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Looks interesting!  Will have to check those ones out.

As for recent books, I really liked Dana Stabenow’s latest Kate Shugak mystery called A Deeper Sleep.  It’s not new exactly - it’s the 15th book in the series - but it was great to get to see Kate again.  I highly recommend the series.  It’s contemporary, set in Alaska, well-written and has elements of romance, too; each book also stands-alone, for the most part, so it’s not necessary to read them in order, but for the sake of character development and continuity, it’s best to read them in order.

My most exciting discovery of last year, I think, was Stephenie Meyer.  She writes YA books and so far has two published - Twilight and New Moon - with a third due out sometime this fall.  They’re a little gothic, highly romantic and just all around lovely.

And, not a book but a genre TV show: I recently got into Supernatural and am really liking it, despite the horror.  It’s not exactly Valentine’s Day themed, but I’d suggest checking it out.

Also, Whedon/Cassaday’s 3rd installment of their Astonishing X-Men series, “Torn”, hits bookstores on the 14th!

I had Christopher Fowler on my t-b-r list. After reading your comments I went to the library website and requested the first book in the series!
I love reading new, interesting authors in the mystery/tec genre.
Thanks for reminding me of this one.
Dee

I have an ongoing thing with historical fiction.. I love Phillipa Gregory’s books, and am convinced Henry the VIII was an arrogant **&&^%!
-In that same Hist. fic. catagory I am also a big fan of Anya Seton, her book “Green Darkness” is just great!
-In the mysteries, still love Agatha (Christie)!

These look wonderful, Eloisa! I, too, am always looking for new mystery authors.

Firefly, I put one of Dana Stabenow’s books in my husband’s Christmas stocking this year--part of it takes place on a Coast Guard cutter up in Alaska, and my hubby was on a cutter (though in the Caribbean, a tad different, climatologically speaking *G*).

And Ms. Mary, I am a HUGE Anya Seton fan. I went through everything by her in the library I could find when I was a teenager, then started buying them myself as an adult. (All used off ABEbooks.com, since her stuff seems to be out of print, but well worth the price--which is often very little.) My favorite was KATHERINE, but GREEN DARKNESS is a very close second. Also loved THE HEARTH AND EAGLE a lot.

Have you read any Sigrid Undset? She’s sorta Setonish, but in Scandinavia. Loved KRISTIN LAVRANSDOTTIR when I was a teen.

Have you read Matthew Pearl’s THE DANTE CLUB?  It’s a mystery about American literary figures led by Longfellow in translating Dante’s INFERNO.  I got a little bogged down by trying to remember who everyone was, but it was a good mystery.  I’m on the library waiting list for THE POE SHADOW.

I’ll have to try Christopher Fowler.  He’s not too gruesome, right?  (I can’t read horror; I’m a weanie.)

The Fowler books sound interesting, Eloisa. I have added them to my TBB list. If I like them half as much as I do Julia Spencer-Fleming’s books, you will have introduced me to another terrific writer.

Mystery is my second favorite popular genre, and I have been reading them almost as long as I’ve been reading romance. I grew up reading Christie and Sayers, John Dickson Carr, Michael Innes, and even Chesterton’s Father Brown. I admit that these days I usually prefer cozies. Dorothy Cannell, Nancy Atherton, Lee Harris, Patricia Sprinkle, Valerie Wolzein, Carolyn Hart--all are auto-buys for me.

The above was prologue. Word-length forced me to split my post.

My favorite mystery writer is Margaret Maron. I love Lt. Sigrid Harald, NYPD, with her complex history as the daughter of a Pulitzer-Prize-winning photojournalist mother and a cop-hero father killed in the line of duty and her out-of-the-ordinary romantic life, but Sigrid remains a character I can appreciate but can never fully understand. Maron’s other series set in Colleton County, N.C. with its local politics, old crimes, and troubled race relations is a world I know. Bootlegger’s Daughter, the first in the series, won every mystery award available in 1993, and Maron’s local color genius and rich characterization skills have not faltered in the eleven books that have followed. Maron captures the tangled family relationships, the rural community ties that can be both comforting and claustrophobic, and the secrets restlessly slumbering behind even the most familiar surfaces in cadences that are as authentically Southern as grits and barbecue. And the series allows readers to follow Deborah Knott’s love life, past and present. If you don’t know Maron’s work, you are missing something splendid.

Ms. Mary and Liz, I too love Ayna Seton’s books.  I have Katherine, but will have to try and find Green Darkness so I can re-read it.

I just picked up an older book by Barbara Michael’s “Wings of the Falcon”.  I usually read anyting by John Grishman; David Baldacci; Harlan Coben; JA Jance: Nevada Barr; Sue Grafton, and John Lescroart. 

Carolyn, I am a weenie like you too.  I had to give up reading Patricia Cornwell’s books because they started to scare me to much.  I have however found some great mystery writers on the lighter side.  Ayelet Waldman; Nancy Martin; Deborah Donnelly; Margaret Maron; Diane Mott Davidson, Katherine Hall Page; Carolyn Hart, and Kate White to name a few.

Janga, you are right on about Margaret Maron’s books.  I have read all of her books with the exception of her new one, “Winters Child.” I just love the way she draws you into Deborah’s life and family.  I have thought about picking up a Nancy Atherton book; but have been to busy catching up on all the squawker’s books.  Do you have a favorite of hers to start me out with?

Thanks to all of you for the recommendations!

Sorry to post again!  Janga, just wanted to clarify my previous statement about reading all of Margaret Maron’s books. I should have said that I only read the Deborah Knott ones.  I started one of her books with Sigrid Harald, but could not seem to bond with that character.

Janga and Linda:  someone just gave me Margaret Maron’s name as a recommendation, but didn’t give me the correct spelling, so I wasn’t able to find her at the library.  Thanks - I’ll try again!

Very interesting...I’ll have to look them up.

Some time back on one of the blogs (don’t remember which one) Mary Anna Evans was reccommended as a new author. Her first two books are excellent...about murder at an archeology dig in the South East...Her third is in my TBR pile..."Effigies"...at an archeology dig in Georgia. I’m looking forward to reading it.

Linda, I think the early Aunty Dimity books are definitely the best.  Aunt Dimity’s Death is the first of the series, and I adore it. The DorothyL list was all abuzz about it when it was first published, and some booksellers’ group named it one of best mysteries of the 20th century. It is part mystery, part family story, part love story, and all delightful. The second, Aunt Dimity and the Duke, is almost as good, and it too includes a love story. Aunt Dimity’s Good Deed (#3) is wonderful too. The nine that follow are still good books, but for me they never quite measured up to the first three.

Three of my favorite non-romance authors are M.C. Beaton, Sharyn McCrumb and Laurie R. King.  M.C. Beaton is romance author Marion Chesney, but as Beaton she writes cozy mysteries.  Hamish McBeth and Agatha Raisin, two very different characters who are never lucky in love, but who are incredibly endearing.

If you want to read an author who can create a sense of place like no other read McCrumb’s Ballad series.  Set in Appalachia, she gives you a feel for the people, the culture, the geography and the history of Southern Appalachia along with a great mystery.  The recurring character Nora Bonesteel is one of the most intriguing I have ever read.

King writes the Mary Russell series with Sherlock Holmes as one of the main characters.  Mary is as smart as a whip, brave, beautiful, creative, basically everthing you would want yourself to be.  King has a PhD. in comparative religions and she incorporates her knowledge into her stories to make them fascinating.

Thank you so much Janga!; I will definately put all three on my list of books to get.

And Avery, one of my favorite Sharyn McCrumb’s book is “She Walks These Hills”.  I have read that book several times, and each time I always get goose bumps.  Another of her books was about the night riders; If I remember correctly they were ghostly men from the Civil War.  I can not remember the name of that book but it was very good. 

Another good writer is Sarah Shaber. Her first book was “The Futive King”.  Her character is “Professor Simon Shaw” who lives in the south.

So many great books; and so little time to read them all!

Many thanks, Eloisa. I love P.D. James, Elizabeth Geoge, McGown, et al. I’m always looking for literary mystery writers, and Christopher Fowler seems poised to be my next favorite.

I absolutely adore Martha Grimes and her Richard Jury mysteries. Just read the latest, DUST, and I think that’s about number 20 or 21 in the series.  The book titles are all pub names, since the novels are set in England with Jury as a Scotland Yard detective.  All her books have a returning cast of delightful, offbeat characters who are, by now, old and good friends. Grimes is a brilliant writer, and her mysteries are definitely fun, thought provoking, terrific reads!

Firefly, I put one of Dana Stabenow’s books in my husband’s Christmas stocking this year--part of it takes place on a Coast Guard cutter up in Alaska, and my hubby was on a cutter (though in the Caribbean, a tad different, climatologically speaking *G*).

I hope he liked it!  I did, but don’t have the same sort of affection for it that I do the Kate books.

King writes the Mary Russell series with Sherlock Holmes as one of the main characters.  Mary is as smart as a whip, brave, beautiful, creative, basically everthing you would want yourself to be.  King has a PhD. in comparative religions and she incorporates her knowledge into her stories to make them fascinating.

I’m a Russell/Holmes fan, too.  I subscribe to King’s blog, and apparently there’s not going to be a new Russell until 2009… I haven’t been able to get into King’s other books, though; I’m not sure why not.

For historical mysteries try Margaret Frazer, who writes two series set in the 15th century.

I enjoyed fantasy books as a child - the Chronicles of Narnia, Lloyd Alexander, Robin McKinley - and still look for YA fantasy.  I just read a fun book called “Sorcery and Cecilia” by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer.  It’s set in Regency England and is written in the form of letters between two young women.  There are two more books in the series.

Carolyn,
I hope I’m not chiming in too late—but I’m a scairdy too and stopped reading Cornwall for the same reason Linda did.  These are kind of gothic—big black shadows hulking around the upper wings of the theater, but I didn’t find it very scary, frankly.  You’ll see when it comes to the first murder—they’re more theatrical than gory, really.
Eloisa

I grew up loving Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie mysteries.  I’ve now become a fan of Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs books.  I like that you get both the mystery and the sense of England between WW I and II.  Maisie is very much a creature of a changing social structure, a woman with a career that probably would not have been possible prior to WWI.  The devastation wrought by the war is clear in so many of the lives depicted, including Maisie’s own, but it also opened the way for women such as Maisie to move beyond the class they were born into.  Not particularly romantic (at least so far), but fascinating nonetheless.

I also very much like the P.B. Ryan Gilded Age mysteries which take place in Boston immediately after the U.S. Civil War.  Like the Maisie Dobbs books, part of what makes the series so good is the sense of the possibility of social change for which the war was a catalyst—change which can be for good or for ill, but which certainly provides an exciting backdrop for a mystery series.

Eloisa,

I’m major late jumping in here...Those sound truly interesting. I like mysteries, although truthfully, I’m more a fan of watching them (Mystery! and Hallmark Mysteries) on telly than I am of sitting down to a book of them. I am an admitted wuss and cover my eyes during the potentially gorey scenes of movies.

I am a bit of a fan of Ian Rankin, though. His hero John Rebus is so fascinating. I actually got hooked on him by watching Mystery Mondays on BBC America. I suppose it didn’t hurt that John Hannah played Rebus...*sigh*

And I’m a massive fan of the Inspector Linley mysteries. So well done and not overly gorey, either.

LdyB