Borrowed Books

For someone who reads as many books as I do—to research my own novels, support my editing projects, provide a context for my writers’ group, prepare for interviews and blog posts, and just for fun, because I like a particular author’s style—paying a monthly fee for Kindle Unlimited is a no-brainer. Yes, I know it can cut into authors’ royalties, but many of the books I borrow I otherwise wouldn’t read, and others (especially for research, if I make a lot of notes) I later purchase to make space for other borrowed books. So it seems no worse to me than getting books from the public library—and in fact, it’s somewhat better for authors, who do collect payments for borrowed books even if they are smaller than those on sales.

So what do I have in my Kindle Unlimited collection this week? The ten titles in my current list include five historical mysteries, all but one set during the Victorian era (although that part is unusual, since I like a wide range of historical periods and places), most of them parts of series featuring a female detective or a mixed pair of detectives in varying stages of forming a romantic partnership. I also have the next installment in a series featuring a feline detective named Max; his cases are pretty much unsolvable, since the author rarely provides enough information to identify the culprit before the big reveal, but the evolving relationship between Max and his three feline co-detectives is hilarious. Of the non-mysteries three (although fiction) can be considered research for my next writing project, a standalone novel described several times on this blog and set mostly in Tudor England. The fourth, Christina Ståhle’s Before He Was Red, will be the subject of a future New Books Network interview. Short summaries, in the order in which I borrowed the books, follow.

Irina Shapiro, Murder in Bloody Weald

The sixteenth in a series I love featuring the American Jason Redmond, a gifted surgeon who struggles with his unexpected inheritance of an earldom, and his friend Daniel Haze, a Scotland Yard detective.

C.M. Rawlins, Death in a Prison Cell

The only non-Victorian among the mystery series, this second book is set in the 1920s. It features Countess Maeve Morgan, a former police officer, whom it follows south as she tries to help the family of her private secretary.

Lynn Morrison, What’s a Little Blackmail between Friends?

I’ve read and enjoyed other books by this author, plus I love the title. Other than it being another Victorian mystery, I don’t know much about it, but I’m looking forward to finding out more.

Karen Heenan, The Son in Shadow

The fourth in a series called The Tudor Court, this novel follows one of the characters from another book in the series that I enjoyed, Lady, in Waiting (yes, the comma is deliberate). It’s the first of the three Tudor books I mentioned, which I’m reading to find out more about Elizabeth I’s court as perceived by fellow novelists.

Christina Ståhle, Before He Was Red

Set in the late nineteenth-century, this standalone novel follows the secret marriage of a Belgian glovemaker and the future sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Who could resist a plotline like that?

Raymond Wemmlinger, The Queen’s Favorite and The Queen’s Game

Both novels feature the Seymour and Grey families, who in different ways were rivals and heirs to Princesses Mary and Elizabeth. The other two Tudor novels on my list.

Nic Saint, Purrfect Party

This eighty-first installment of the Mysteries of Max series takes Max and his pals to the White House, where conflict breaks out between the president’s dogs and Harriet, a white Persian prima donna determined to become First Cat.

Magda Alexander, A Murder at the Royal Opera

Another of the Victorian mysteries, here featuring an aristocratic woman with feminist inclinations who repeatedly stumbles into investigations with a widowed duke who, if not misogynistic, is certainly in no hurry to retie the knot. They want partnership; society wants them wed, and meantime they solve various crimes.

Sarah F. Noel, An Impertinent Heiress

This first of a new series set in the late Victorian period features an American heiress who travels to England not—like many of her peers—to use her fortune to secure a marriage to a British peer but to travel and enrich her life. I haven’t read any of this author’s books before, but the premise appeals to me, so I’ll give it a try.