Recommendations: Week of 11/4/24

Let's hang out in the 19th century

Everyone’s comfort food is specific. It’s not just mac and cheese; it’s that one blue boxed mac with some sriracha. It’s one particular season of The Office or the third Harry Potter movie. For me, it’s Pride and Prejudice when I’m feeling a bit crazed and Jane Eyre when I’m not making very sensible romantic decisions. Recently, I’ve felt in need of some comfort and my go-to has been a very specific type of novel.

In this novel, a young Victorian woman has recently been widowed. She wasn’t married to her husband for very long and she didn’t love him, usually because the marriage was arranged by family or financially motivated. There might be some doubt as to how he died. It might even be murder. His death usually leaves her financially independent and being freed from the pressures of the marriage mart and the privations of a marriage of convenience opens a new life for her. She overhauls her wardrobe; she starts reading from her late husband’s extensive library; she develops a taste for the port in his cellar. Then, a man comes into her life. This man is probably a sort of genteel private investigator, and he’s probably investigating her husband’s untimely death. Once it’s determined she wasn’t involved, they work together and the dangers and thrills of this project spark a new romance.

And Only to Deceive by Tasha Alexander: Emily is taking to widowhood quite well. She barely knew Philip, Viscount Ashton, and he was away hunting in Africa for large stretches of their short marriage. But the discovery of his journals from the year of their marriage makes her realize that he loved her deeply. As she reads, she starts to understand him in a way she never did during their marriage. She enters into his interests and pursuits, learning about antiquities and taking up the study of Ancient Greek. But her intellectual pursuits lead her to discover that many of Phillip’s antiquities were fakes and there may have been a grand conspiracy afoot that led to his death. Meanwhile, Phillip’s friend and discrete private investigator Colin Hargreaves is also looking into the matter. He’s also distractingly handsome, of course.

Emily is a wonderful heroine; she’s bright, resourceful, steady, and passionate. Her widowhood sets her on the path to self-actualization but the first novel in this series makes her also examine with care the man she married. She has to mourn him and come to terms with his death to start her new life. This is a long series, with Colin and Emily working on cases together all over Victorian Europe, so there’s plenty to keep you cozy as the long winter nights approach.

Added Easter Egg: Tasha Alexander’s husband is the new writer of the Jack Reacher novels.

Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn: Raybourn is known more for her Veronica Speedwell novels, the first of which is 2015’s A Curious Beginning, but her Lady Julia Grey novels came first, and in some ways I prefer them. The Speedwell novels are also wonderful and I highly recommend them, but they’re more whimsical and a little more lighthearted than her other series, and I love the gravitas of these older books.

Lady Julia Grey’s husband dies suddenly in the middle of a party and no one suspects murder. He had a longstanding heart condition and although their marriage was young, Julia always knew this was a possibility. After his death, private inquiry agent Nicholas Brisbane shows up on her doorstep and reveals that he had been retained by her husband to prevent his murder; suddenly Julia must question everything she knew about her marriage. Threatening notes were being sent, secrets abound, and Julia is right in the middle of everything. Can she solve the mystery before she becomes another victim? And can she survive the secrets she will discover?

Julia is a wonderful character; she begins timid and scared of her own shadow but grows into a confident, beautiful woman throughout the novel. In the other novels, she and Brisbane are continually thrown together as other mysteries pop up and there’s a ton of angst, but things end happily when they should. Both Raybourn’s series are wonderful reads, full of strong interesting women and angsty gruff men.

The Anatomist’s Wife by Anna Lee Huber: The main difference this novel boasts from the above is there is no question about how Kiera’s husband died (I’m only three books in so maybe that comes up at some point). Instead, the point of conflict here is in how abusive her husband was to her during their marriage. His life’s project was to write and illustrate a textbook on human anatomy. He was also a shit illustrator, so he married Kiera to take advantage of her artistic skills. He forced her to watch dissections and draw what she saw for years and after he died the public found out and she was slandered as an unnatural woman for being involved in such gruesome dealings. Left with no money and no fond memories of her husband, the first novel finds Kiera recovering from the scandal in rural Scotland at her sister’s castle. There’s a house party, and inevitably a murder, and Kiera is suspected due to her past. She teams up with private inquiry agent and dashing rogue Sebastian Gage, also conveniently at the house party, to try and clear her name before the constables arrive and arrest her as the most likely suspect.

There are so many books in this series. You will be set for months. I have read three, and like each one more than the last. Kiera has a lot of recovering to do from her marriage and her relationship with Gage unfolds slowly through the books, as it should, but it is a wonderful partnership. All of these books are about marriage, its aftermath, and its new beginnings, but this series in particular takes its time reawakening Kiera to the possibilities of a loving marriage.

Dive into one or all of these series this week. I promise you’ll not even notice what else is going on around you. But do remember to vote, of course.