If a novel ever needed an HEA, Lauren Willig’s prosaically-titled Two Wars and a Wedding does. A multi-hanky read, indeed. A historical saga and sweeping one at that (more sagas, please!): recounting a young woman’s journey from immature and impetuous to worn-down, guilt-ridden, and broken to strong, resolute, and happy across “two wars and a wedding”. And did it ever keep me reading, as steadily as Real Life would allow, over three days. To start, let’s fill in the war and wedding details with the publisher’s blurb:
September 1896: As an aspiring archaeologist, Smith College graduate Betsy Hayes travels to Athens, desperate to break into a very male-dominated field and find work at some of the world’s most famous excavation sites. In the midst of the heat and dust of Greece she finds an unlikely ally in philanthropist Charles, Baron de Robecourt, one of the few men who takes her academic passion seriously. But when a simmering conflict between Greece and Turkey erupts into open warfare, Betsy’s archaeological sites become battlefields and she falls into the grim and heroic task of nursing the wounded. As the world around her is irrevocably changed, Betsy finds her heart pulled in multiple directions.
June 1898: As the Spanish-American war begins, an older and wiser Betsy Hayes is searching for her former best friend Ava, who she last saw in Greece during the Greco-Turkish War. She believes that Ava might be with the Red Cross headed to Cuba, so Betsy herself joins the Red Cross and follows Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders straight to the heart of the fighting. As she enters the war zone, dark memories of her last war resurface and her need to protect old and new friends intensifies. (more…)
I always enjoyed Thomas’s romances, back when she was writing them, but I think she found her “true” genre with the Lady Sherlock mystery series. The latest, A Tempest At Sea, maintains what the previous six proved: Thomas can write clever, complex mystery plots while keeping her ethically-minded, sympathetic protagonists front and centre. Lady Charlotte features, but A Tempest At Sea is an ensemble cast (to the series’s betterment) one in which we get to be with Charlotte’s lover, Lord Ingram, on a greater page count than Charlotte. Given how adorable “Ash,” Lord Ingram, is, the loss is bearable, though I would have liked to see more of Charlotte and even more of Charlotte and Ash together. On the other hand, A Tempest At Sea is a closed-“room”, rather closed-“ship” mystery and, as a Christie-fan, cause for celebration and enjoyment, as Ash notes, ” ‘The isolation of shipboard society heightens the sense of danger.’ “ To orient us, the publisher’s blurb:
I have to start by saying what a fan I am of Will Darling, how much I adore him and enjoyed the first book in his series, Slippery Creatures. Hence, why I was keen to read Charles’s trad-pubbed romance, The Secret Lives of Country Gentleman. Would her unique voice and style be “standardized” for a wider audience, or could Charles retain everything that makes her self-published m/m romance unique? Also, with a selling point of “Bridgerton meets Poldark,” I was doubly intrigued. (I’m still mulling how much I liked this. But let’s consider Secret Lives on its own merit.) The publishers’ details for our orientation:
Amnesia romance narrative? Sold. I love the possibilities of what it allows the romance genre to explore: how the familiar is skewed for the character without memory, how it is anchored for those who are possessed of memory and how the twain can’t meet. And I’d read and enjoyed Becky Wade in the past. Much of what I enjoyed then is still present and something more besides: as Wade is no longer under the constraints of traditional Christian publishers, she includes narrative elements worth exploring, make for something deeper, more real, and interesting. But there are also losses, all of which I’ll discuss by and by. For now, the blurb to help orient us with some detail: 
Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021) is as remarkable, precise, well-written, measured, and ethical a book as Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, my 2021 book of the year. And Empire of Pain may take it for 2023. It’s early days yet, but it’s not likely I’ll forget it. 
I’ve enjoyed Emma Barry’s romances since reading her histrom, Brave In Heart. I have sentimental affection for it because it was one of the first romances I reviewed on this very blog (turning TEN in May). So I was awfully glad to see another Barry romance on the horizon, except I admit approaching it with a gimlet eye: while I love Barry’s romances, I really really hate chickens. When I used to spend summers in my parents’ Greek village, stray, mangy dogs and squawking, fluttering, pea-brained, eat-anything, gag-inducing-smelly chickens were what I hated most about it (also roosters crowing at sun-rise when you’d been pickled in ouzo the night before). Like Chick Magnet‘s hero, Will Lund, I never warmed to heroine Nicole Jones’ chickens, but like Will, I liked Nicole and I liked what Barry wrought. I don’t think Chick Magnet has the wit and fun of Barry’s Political Persuasions series (once in a while, it peeked through), but I still read this in one sitting during a work-week from hell (five-hour Zoom, anyone?); and, except for an uncertain beginning, it got better and better with each page-turn. To give you a more-details picture, the publisher’s blurb:
“Murder and mayhem,” many reviewers note about Cosimano’s Finlay Donovan series… And I certainly got gobs of it listening to book #3. There are readers who love a plot-driven narrative and readers who don’t and what I again learned was I’m not the lover of the plot-driven narrative…BUT I absolutely loved this narrator and would listen to her read a grocery list. More of why later. For now, here’s the convoluted Finlay Donovan plot from the, thank the reading gods, publisher, because I certainly couldn’t unravel it:
It has been a brutal winter chez the Bateses this year: December saw a deadly snowstorm; January, a visit by the polar vortex; and, intermittently, snow snow snow, some ice, sleet, freezing rain, more snow. I had a fine Christmas season, horrible milestone birthday soon thereafter, and some desultory reading. Back to work in early January and the work pile-on has been relentless… and yet, I read a few murder mysteries and it made the bad a bit better:
Miss Bates Reads Romance 