BOOKLIST Gives WHO BURIES THE DEAD a Starred Review!

A wonderful starred review from Booklist:

When Stanley Preston, a wealthy merchant with family political ties, is found beheaded, Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, is called to help. While he's repelled that Preston's wealth came from slave labor on Jamaican plantations, Devlin is more concerned about such a murderer on the loose in London in 1813. Subsequent murders, including another beheading, appear linked to Preston's. Among the suspects is Sinclair, Lord Oliphant, former governor in Jamaica, who made Devlin the unwilling catalyst in the brutal murder of innocent women and children years earlier during the Napoleonic Wars, an incident that still haunts Devlin and makes Oliphant his sworn enemy. Another suspect is Preston's banker, Henry Austen, whose spinster sister, Jane, while helping to care for her gravely ill sister-in-law, displays her keen observations and wry wit to Devlin. As Devlin's personal life has become richer and fuller, with his deepening love for wife Hero and infant son Simon, so has this novel, the tenth in the series featuring St. Cyr. With such well-developed characters, intriguing plot lines, graceful prose, and keen sense of time and place based on solid research, this is historical mystery at its best. --Michele Leber

Finished!

Finally, finally, finally finished Sebastian Book #11.

That's right; it STILL doesn't have a proper title. I came up with one I liked, but the Powers That Be didn't like it, and I must admit I wasn't wild about it myself. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to come up with anything they like any better, and I'm terrified that I'm going to get stuck with something awful.

I already have the idea for #12 swirling around in my head, but it's going on the back burner while I take care of all the things I had to shove to the side during the last final push to get this thing done. This one ran a little long for reasons I will never quite understand. You'd think after writing eleven Sebastian St. Cyr mysteries--and more than twenty books all together--I'd be able to gauge a manuscript's length better, but obviously not.

And now I'm off to play with a kitten--who isn't so little any more!

Some News

The audio edition of WHAT ANGELS FEAR is now available. Davina Porter is once again the narrator. Recorded Books has purchased the audio rights to the entire series, so all the books they'd missed should come out over the next year or so. Their cover of Why Kings Confess has a Victorian gentleman lounging in a chair, so I'm very happy with this cover of Angels.

And my Aussie readers will be happy to know that WHAT ANGELS FEAR and WHEN GODS DIE will soon be available as ebooks in Australia (that's the old Australian trade paperback editions, above; I don't know if they'll use the same covers for the ebooks). I had no idea they weren't available until Alison Stuart happened to mention it on Facebook. So I did some investigating. You'd think the explanation would be simple; it wasn't. But the upshot is that the first two books in the series should be up sometime in January. That will still leave some books in the middle that aren't available in ebook form in Australia, but we're working on that. So, thank you, Alison!

Happy Holidays, Everyone!

I've put my book completely away for the holidays and plan to spend the next ten days simply enjoying my family. My younger daughter is home from graduate school and my older daughter is home from San Antonio, so we will all be together this year.

My family has a long, multi-generation tradition of seriously overdoing it in the decorating department. I put up two villages, one under the tree (which is in my office):

And one on the buffet in the dining room:

I also put up two nativity scenes, including this one carved of olive wood by a Palestinian refugee from Bethlehem I befriended in Amman:

And every year, Danielle makes a gingerbread house. This year she was really ambitious; this monster is  almost 20" tall and took the better part of four days:

But the one who enjoys Christmas the most is Huck, who spends all his time under the tree and seriously mourns its departure by Twelfth Night:

Hope you all enjoy the holidays this season, whatever you do or don't celebrate!

Focusing

I can't believe how long it's been since I put up an new blogpost. My excuse is that I've been focusing on getting this $#%& book finished in time for Christmas. But I've resigned myself to the fact that's not going to happen, and now I'm simply trying to get it to a good stopping point. Angel's been helping by draping himself over my arm while I'm trying to write.

I've decided to do the ARC giveaway for WHO BURIES THE DEAD after Christmas, when life will be more sane. Hope that doesn't disappoint anyone too much. I'll be putting up another post soon, I promise! Now back to work...