Welcome to another edition of Mailbox Monday on Tuesday. This is starting to become a more regular occurrence here!
Over the past 2 weeks I received 2 books – talk about pacing! Both are for review, received from the publishers.
- Fever by Mary Beth Keane – audio download from Simon & Schuster Audio. I first heard of this book in a USA Today review and was instantly intrigued. It is the story of the woman who became known a “Typhoid Mary”. I have asked my fiancé many questions about this woman before so I had to get the jump on this book.
“On the eve of the twentieth century, Mary Mallon emigrated from Ireland at age fifteen to make her way in New York City. Brave, headstrong, and dreaming of being a cook, she fought to climb up from the lowest rung of the domestic-service ladder. Canny and enterprising, she worked her way to the kitchen, and discovered in herself the true talent of a chef. Sought after by New York aristocracy, and with an independence rare for a woman of the time, she seemed to have achieved the life she’d aimed for when she arrived in Castle Garden. Then one determined “medical engineer” noticed that she left a trail of disease wherever she cooked, and identified her as an “asymptomatic carrier” of Typhoid Fever. With this seemingly preposterous theory, he made Mallon a hunted woman.
Bringing early-twentieth century New York alive – the neighborhoods, the bars, the park carved out of upper Manhattan, the boat traffic, the mansions and sweatshops and merging skyscrapers, Fever is an ambitious retelling of a forgotten life. In the imagination of Mary Beth Keane, Mary Mallon becomes a fiercely compelling, dramatic, vexing, sympathetic, uncompromising, and unforgettable heroine.”
- Bristol House by Beverly Swerling – print book from publisher. I selected this book because I have had my eye on her New York series for quite some time but haven’t had the chance to read them.
In modern-day London, architectural historian and recovering alcoholic Annie Kendall hopes to turn her life around and restart her career by locating several long-missing pieces of ancient Judaica. Geoff Harris, an investigative reporter, is soon drawn into her quest, both by romantic interest and suspicions about the head of the Shalom Foundation, the organization sponsoring her work. He’s also a dead ringer for the ghost of a monk Annie believes she has seen at the flat she is subletting in Bristol House.
In 1535, Tudor London is a very different city, one in which monks are being executed by Henry VIII and Jews are banished. In this treacherous environment of religious persecution, Dom Justin, a Carthusian monk, and a goldsmith known as the Jew of Holborn must navigate a shadowy world of intrigue involving Thomas Cromwell, Jewish treasure, and sexual secrets. Their struggles shed light on the mysteries Annie and Geoff aim to puzzle out—at their own peril.
This riveting dual-period narrative seamlessly blends a haunting supernatural thriller with vivid historical fiction. Beverly Swerling, widely acclaimed for her City of Dreams series, delivers a bewitching and epic story of a historian and a monk, half a millennium apart, whose destinies are on a collision course.
That’s all for me. What arrived it your mailbox recently?
Mailbox Monday is on a monthly blog tour and for the month of March it is being hosted by Chaotic Compendiums.
Copyright © 2013 by The Maiden’s Court
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