Anna Katharine Green, The Woman in the Alcove. (If you're wondering why her name is sometimes spelled with an e and sometimes with an a ... so am I. It appears in different spellings on the covers of the books.) Woman in the Alcove is a decent story with one of the plucky amateur type detectives. It's not entirely clear why her assistance is tolerated by the authorities, but she and the police are good characters and the plot, while a bit over-complicated, is interesting.
Louisa May Alcott, Little Men. People and their relationships are Alcott's strength, no doubt about it. In this book, she creates a vivid and diverse set of characters and weaves them into simple, homey stories.
Louis L'Amour, Monument Rock. A nice, solid set of short stories. L'Amour's knack for creating diversity within a fairly limited setting never fails to impress me.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Writ in Blood. I admit, I didn't finish this one. Or get that far into it. I like Yarbro, and I like the period of early 20th-century Russian history in which the book is set. What I don't like is historical fiction that is too closely intertwined with tedious politics or set amongst too many famous people. When a book opens with a conversation between the fictional main character and the Czar of Russia? And then goes on to detail how closely the main character is going to need to work with heads of state all over Europe? That's not historical fiction, that's fictionalized history. Not the same thing at all.
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