Lord Alexander Pynn-ffoulks (Alec to his friends) has been long estranged from his father, the Duke of Ilvar. The Duke is planning to present his Duchess (not Alec's mother; this one's his second wife) with a diamond parure for their anniversary; Alec wants a pair of jewel thieves, the Lilywhite Boys (so called because the police have never been able to pin anything on them), to steal it. He'll get them into the Duke's remote home where they can break into the safe. Jerry will pose as Alec's new best friend in order to be invited to visit. But there's more between Jerry and Alec than he had planned, and this plot may run into unforeseen complications.

This book actually struck me more as a heist book than a romance (in spite of the large number of *ahem* romantic interludes). It's not unusual for Charles to stray rather close to the lines between genres; she's mentioned before that a Romance used to be the sort of tale of "romantic" adventure that Alonzo Quixana spent too much time reading before he decided to become Don Quixote, and my absolute favorite of her series was the one that one of the professional journals said got too bogged down in politics. But in this instance in particular, what keeps the pages turning is the intrigue as Alec and Jerry set up the robbery. And there are limits to how much I can say without spoilers, but midway through the book there's a giant reveal which I wasn't entirely sure was playing fair in a romance novel, but in a heist movie I'd expect nothing less.

Then there are those "romantic interludes." There is a lot of sex in this book, and what's amazing about it is the communication. Alec has very specific fantasies about what he wants in bed, and so far the people who are interested in giving it to him haven't been particularly nice about it. Jerry isn't exactly what you'd call "nice" in general, but when it comes to sex, he's very clear on making sure he doesn't take any advantage that wasn't freely offered to him. As usual, Charles has produced some of the best illustrative arguments against the notion that explicit consent interferes with sexiness in romance today.

As a nice bonus, and another topic that I won't say too much about, there are some nice Easter eggs for Charles's returning fans. Those who have read her Sins of the Cities and Society of Gentlemen series will recognize some familiar faces and some familiar family names.

I don't know which of KJ Charles's series I should hope we get more of next.

Overall: A

I was eagerly awaiting Daughters of a Nation: a Black Suffragette Romance Anthology well before it came out, but I kept having to push it off due to committee reading. Last month, I finally both had the downtime from the award season and felt sufficiently caught up on the series that I was already reading to pick it up.

The standout of the for novellas was "Let Us Dream" by Alyssa Cole, about Bertha, who owns a cabaret in Harlem in 1917, fighting for women's right to vote in New York state when the white and/or more "respectable" supporters of the cause don't necessarily want her in the fight. Amir Chowdhury, an Indian Muslim chef, is in the country illegally, so washing dishes in the cabaret's kitchen is the best job he can get. Both of these two are survivors who have become used to having the world set against them, and the time that it takes for them to learn how to let another person into their lives is believable. I also liked how they recognize each other's struggles and learn from each other. After some initial head-butting, Amir teaches Bertha how to make her Indian dance performances more authentic and Bertha teaches Amir about American government. When ultimately, women's suffrage passes and Bertha can vote but Amir (due to his immigration status) still cannot, he only says that means he'll have to try harder to win her over to his positions. Since many of the most ugly conflicts over suffrage in America came between marginalized groups when it became clear they wouldn't all get the right to vote at the same time, I particularly appreciated this point.

My second favorite was "In the Morning Sun" by Lena Hart. Madeline believes that her beloved Jimmy was lost in the Civil War. She joins a missionary group and heads west to Nebraska, where she teaches freedmen. By chance, Jimmy, who has been building homes and advocating for veterans, discovers that Madeline is in Nebraska and still unmarried. He searches for her in hopes they can pick up where they left off, but they've both been through so much since they last saw each other. Although I saw many of the revelations as well as how the final conflict would be settled coming, I found this to be a good, solid read.

Then there's "A Radiant Soul" by Kianna Alexander which I wonder if I might not have liked more if it weren't for Courtney Milan. I can explain that but I'm going to have to come back to it. Sarah returns from the Wyoming Territory, where in 1881 women have the right to vote, to her parents' home in North Carolina to celebrate her mother's birthday. Owen has been hired by Sarah's father to build her mother a gazebo as a birthday present. Her father's hoping that they'll hit it off. Sarah's passionate about the right to vote and spreading it throughout the country; Owen's intent on working against the suppression of the black male vote. He's not sure about women voting and he definitely doesn't think they should get suffrage when it can't be protected for those who already have it. By the end of the novella, he's come around enough that he'll tell his fellow men that maybe they should stay out of the women's suffragists' way. Here's where Courtney Milan comes into it, at least in my head. Milan has a book called The Suffragette Scandal which, when she first announced it, was going to be called The Mistress Rebellion. Now, I can't remember exactly where I read her explanation of the evolution of this book. It might have been in the author's note, but I don't have it with me at the moment, and it might have been online but if so I'm not tracking it down with a cursory Google search. But the way I remember it going was that originally her heroine Free was going to meet a man who opposed women's suffrage but they have this amazing chemistry and he comes around by the end, but eventually she realized she couldn't have the moral of the story be that if the sex is good enough maybe a man will eventually see you as human. I can like "guy who hadn't really thought about women's suffrage is enlightened by a woman he falls for," but I don't think I can ever get on board with "guy who actively opposes women's suffrage is turned around by the love of a good woman" after reading that.

Second in the book but least in my affections is "The Washerwomen's War" by Piper Huguley, about Mamie Harper, the daughter of famous poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Gabriel Harmon, a minister she'd met at Milford College. She has always been determined not to marry a minister. Their paths cross again when she takes a semester off to teach adult female students in Atlanta. I was initially put off by this book when I saw it was in the first person, a perspective that works for me in other genres but not really in Romance. To make matters worse, Gabriel's against women's suffrage and not apparently for any reasons of the shaky nature of black male suffrage like Owen had. He's just not sure that it's women's place. And although he supports the Atlanta washerwomen's strike, we never hear him go back and say that he supports women getting the right to vote. Maybe we're supposed to assume that. I don't think it's safe to.

This collection is a mixed bag but I'm glad I read it. The strong stories on their own would do far better than the overall grade.

Overall: B-

The year is 1788 and Paul Gastebois works as an "inquirer" in Paris. He does work for the police, primarily tailing foreign diplomats, and also private cases, mostly for the artisan guilds. Then someone comes to him with a missing person case: a singer of songs who works at the Pont Neuf and who has not been seen by his friend in several weeks, after having run into an unknown person from his past. The investigation that follows is a knotted web of blackmail, illegal publishing, corruption, and- eventually- murder.

I adored this book. I've been short a good French Revolution mystery series since Susanne Alleyn's Aristide Ravel series appears to have trailed off. Really, it's hard to find any good French Revolution fiction from somebody who's done research beyond A Tale of Two Cities and The Scarlet Pimpernel, and in which the sympathies don't appear to be all towards those poor aristocrats who can no longer do exactly what they want. Gastebois himself isn't particularly involved with politics, but the upcoming meeting of the Estates General looms over this book, as well as the popular dissatisfaction that gives rise to government satire in the guise of illegal pornographic stories. I'd love this book even if the mystery were less intricate; so much the better that it turns out to be a knotty detective tale of the first order? I can only hope that the promise of the "a Paul Gastebois mystery" emblazoned across the cover is fulfilled with many more installments of the series to follow.

Overall: A

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Golden State takes place in a nation that apparently grew out of an independent California at some point in the unspecified future, when the most harshly punished crime is the telling of lies.

Sounds like a fascinating premise for a detective story, right? And Winters can be trusted to write compelling speculative fiction detective stories. His Last Policeman series, set in a world where a meteor was going to be destroying life on Earth in less than a year and so many people were either abandoning their lives or committing suicide that there was no point in investigating disappearances or mysterious deaths any more, was brilliant. Sadly, in this instance, the implications never seemed to be as fully explored as I wished, the world never quite deviated far enough from our own. The "anomalies" that form the basis of the case that speculator Laszlo Ratesic is investigating regard things that are either very much illegal or very much worth covering up in our current world. (Murder, blackmail, adultery.) There's a scene near the beginning of the book where he senses a lie in a crowded restaurant and the person lying to cover up for his brother's crime faces a harsher sentence than the brother in question. But the actual outlawing of lying has fairly little effect on the plot for the biggest chunk of the book. It gets a bit more complicated near the end, but it's too little, too late. More important is the extensive records that have to be maintained in order to keep track of the Objectively So, but the level of surveillance doesn't necessarily have to depend on lying having been outlawed in order to be justified.

I expect better of Winters. My favorite thing about his Underground Airlines was the little glimpses we got of how the rest of history played out differently and how people recognizable from our world wound up in a universe where the Civil War never happened and slavery persists in four states to the present. James Brown refusing to perform in the United States and proclaiming to the rest of the world "look at what they're denying themselves" (or words to that effect, it's been about a year and a half and I don't have my copy at hand). But this world never really seems to be fleshed out in the same way.

​Overall: C

This review is based on an advance copy received from the publisher at the American Library Associations Midwinter Meeting.

I normally make some attempt to prioritize the most quickly forthcoming books when I'm reading ARCs, but this time I went straight for The Nickel Boys as soon as I'd finished The Rosie Result, which had the advantage of being a part of a series I'd already been following. I was a big fan of The Underground Railroad, and I was excited to find out what Whitehead had done next. His latest is an entirely different sort of novel aside from its grounding in the horrors of history, based on a real reform school in Florida. It follows Elwood Curtis, a black boy bound for college in the 1960s when his life changes course terribly not even so much because of one mistake as because of an accident. Abuse, corruption, and the threat of being disappeared hang over the school, where Elwood fights to declaration "Throw us in jail and we will still love you" as a way to hang onto hope and his humanity while his friend Turner focuses on staying out of trouble and scheming to survive by any means necessary.

On some levels this is a simple book; the bulk of the plot can be summed up in the paragraph above. But in addition to its powerful and brutal prose, it manages to be impressively surprising for a book in which there is so little of what you'd call intrigue. This is in no way a comfortable book, but it is an important one.

Overall: A

The Nickel Boys will be available July 16.

The Rosie Result is the third book in the Don Tillman series, following The Rosie Project and The Rosie Effect. This book is based on an advance copy received from the publisher's booth at the American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting.

(A note about language: the words used to describe autistic people is a conversation that appears in this book. For the purposes of this review, I am going with "autistic" rather than "person with autism" because that is the language that the autistic people I know overwhelmingly prefer for themselves, as well as the language that most of the characters in the book who are talking about themselves rather than others use. If I meet a person who wants to be described as having autism, I'll respect their wishes when talking about them, but outside of those specific circumstances I'm going with the average.)

It has been about eleven years since The Rosie Effect, Don and Rosie have moved back to Australia, and their son, Hudson, is having some trouble at school. With a video that went viral causing some problems for Don at work as well, he decides to take a leave of absence that will allow Rosie to work full time while he focuses on The Hudson Project, including putting together a panel of experts from among his friends to teach his son the lessons Don deems important for somebody growing up different. School administrators with significantly less expertise in the area than one would want suggest that Hudson may be on the autism spectrum, which raises the question of whether a diagnosis would be beneficial to him or cause others to try to keep him in a box- and which also raises long ignored questions for Don about himself.

Objectively, I recognize that this is probably not as good a book as The Rosie Project. Neither of the sequels is as successful on a purely comedic level as the first, and the first did establish what the series was trying to be. However, The Rosie Result has become my favorite book in the series. It has moved away from the lightly sketched, quirky-but-not-officially-named depictions of autistic people a la Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory to an insightful, nuanced depiction of many different ways of thinking, perceiving the world, and forming community. In addition to the ongoing adventures of Don and Rosie and the beginning of Hudson's coming of age, I very much enjoyed revisiting Don's old friends and learning more about his family of origin, and I would love to visit his bar. This isn't as good a comedic romp as The Rosie Project, but it's satisfying in a way that the beginning of the series never suggested.

Overall: A

The Rosie Result will be available May 28.

Ghost Wall is a brief novel about a 17 year-old-girl named Sylvie whose father has arranged for them and her mother to join an anthropology professor and his students on a trip to the woods of Northumberland, attempting to recreate the Iron Age. It is a tense, atmospheric work, that works a lot in to only a hundred and thirty pages. The threat of her father's abuse hangs over Sylvie, and an indictment of patriarchy is one of the most obvious threads of the book: the two grown men in particular often filling the time with their "projects" while the women are expected to keep the group fed, exactly on time, with no clocks and using historical methods. But there are hints of white nationalism and other incarnations of oppression dropped as well- Sylvie is short for Sulevia because her father wanted her to have a "pure British name." As the story unfolded, I found the Stanford Prison Experiment coming to mind, if not for Sylvie's father who appears to have been your basic tyrant all along, then for the professor and the male students who adapt all to easily to the brutal lives they imagine they are recreating. All in all, it's a simple work but a haunting one, with an impact far beyond its page count.

Overall: A

An Extraordinary Union is the first in the Loyal League series.

Ellen has been living as a free woman in the North for years. Knowing that her photographic memory would be a valuable asset to the Union and a way to help free her people, she has become a spy and been planted as a slave in the home of a Confederate senator. There she meets Malcolm McCall, a Pinkerton agent posing as a Confederate soldier, also in search of information from the Senator's family and friends. Sparks fly, which only makes maintaining their covers more difficult.

I'm going to be honest; I had a pretty good hunch about a major factor in this book's finale from the moment I saw that one of the other women enslaved in Senator McCaffrey's house had a husband named Robert who was a riverboat pilot. That said, remembering things I read for past years of Notable Books and being able to add two and two correctly didn't shortchange the intrigue one bit. The twists and turns of the plot were thrilling and the characters were at once remarkable and quite believable. See the author's note for the historical inspiration if you disagree.

The last book in the trilogy comes out later this month and if I didn't already have such a long TBR list from what has accumulated during four years of committee work, I'd go straight to A Hope Divided so I'd be ready for the conclusion as soon as it's available.

Overall: A

Unmasked by the Marquess is the first in the Regency Imposters series.

Robert Selby seeks out Alistair, the Marquess of Pembroke, to help him introduce his sister into society. He's certain that she can make a great match if she just gets the right introductions, and Alistair, whose late (and by Alistair, unlamented) father was a friend of the Selby family, is the only thing resembling the right connection that they have. Alistair has, with much effort, managed to restore the finances and the reputation of his family after his father left both in disrepair. This has left him with a giant stick up his arse. He first thinks that doing a favor for the Selbys might encourage some other people to stop bothering him for favors, but he's more interested in Robert than he ought to admit if he wants to keep the family reputation intact. What he doesn't know at that point is that "Robert Selby" is actually Charity Church, formerly the Selby's maid. She's been living as Robert for the past six years but the charade will end as soon as she sees Louisa Selby settled.

The conflicts in this book do not come from where you expect them to. Alistair finds out who Robin actually is fairly early in the book and does not much care about what the contents of her pants are. (Robin is, per the author's note, nonbinary but unlikely to use anything but "she" pronouns simply because they wouldn't bother her, so I'll stick with "she" and "Robin," the name she thinks of herself by at the end of the story, for any part of this review where the "Robert" disguise isn't front and center.) The issues arise partly from the fraud upon which Robin's life as Robert is built, which make it impossible to remain "Robert Selby" any longer than absolutely necessary, and partly from Alistair's reluctance to have a long-term partner who is anything but his wife, after having suffered in the reflected scandal of his father and his mistresses. And there are certain expectations for the wife of a Marquess that don't involve dressing and conducting herself like a man. Many of these issues are wrapped up rather quickly but in my estimation it was clear enough that it wasn't entirely without repercussions- just that they'd decided what social repercussions a Marquess could bluster his way through and what they were all willing to live with. It did have the effect of making a story with so many complications actually seem fairly low conflict, but the characters are delightful, the plot is different, and the book is all around thoroughly charming.

Overall: B