The Artful Dodger was always a far more interesting character than Oliver Twist, who mostly burst into tears and got rescued by other people. Why, then, did Charles Dickens choose to write the story of the latter rather than the former? Peter David here proposes the answer: because the story of the Artful Dodger is full of vampires and people simply were not willing to accept that. Having escaped transportation to Australia, the Artful Dodger stumbles into a conspiracy of vampires in high places. (As Peter David points out, Dickens was so known for giving characters revealing names that the practice has become known as Dickensian, and there was a character in the original called Magistrate Fang.) What happens from then is equal parts hilarity and adventure featuring the best known names of 19th century London, historical and fictional. It's terribly fun, with everything I expect from Peter David's fantasy and streaks of Douglas Adams and George MacDonald Fraser as well.

Peter David is in the middle of two series that I would very much like to see continued, and which I'm under the impression are supposed to be, but I have absolutely no bitterness that he chose to write this instead of the next installment of one of them. It might be my favorite book of his yet... or I may need to reread some of the others just to compare and make sure.

Overall: A

Frederica ("Free") Marshall publishes a newspaper by, for, and about women. She's an investigative reporter in the mold of Nellie Bly, and she has her share of enemies. One of them, James Delacey, is currently behind a scheme to ruin her paper by making it appear that it is plagiarizing from other papers.

Edward Clark was born Edward Delacey, James's older brother, but has been out of the country and unheard from in so long that he's about to be legally presumed dead and his title passed to his younger brother. Edward is fine with that. What he's not fine with is that James's scheme would also ruin Stephen Shaughnessy, the little brother of his childhood best friend. When he initially approaches Free with part of his story (leaving out that James is his brother and that his motive is protecting Stephen) he attempts to blackmail her into working with him. She blackmails him right back, and accepts.

This is quite possibly my new favorite romance, period. Free is a force of nature. She knows every bit of how ugly the world can be; she frequently subjects herself to it deliberately for the sake of a story. But she sees that ugliness and then finds bits of it that she can fix. And I love how Edward was utterly bowled over by her from the beginning. The author's note says that Milan's original intent was for Free to meet some guy who was opposed to women's rights, and I'd probably be writing a very different review if that hadn't changed. My favorite thing about Edward is that, even if he isn't always sure that there's much hope for Free to succeed, he never for a second thinks that she's wrong or needs to change.

There's also a secondary romance that was quite sweet, although not as integrated into the main plot as the one in The Heiress Effect. And as always with Milan's books, the dialogue was wonderful. I can hardly wait for the concluding novella in the series. For that matter, I can hardly wait for the next series after this.

Overall: A

Rumor has it that Lucien, Duke of Belliston, is a vampire. When a woman is discovered dead with bite marks on her throat, Sally Fitzhugh - certain that the vampire stories are nonsense and this murder has been staged to frame him - intervenes. The two join forces to find out who is behind the murder and possibly that of the Duke's parents, years before, which had been blamed on his mother.

This book is a delight. It's full of adventure, romance, and humor, most particularly in the form of a pet stoat. Sally has grown up to be a formidable heroine, brave but not foolishly so. She comes across as a sort of successor to Miss Gwen for the next generation. And Lucien, although his baggage sometimes temporarily gets the best of him, displays remarkable endurance. They make a perfect couple.

The only slight disappointment from this book is one that I have trouble describing because it would be incredibly spoilery. The best I can do is: although for most of the book, the characters believe that the murders are connected to the ongoing plot of the series, it turns out they have nothing to do with it. Change the names and have the characters not have a theory about who is behind the murders (just a need to investigate) and this could have been any stand alone romance. It was a fun one, but it was missing a crucial element of the series, as far as I'm concerned.

Overall Rating: B+

Theoretically The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla is released tomorrow, but since I didn't have an ARC, just a copy that shipped early from B&N, I wouldn't be surprised if you could find it already, too.

This review is based on a free copy received from the publisher.

I picked up Seven for a Secret at a conference not realizing that it was the second in a series. I probably would have understood more about the characters had I read The Gods of Gotham first, but I don't think that not having read it affected my enjoyment of this book.

Timothy Wilde, copper star of the newly formed NYPD, is approached by a woman named Lucy Adams whose son and sister have been abducted by slave catchers in spite of being free natives of Albany. Rescuing him with the help of his friend Julius Carpenter and the New York Committee of Vigilance is only the beginning for all of them. Timothy is pulled into a murky world of slave traders and politics, with his brother Valentine assisting him only so far as his interests don't disturb the Democratic party machine.

This is a dark, twisty tale full of deceit and vividly drawn characters, set against New York City at a time when the city was filling with refugees from the Irish Potato Famine and tensions over slavery are simmering.

Overall: A

This review is based on a free copy received from the publisher, a bit late to be considered an advance copy (although not as late as the fact that I'm just now reviewing it would apply).

The Lion and the Rose is the sequel to The Serpent and the Pearl, a novel of the Borgias. Specifically, they follow Guilia Farnese, the mistress of Rodrigo Borgia, AKA Pope Alexander VI as well as two fictional narrators. When I read the first book, it struck me as if somebody had tried to reverse engineer historical fiction out of historical fantasy. Now, the quantity of drama and backstabbing surrounding the Borgias would be rather difficult to exaggerate. It's the two fictional narrators that have me rolling my eyes and saying "Really?" on a pretty regular basis.  There's Carmelina, a rare female chef who learned from her father whose recipes she's stolen, because of course she is, who in the first book appears at the household that employs her cousin while he's out gambling and saves the dinner, because of course she does. And then there's Leonello, the dwarf body guard. Leonello means "Little Lion." I'm not going to say anything else about that, I'm just going to let you think about that for a few minutes (if it takes that long) and draw your own conclusions about whose voice you think the author wants me to be hearing in my head while he narrates.

The second book continues in much the same vein. The Borgia intrigue is tons of fun. Carmelina's apprentice invents French fries. (He is a historical figure, so perhaps I should mention that the author's note does clarify that although potatoes were just being discovered in the "New World," he did not actually invent French fries.) And at one time or another every male character with a significant speaking part falls in love with or tries to sleep with (consensually or not) one or the other of the female narrators. Because nobody can be immune to both of their charms. All in all, it's not that it's bad, it's just that so much of the invented material is material that we have seen many, many times before.

Overall: B

I don't read a lot of fiction about Shakespeare, mostly because I'm tired of the trope where they add all kinds of inspiration for his plays (maybe even exact dialogue) into his life. Dark Aemila has a ton of that, but I found that I didn't care.

Dark Aemilia is the story of Aemilia Bassano, later Lanyer, a possible inspiration for the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets and one of the first female poets to be published in England. As told here, she has a brief, ill-fated affair with Shakespeare while the mistress of Lord Hunsdon. When she falls pregnant, she allows Hunsdon to believe he's the father so he will marry her off with a dowry big enough to make her new husband look the other way. Years later, when her son is dying of the plague, she makes a deal with Lilith; in exchange for her son's life, she will write a play for her, The Tragedy of Lady MacBeth. You can probably see where this is going.

Although the plot is mostly fiction aside from the basic outline of Aemilia's life (there's no evidence she had an affair with Shakespeare, no reason to think her son was his rather than Hunsdon's), she did in fact write poetry in defense of Eve, and it's not difficult to believe that she could have been the brilliant and somewhat embittered woman we see here. This is her story; Shakespeare is almost a footnote, a hook to bring the reader in and give the story a closing with his death. The plot is about Aemilia's shifting place in the world, her love for her son, and her struggle to find a way to do what she wants with her poetry.

I would have liked to have heard more about her Lady MacBeth. It's clear that for the most part, Shakespeare is to have stolen her script word for word and scene by scene. But she wrote The Tragedy of Lady MacBeth, and the final play was of MacBeth. So no matter how wonderful a role Lady MacBeth is, presumably Aemilia's version was not the final version. For one thing, Lady MacBeth dies with several long scenes left to go, and it seems unlikely that would have been the case if she were the title character (Julius Caesar aside). Did Shakespeare add more to MacBeth's role to make the two leads at least equal? Did he edit and alter the tone in order to make it a play about a king, not a queen? Since this was the plot point that made me pick up the book I would have liked to have known more about what was meant to have been changed aside from the name of the playwright.

Overall Grade: A-

This review is based on an advance reading copy received from the publisher.

After Eli Burke dies, his granddaughter, Marjorie, discovers that in his private notebooks, the "White Magician" from the stories he told in her childhood is called the "White Rebbe," a figure out of the Wandering Jew legends on which she's writing her dissertation. The stories contained in the notebooks, involving also the Angel of Losses and a lost letter of the alphabet, not only reveal a lost history of the family but a legacy that must be taken up by the current generation and a possible miracle for Marjorie's sister Holly, from whom she has been estranged since Holly married an Orthodox Jew and converted.

The Angel of Losses is a wonderful mix of magic, history, and folklore (some of it invented). It's also a powerful story of family, of the ties that bind and the ones that people break, or try to, to survive. In a way, it struck me also as the story before a fantasy story- which is not to say that I expect a sequel. It's clearly self contained, but Marjorie ends the story at the brink of something new, and perhaps this isn't the "quest" itself, but the explanation for why Marjorie undertakes it.

Overall Grade: A

The Angel of Losses will be available July 29.

This review is based on a free e-galley received from the publisher that will eventually expire, and which I will then miss greatly.

That Summer is a gothic time slip novel, traveling between 1849 and 2009. I'd say it is not, strictly speaking, a romance novel, for reasons that I will not go into for fear of spoilers. Honestly, I did not The most intense aspect of the book for me were the mysteries. What might the modern heroine find in the house? What exactly would happen to the 19th century lovers? I did not love the historical portion of the book quite as much as I did The Ashford Affair, mostly because aside from Imogene and Gavin, the characters seemed more thinly drawn, nor does Imogen seem to have a significant relationship (even a significantly complicated relationship) with anybody but Gavin once the book is truly underway. However, the modern heroine, Julia, and the modern supporting characters seemed more complex. Between them and wondering how everything would end, I had a lot of trouble putting this book down at the end of my breaks at work.

I'll be sad to see the Pink Carnation series come to an end after two more books, but I'll happily read whatever else Lauren Willig chooses to write.

Overall: A

That Summer will be available on June 3.

This review is based on an advance reader copy received from the publisher.

In the third book in the Scotland Yard Murder Squad series, Inspector Day and Sergeant Hammersmith have been pressed into service searching for four, or possibly five, prisoners who escaped after a train car derailed and crashed into a prison wall, apparently deliberately. One of them is a murderer whom Day caught in the first place, and who may possibly go after his wife, Claire, who is expecting a baby any day. To make matters even worse, Jack the Ripper is back on the loose after having been secretly captured and held prisoner by a shadowy organization.

After three books, Day, Hammersmith, and the reoccurring supporting characters still come across as rather lightly sketched. Jack is the most compelling character, although he still feels a bit derivative. I worry that it sounds a bit ridiculous, when Jack the Ripper is one of the models for all fictional serial killers, but we are dealing with a fictional version of Jack that was just created here. His fixation with "transforming" people is reminiscent of Thomas Harris characters, and since I do not believe that theme was in any of the Ripper letters, I can't excuse it by saying that it's an actual association with the historical Jack. If I've missed a letter that suggested Jack the Ripper did think in those terms, please correct me.

What keeps me reading this series is the setting. The little details of weapons, the things that Scotland Yard can and cannot do with forensics in the 1890s when modern ideas of forensic science were just starting to be formed are worth the time and keep the reader's attention in between the pure action scenes. That's why I'll be looking for the fourth book, which was rather more obviously set up at the end than other installments in the series have been.

Overall: B

The Devil's Workshop will be available May 20.

This review is based on an advance reading copy received from the editor.

The Confabulist follows two plot threads, one about Houdini and his quest to reveal the fraud of spiritualists, and one about Martin Strauss, who supposedly threw the punch that killed him. The Houdini thread is engaging, even if some chapters that rapidly shift back and forth between two different times left me confused about the order of events, and could have stood on its own if it was given a different ending to wrap it up. Martin Strauss, however, is suffering from a medical condition in which he is not only losing his memory but it's being completely replaced by false ones. I enjoy a good unreliable narrator as much as anybody. I adored Mind of Winter, and Drood by Dan Simmons is one of my standby books for the staff picks display at the library. However, the best part of those two books is trying to work out if the narrator is losing touch with reality or if they are describing the actions of somebody else who is, or if there might even be something supernatural going on. In this case, we are told in the first chapter about Martin Strauss that he remembers things that are completely untrue. Knowing that, I saw the reversal in the last chapter coming instantly, rendering all of Martin's chapters pointless because I knew it was more likely than not that most of it was never supposed to have happened.

Overall Grade: C

The Confabulist will be available May 1.