Fire Must Burn Allison Montclair (2026) In this eighth entry in the Sparks and Bainbridge Mystery Series, the inimitable Iris (Sparks) and Gwen (Bainbridge) are back at the murder game, even though their actual occupation is running a marriage bureau in post-World-War-II London. This time Iris, a former British spy, is dragooned into helping her former spy boss on a tough case that requires subterfuge with clients of the marriage bureau. At the end of every Montclair novel I don’t want to let go of these fantastic characters, in spite of the post-war rationing and the bombed out buildings and the British patriarchy that they have to endure. Iris and Gwen are the best models for women heading into the second half of the twentieth century. I recommend reading this series from the beginning, and my reviews of several previous titles are here.
History Lessons Zoe B Wallbrook (2025) This debut novel is billed as a mystery, and the lead character, Daphne Ouverture, does indeed get entangled in solving the murder of a colleague of hers at Harrison University, an elite (fictional) institution in the (fictional) small city of Calliope. But in addition to producing a reasonable mystery, novelist Wallbrook also sends up academic politics most blisteringly, and she even dips into the romance genre with a love-at-first-sight subplot. As I read, I noticed that the setting seemed uncannily similar to Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the University of Michigan, where I used to work. Some poking around on the internet revealed that Zoe B Wallbrook is a pseudonym for Kira Thurman, who is a real live associate professor at UM. This discovery provided me opportunities for decoding beyond the basic story, observing how Wallbrook/Thurman disguised UM. And if Kira is as endearing as the character Daphne, she’d be fun to bump into around town.