It has been ages since I wrote about the books I’ve been reading recently. So let’s have a canter through them.

City of Silk by Glennis Virgo is set in sixteenth century Bologna, and we follow the story of Elena, a talented seamstress who has figuratively and literally escaped from the Baraccano orphanage. She dreams of being a tailor, but in 1575, women are not allowed to hold such roles.

But her biggest concern is the powerful Fontana, the wealthy man who bestrides the city, sharing his wealth, but also taking advantage of the girls who are brought up in the orphanage under his patronage. It’s all hidden in plain sight, but his wealth means that even tailors like Maestro Rondinelli feel they must take his money or suffer the consequences.

This novel does cover a lot. It deals with sexuality, abuse, slavery, and most of all, just how tough life was in sixteenth century Europe, especially if you were a woman. A common theme is Elena worrying about how she can safely get home after dark without suffering verbal or physical assaults.

The book is a pacy read, and our protagonist is headstrong, sometimes to her own detriment.

The detail of life in Bologna feels very rich and Virgo has obviously carried out a great deal of research to present such an authentic view of the clothes-makers of Bologna at the time. A useful afterword helps explain the context a little more, and I confess that I did not know any of the city’s history.

An excellent piece of historical fiction.

You can feel the darkness of Lie of the Land by Kerry Hadley-Price coming off the page. Jemma and Rory have just moved into a new home somewhere in the Black Country. It needs work – a lot of work. Their relationship seems a little fragile, and everything is very slightly off kilter.

We begin to understand that there is tragedy in Jemma’s life, although exactly what has happened only reveals itself slowly.

Then they meet the neighbours and things become even stranger. Next door’s house is lovely, and its occupants just a little too much. Meanwhile despite working on their own house, nothing really seems to improve. The cold and wet seep in. And the couple’s relationship isn’t a great deal better.

Then something happens, and you’re hit sideways.

This is a dark and brooding book, best read in those short days and long nights of winter. It’s unsettling and very original. I liked it.

I’d not previously read any of books by Antoine Laurain, so I came quite fresh to French Windows.

In essence, this is a literary take on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Nathalia comes to visit Dr Faber, a psychoanalyst, to see if he can resolve her issues. She has not been able to continue her career as a photographer since she took a picture of a murder!

Dr Faber’s suggestion is that she imagines the lives of each of the residences in the building across from her. She observes these people go about their lives, and must write about one resident each week, dropping her notes off with the doctor. But is she making these stories up? When Faber checks out some of the details, everything seems surprisingly accurate.

Nathalia is slowly unlocking her problems, but a mystery is being solved at the same time.

This is a short and twisty tale. It’s great fun.

I seem to have slipped behind with my Michael Connelly books, and Resurrection Walk was 2023’s novel, featuring Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer.

In fact, Connelly has created something of his own universe with three detectives each featuring in their own books, but overlapping with one another. Haller is half-brother of Harry Bosch, and Bosch shows up in this book as Haller’s investigator.

The other detective is Renée Ballard who frequently teams up with Bosch. As an aside, a run of Bosch TV series on Amazon Prime Video is nearing its end with Bosch: Legacy due to air its third and final season next year, following a previous seven seasons of regular Bosch (in truth, they were basically the same show, except Bosch is not in the police force any longer). Amazon has also commissioned a Ballard spin-off as well. Meanwhile Netflix has the rights to The Lincoln Lawyer with season 3 recently arriving. That does mean that Bosch and Haller can’t meet in the series because they’re on rival streamers… But back to the book!

Having recently freed an innocent man, Haller and Bosch sit down to go through other cases that have presented themselves. They land on the case of the woman who has been imprisoned for murdering her partner, a police officer. And of course, since this is a Lincoln Lawyer novel, that means a big courtroom sequence.

A thrilling read.

I then moved straight on to this year’s Connelly novel, The Waiting. In her spare time, Renée Ballard is a surfer, so when she has her badge and gun stolen from her vehicle at the outset of this novel, she knows she’s in trouble, and she’s going to have to recover them without telling her superiors, who she has had run ins with before. But she of course enlists Bosch to help her out.

Meanwhile her day job is solving cold cases, and the team has had a hit with a serial rapist and a familial genetic match. They are going to have to tread carefully with this one, and that’s not something Ballard is great at.

One of the delights of a Connelly novel is that there are multiple layers at play. That means different, and unrelated cases and stories happening simultaneously. There’s a third case here too, which relates to a real, and very famous, unsolved Los Angeles killer.

Oh, and one curiously meta thing here. At a certain point a character binges Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer series, saying that it’s not quite like the “real” Lincoln Lawyer! Worlds within worlds within worlds…

Roll on more Connelly!

Black Wolf is Juan Gómez-Jurado’s follow-up to Red Queen (a title I somehow failed to write about), featuring the brilliant, but dangerous Antonia Scott. The comparisons to Stieg Larsson’s Girl with a Dragon Tattoo are not unwarranted and this is essentially a Spanish take on a similar story. Indeed, Amazon Prime Video has already turned this into a TV series.

Scott (Her distant father is English) is a generally unwilling participant in having to solve crimes for a secret pan-European organisation. Her brilliant mind, sometimes drug-assisted, is able to make connections where others might not. But as she herself is not in the police or a lawyer, she is assisted by Inspector Jon Gutlérrez who has to cajole her into helping.

Someone has murdered a senior mafia figure, and his girlfriend is on the run and trying to avoid the killers. Antonia and Jon are on their trail, but so is a hired killer – the Black Wolf.

This is very much a 100 mph thriller with car chases, guns, and very few people you’d actually want to trust. It makes for a very quick read, but you enjoy the ride.

You perhaps know Susie Dent as Countdown’s long standing resident of dictionary corner. But over the years she has written several non-fiction books on words and language, and she also posts very entertaining words of the day on social media.

Guilty by Definition is Dent’s first novel and it’s very entertaining. We follow several members of a team at the “Clarendon English Dictionary” – definitely not to be confused with the “Oxford” English Dictionary. They work in the department that updates and adds new words to the dictionary. Martha is the relatively new editor there working alongside Simon, Alex and Safi. When strange postcards and then letters begin to arrive, they hint towards something that happened years earlier when Martha’s sister Charlie disappeared.

The letters are full of clues as to what happened, and the cast of characters set about investigating. The characters are well-drawn and of course the dictionary background is detailed and no-doubt completely accurate. Each chapter starts with a word, and the definition of that word – some of which you will be familiar with; others you certainly won’t.

The characters are a colourful bunch, and there are various revelations and backstories to be revealed. It would be easy to dismiss this as “cosy crime,” but I’m not sure that would be fair. Certainly this is a very middle-class world of academia, but this is a well drawn world that I’m sure Dent knows well.

I was carried along willingly, even if there were a few things that perhaps don’t quite hang together as much as you’d like. Yes, the Oxford setting immediately conjures up Colin Dexter’s Morse novels. But this book also reminded me a little of The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martinez, which was a whodunnit set in an Oxford world of mathematics.

Thanks Netgalley and the publishers for early access to City of Silk and Lie of the Land.