I just finished Rhys Bowen's second book in the A Royal Spyness mystery series, A Royal Pain. It made me realize I like cozy mysteries only when they're set in historical periods. Normally I'd say I don't care much for cozy mysteries at all, but I love this and Kathryn Miller Haines's Rosie Winter series.
Bowen's books are set in England, 1930, when communism is on the rise in Europe and that upstart Hitler is getting some attention in political circles. The heroine, Georgie, is a British royal who's close enough to the throne to visit her grandmother the queen (Victoria) but far enough to never be at risk of ascending.
Kathryn Miller Haines's series stars a young stage actress trying to make a living in NYC in the middle of WWII. This series is so rich in detail and atmosphere you're instantly transported back to the time period the minute you open to the first page. The slang is amazing and the details are spot on.
I'm also reading The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. It's interesting, if a bit slow to start off, and it reads exactly the way you can imagine a big budget movie director would write a book: lots of cuts between different scenes and POVs, lots of characters, some of whom live and die within the scene they're in, plenty of details. If there's one complaint I can make is that the writers are prone to excessive details about technology. Seriously, I don't really need to know the specs on that piece of forensics equipment your hero is using. I don't even need to know what piece of equipment he's picking up to perform that autopsy. Just tell me he's performing an autopsy and I'll be fine. Still, it's a book I look forward to reading.
Lastly, I started Jim C. Hines's The Stepsister Scheme, about Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty banding together to rescue Cinderella's husband. It has Hines's trademark humor, and it's a distinct twist on the fairy tale genre. It's worth noting that these
aren't Disney princesses; these are the versions more closely recorded by the brothers Grimm.
That's it for now. I've been adding books like crazy to my Amazon wishlist, but I've made it a point not to buy any more. My current TBR pile is about to bury me.