family since that fateful night.

The novel goes back and forth between the events of the intervening five years and Clemmie’s attempts to rectify her father’s mistake. The result is a thoroughly engrossing tale about the lasting bond between siblings, human and divine.

I hope to host a written Q&A with Rachel Louise Driscoll on this blog in a few weeks.

Kathleen Kaufman, The Entirely True Story of the Fantastical Mesmerist Nora Grey (Kensington, July 2025)

This fascinating novel follows the career of a young Scotswoman named Nairna Liath, starting in 1900. Nora, then sixteen years old, travels the Scottish countryside with her father, Tavish, who supports himself and his daughter by hawking her supposed skills as a medium. But we soon find out that the joke’s on Tavish: Nairna really does have psychic talents, especially in reading Tarot cards. Her ability attracts attention from the Society for Psychical Research, setting Nairna on her path to become the spiritualist Nora Grey.

Her tale is intertwined with (in fact, propelled by) that of Nairna’s grandmother, Lottie Liath, in the 1860s. Lottie has just lost her husband in a coal mining accident, and when she protests the lack of financial support provided by the uncaring mine administration, the manager has her arrested and thrown in jail. From there, the pregnant Lottie ends up in an asylum. And it’s the asylum, where she is subjected to psychic experiments, that brings her increasingly into conversation with Nora.

The tale is tremendous fun and heartbreaking at the same time, and it’s best just to suspend disbelief and go with the flow. If you do, you will love every minute of this story.

I’ll be hosting a podcast interview with the author for New Books in Historical Fiction in mid-August 2025.

Kate Khavari, A Botanist’s Guide to Rituals and Revenge (Crooked Lane Books, June 2025)

The effects of what was once called the Great War and is now better known as World War I or the First World War have attracted more notice since the centennial of its beginning in 2014, but public attention still pales next to the deluge of works, both fictional and nonfictional, about the 1939–1945 war that followed. Yet the impact of the Great War on society, especially on the position of women, was in some ways even greater than that of the later conflict.

The Botanist’s Guide series of mysteries follows the career of Saffron Everleigh, a scientific researcher at the University of London, beginning in 1923. Although as with most mystery series, the focus is on various grisly deaths, here mostly involving plants, and the identification of who caused them, the immediate and longer-term effects of the war—both positive and negative—infuse the books.

For more information, look for my written Q&A with the author here in early July.

Laurie R. King, Knave of Diamonds (Ballantine, June 2025)

This latest installment in the Russell and Holmes mystery series, also set during and after the Great War, introduces Mary Russell’s uncle, Jacob (Jake) Russell, a charming grifter assumed to have died fourteen years before the novel opens, when Russell was eleven years old. Jake’s last big con before his disappearance involved a set of diamonds known as the Irish Crown Jewels, the theft of which was investigated by, among others, Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes still bears a grudge fourteen years after the fact, because his original investigation and that of the Scotland Yard detective charged with the case were shut down by direct order from the king. So when Holmes receives a request from his brother Mycroft to reopen the investigation on the grounds that the jewels have resurfaced, Sherlock refuses—until he returns home and realizes that Russell has decamped for Ireland with her uncle Jake …

Sarah Landenwich, The Fire Concerto (Union Square and Co., June 2025)

This compelling debut novel explores the interconnected lives of three acclaimed female concert pianists: Clara Bishop; her teacher, Zofia Mikorska; and their nineteenth-century predecessor, Constantia Pleyel—best known for her arrest and subsequent incarceration for the murder of her own piano teacher, a Polish composer named Aleksander Starz, famous for a composition known as the “Fire Concerto.”

Clara is the center of the novel. Once a brilliant performer, she suffered career-ending injuries during a performance of the Fire Concerto and, when we meet her, is tending bar in Austin, Texas. An unexpected summons to her teacher’s “final concert” turns macabre when she discovers that it is actually a reading of Zofia Mikorska’s will. Clara inherits a metronome, which she soon learns may have been owned by Starza. Clara is gradually drawn into a search for the truth of Starza’s murder, Pleyel’s part in it, and the connections between them and her brilliant but difficult teacher. In the process, Clara must also confront her own past, especially the career she abandoned.

I’m scheduled to host a New Books in Historical Fiction interview with Sarah Landenwich in July 2025.

David Lewis, A Beacon in the Night (Kensington, June 2025).

This successor to last year’s A Jewel in the Crown focuses on the Welsh socialist/ex-police constable Caitrin Colline, with some assistance from her former partner, the English aristocrat Hector Neville Percy. The sequel opens on December 31, 1940, with the Battle of Britain in full swing. Caitrin’s section of London has been demolished by relentless attacks from the Luftwaffe, and even 512, the all-female intelligence operation that recruited Caitrin early in Jewel is under pressure to accept incorporation into one of the other secret services. As 1941 dawns, things only get worse.

When it becomes clear that the Nazi pilots are homing in on beacons planted by British sympathizers with Hitler’s cause, 512 orders Caitrin to use her contacts in the London underworld to find out who’s responsible. In the process, we find out more about Caitrin’s family and her past.

I’ll be hosting a written Q&A with David Lewis here next week.