Two mysteries are in­ter­twined in this novel. In the present day, a long-lost diary of Arthur Conan Doyle’s from 1900 has apparently been re­dis­cov­ered, but the finder has been murdered, while in 1900, Doyle and Bram Stoker in­ves­ti­gate the murder of several young women.

The two mysteries are artfully in­ter­twined and the plots move along nicely. I was irritated by the author’s ignorance of Victorian England—"It was a Victorian-era shilling, worth only five pennies in its day" (twelve, dammit, until dec­i­mal­i­sa­tion in 1971)—and weak grasp of ACD’s style.

Liza lives with her reclusive mother, Eve, in the gatehouse of Shrove, a remote English country house. Liza has never been to school and has been kept apart from the world. When Eve is about to arrested for murder, she sends Liza away to a friend in London. Instead Liza runs off with the boyfriend she had met recently. She spends much of the book, like Scheherazade, telling the story of her life to Sean, as she gradually learns to live in the world.

The story may be quiet and slow …continue.

A collection of related short stories, all taking place in the city of Newford, which might be a little closer to other worlds than most places.

De Lint writes haunting tales of love and music and wishes being granted at a cost.

A murder in Sussex bears sim­i­lar­i­ties to another recent murder in Scotland, but what could the link between the two men be? One of the victims left a half-written letter addressed to John Madden, who is now retired from Scotland Yard. Soon there are more victims and Madden and the police struggle to find the killer.

Airth evokes both the First and Second World Wars, exploring the damage done to those who survived and the injustices visited upon some who did not.

Operation Gold was one of the CIA’s great exploits of the Cold War: a tunnel running from West Berlin into the Russian sector to tap into the Soviet com­mu­ni­ca­tion lines. It was believed to be a great success when the Russians broke into the tunnel in 1956. Later it was discovered that George Blake, the MI6 traitor, had betrayed the tunnel from the beginning.

Leonard Marnham is a British Post Office engineer who is sent to Berlin to help the Americans. A naive 25-year-old virgin who lives at home …continue.

Someone keeps throwing the events of Dr Thomas Wayne’s life into his son Bruce’s face. The murder of his parents when he was a boy ultimately led to his becoming the Batman. Now he realizes that he knew less than he had thought about his father.

Hickham does a good job of filling out the story of the Wayne family and the mark they left on Gotham.

Macbeth is an honorable Scottish lord who serves an ignoble king. When Malcolm finally goes too far, Macbeth and his wife convince themselves that Malcolm must die. (Encounters with a trio of strange women also swayed their minds.) Macbeth himself becomes king but guilt and paranoia start eating away at him and his wife.

Hartley and Hewson retell Shake­speare’s classic play as a novel, providing psy­cho­log­i­cal motivation for Macbeth’s usurpation and downfall. Their Lady Macbeth is more sym­pa­thet­ic and less nakedly ambitious than she is usually portrayed.

The charmingly amoral David Rathbone leads a small group of Palm Beach conmen. A task force of police and federal agents are trying to take them down, and Rita Sullivan goes undercover and flirts her way into David’s bed. Sullivan and some of the other undercover cops start losing their per­spec­tive and get a little too close to their targets.

Jake Geismar is an American war cor­re­spon­dent who lived in Berlin before the war. He returns there in July 1945, ostensibly to cover the Potsdam Conference, but actually to find his lover, Lena. Before he finds Lena, he finds the body of a murdered American officer at Potsdam, which—s­trange­ly—no-one is interested in. Then he gets caught up in the race between the Americans and the Russians to take possession of Lena’s estranged husband, a rocket scientist.

The war is barely over but already the Russians and Americans are …continue.

In a world where the "Others"—w­ere­wolves, vampires, elementals, and more—have the upper hand and live in proximity to humans, they have need for some human staff to interact with their neighbors. Meg Corbyn takes the job, but she has a secret. She is a Blood Prophet on the run from those who have controlled her all her life.

Bishop provides an in­ter­est­ing­ly different spin on werewolves and vampires that I found en­ter­tain­ing.