Series I love

Series I love: Amelia Peabody

As I mentioned in the Week in Books, I spent a fair bit of time last week (and now this week too) re-reading Elizabeth Peters’s Amelia Peabody series, but that’s not quite the whole story. During lockdown, Him Indoors and I actually started listening to the audiobooks of the series together. He’s never read the books before, and I have, some of them a lot of times, and it’s been a lot of fun rediscovering the series through his (fresh) eyes.  I’ve mentioned the series a few times before as part of round-up type posts, but it’s been a few years and I thought it was probably time to give Amelia a post of her own.

Cover of Crocodile on the Sandbank

Anyway, the set up: at the start of the first book it’s 1880-something and Amelia is heading to Egypt after the death of her father. She’d been the dutiful stay at home daughter until his death, but has decided that she’s now ready for adventures of her own (much to the disgust of her brothers) and heads for Egypt (via Rome) to see some ancient ruins. On her way she picks up a companion – Evelyn – who she rescues from the clutches of a fortune hunter and then heads off to look at some archaeology in action. The archaeologists she meets are grumpy Radcliffe Emerson and his brother Walter, who are excavating a tomb in Armana. Radcliffe emphatically does not want Amelia around, but soon they’re competing to solve a mystery. And by the end of the first book, well, it’s a a spoiler (but I think that’s unavoidable in a 20 book series) they’re married with a baby on the way.

Each book in the series covers a different archaeological season, and across the course of the series, the Emersons age and develop a little gang – including their son Ramses and his friends. The first books in the series are all written as Amelia’s diaries – introduced by an editor – but once Ramses grows up, the narrative is supplemented by extracts from the “recently discovered Manuscript H” which follows the younger members of the family. One of the things that Him Indoors has enjoyed the most about the series is the shift in how you view Amelia and how cleverly Peters moves the series on as it moves through times from Late Victorian through to the 1910s. Amelia is a feminist for her times and is wearing divided skirts and later trousers when it was still a bit of a scandal – but as her family grows up you see her grapple with the fact that the generation below her are doing things that she thinks scandalous – and have freedoms that even she never allowed herself. We’ve reached the 1911 season on our listening (book 11) together and I’m hopping with glee at all the fun he has to come. To be honest, books 10 to 13 are among my favourites in terms of character development and I couldn’t help myself in getting a little ahead of the audiobooks and reading ahead to get to all my favourite parts.

Cover of Thunder in the Sky

There are catchphrases – “another shirt ruined” and describing her husband as “the greatest Egyptologist of this or any other time” and variants thereof – and running stories like Amelia’s obsession with “the so-called Master Criminal” who they (first) encounter a couple of books in to the series. And Elizabeth Peters is a pen name for Barbara Mertz, who was an Egyptologist in real life and so there’s lots of proper archeological detail. She’s cleverly woven the exploits of the Emersons in with the activities of the real-life archaeologists who were working at the same time – like Howard Carter, who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun. As well as being a feminist, Amelia is also quite forward thinking when it comes to what she things about Empire and her attitudes to the local people that she meets. It’s hard to categorise the series, but they’re basically historical mystery romances with a side order of parodying Victorian-era adventure novels. I’ve previously described them as a Victorian female Indiana Jones, but funnier and I stand by that. As I’ve mentioned before, if you like series like Deanna Raybourn’s Veronica Speedwell, then you should be reading Amelia Peabody. And if you’ve already read them, may I suggest Peters’ Vicky Bliss series – which is modern-set and has a link back to the Emersons as well.

If this has given you an urge to read the series, definitely start at the beginning, and the first book is only £1.99 on Kindle and Kobo at the moment. I’ve discovered/remembered in re-reading that first time out I borrowed a bunch of them as physical copies from the library (well it was 2012!), so I have gaps in my e-book collection, which I suspect I will be filling in shortly.

Happy Reading!

 

Book of the Week, romance

Book of the Week: Daring and the Duke

The well-informed may have spotted the final books in two series on my reading list yesterday. The final book in the Wells and Wong series – which sees the girls take a Nile cruise – and the last in Sarah MacLean’s Bareknuckle Bastards series. This week’s BotW is the latter – because it’s an epic grovelling book and that turned out to be exactly what I needed last week.

Paperback copy of Daring and the Duke

The Daring of the name is Grace, queen of Covent Garden and the Duke is Ewan, who betrayed her when they were children and who Grace’s brothers have been hiding her from ever since. Ewan has been searching for Grace for a decade – and was told that she was dead – and has been busy trying to ruin her brothers in revenge ever since. But now he knows she’s alive and he’s determined to win her back and make her his duchess. If you haven’t read the first three books in the series, that already sounds like a lot of grovelling is going to be needed, but if you have read Wicked and the Wallflower and Brazen and the Beast it feels going into this like it will be impossible to redeem Ewan. Which is what makes this book so intriguing.

And it mostly delivers. I think if MacLean didn’t have such strong form for series ending novels I would have been even more enthusiastic but  it’s not quite as brilliant a redemption as MacLean’s previous epic-grovel series ender Day of the Duchess or the big reveal general epicness of Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover – which came off the back of a cliffhanger moment so big that you almost couldn’t believe it had been done. But Grace is a great character (also her business organisation is a lot of fun) and peeling back the layers and finding out what happened to Ewan is very satisfying.  We continue to be in difficult times and a bit of escapist reading in early Victorian London with plenty of grovelling as well as actual boxing makes for a strangely calming experience. Or at least it did for me.

I’ve written before that I’m trying not to save up books by my favourite authors anymore because my tastes change and I end up missing out on books that I would have enjoyed at the time but that now don’t float my boat. And previously this would probably have been a book that I would have saved for a time of need, but to be honest all of coronavirus life is pretty much a Time of Need, so I wasn’t going to risk saving it. I’ve also had a recent run of disappointing reads from new books by authors who I usually love, which means it was also a real relief that this was so good and did what I was hoping it would do.

Coronavirus also means that there was no Sarah MacLean meet up for me to go to this year, so instead I treated myself to a signed copy of Daring and the Duke  from Sarah MacLean’s local bookstore in Brooklyn, Word bookstore – but you should be able to get hold of the UK edition (which looks substantially more ethereal and floaty than these books are) from your usual purveyor of books (I can’t promise it’ll be in stock though, it might be an order) or in Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

Bonus picture: it was a sunny week outside and there was also a bit of a sunshine-y theme in the look of my reading!

Copies of Daring and the Duke, Death Sets Sail and The Vinyl Detective

Adventure, Authors I love, Book of the Week, historical, mystery, new releases

Book of the Week: A Treacherous Curse

So it was my birthday last week and I treated myself to a few books, one of which was Deanna Raybourn’s latest book A Treacherous Curse. Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of Ms Raybourn’s work – from Lady Julia, through her standalone books to this latest series so this BotW pick will be no surprise to you.

Cover of A Treacherous Curse by Deanna Raybourn

A Treacherous Curse is the third book in the Veronica Speedwell series and sees Veronica and Stoker investing an Egyptian-themed mystery. Stoker’s former expedition partner has disappeared along with a valuable artefact and Stoker is one of the prime suspects. Veronica is determined to clear his name and the two of them are drawn into a web of intrigue that includes an ill-fated excavation in the Valley of the Kings, an Egyptian god appearing on the streets of London and a disgruntled teenage girl.

Now as you know, I try not to give spoilers in my reviews and that means it’s quite hard to say anything more than that about this without giving away major plot points from the first two books in the series.  But this has interesting developments on the various ongoing plot points that are enough to leave you impatient for book four – which must be a year away given that this one has only just come out and is obviously a major disadvantage of reading a book as soon as it comes out!

There’s unresolved sexual tension galore, wise cracks, peril and moths. I also really like the Eypgtian connection in this – it tapped into some of the things that I love about the Amelia Peabody books.  And if you like Elizabeth Peters’s series and you’re not already reading Veronica’s adventures, then you should be.  But maybe start from the first book (A Curious Beginning) or you’ll get some serious plot spoilers from this.

I haven’t seen these in the supermarkets, but they are usually in the bigger bookshops and I’m sure Big Green Bookshop would be able to order a copy in for you. I bought my copy on Kindle but it’s available on Kobo too although the Kobo version was slightly more expensive at the time I wrote this.  There’s also a really good (and completely spoiler free) interview with Deanna Raybourn on this week’s Smart Bitches, Trashy Books podcast if you want to know more about the book (and the series) before you take the plunge.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, historical, reviews

Book of the Week: Silent on the Moor

This week’s BotW is Deanna Raybourn’s Silent on the Moor – which is the third in her Lady Julia series, and I think these best so far in that the pueblo it’s two books worth of serial tension and angst comes to the boil in the harsh and unforgiving setting of the Yorkshire Moors.

Lady J had invited herself to Nicholas Brisbane’s new house, which is not only in the middle of nowhere, but had some unexpected (to Julia at least) residents. There are secrets and tensions and grim discoveries and oh so much Gothicky drama. I hasn’t realised that this was what this series has been waiting for, but it totally was. And thinking about it – unconventional widows, gypsies, seers, eccentrics – should have screamed melodrama to me.

The solution to the book’s puzzles is suitably ghastly – with definite ick factor – but it’s so in keeping and well executed that it seems both perfect and obvious once you’ve read it. Do not let the horrible pink cover of my copy confuse you, is is not saccharine or run of the mill by the numbers romance.  There is romance (mostly of the will they won’t they kind) and there’s mystery, but Julia (although she makes mistakes) is not a too stupid to live heroine. You’ll jump to some of the same conclusions she does, albeit with a nagging voice in the back of your head that you’ve missed something somewhere that she doesn’t always have.

I know I keep mentioning books that are from series and then telling you to go back to the start first, but I really do mean it with this, you need two books worth of build up to get the full emotional whack from this. So good. And a catnip (as the Smart Bitches say) that I didn’t know I had!

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