Quote:
Originally Posted by jackm8
I love to return to this genre from time to time. I read a few fresh or old novels, then move to other things.
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I'm just slightly put off by dark settings and impersonal characters.
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Sounds like our tastes run in the same direction.
Barbara Hambly's series from New Orleans in the 1830s, starting with A Free Man of Color are really good, with a vibrant but dark setting. I remember one scene where the sheriff says that a few years ago, a man wouldn't be sentenced to death for murder on the flimsy evidence in the current case just because he was Black, and in a few years noone will be sentenced to death for the murder of a Black woman, but right now, the person he's speaking to is in serious danger.
For a much lighter novel, KJ Charles' Proper English is a romance with murder mystery, on a country estate in England in the early 1900s. An ill-assorted collection of guests, secrets and quarrels and money troubles, and a murder which was clearly done by one of us, but who?