What is Beverle Graves Myers reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Beverle Graves Myers, author of Whispers of Vivaldi.

Her entry begins:

Sometimes I read for entertainment, sometimes to inform myself on the trends in my chosen genre, which is, of course, historical mystery. It’s a joy when these two activities merge into one delicious read. Several recommendations:

A Woman of Consequence: The Investigations of Miss Dido Kent by Anna Dean. If Jane Austen had turned her hand to mystery, she might have created Dido Kent. I’ve been hooked on this series since Bellfield Hall introduced the inquisitive, puzzle-bending spinster—Dido is barely thirty-five, but unmarried, and thus a spinster dependent on the generosity of her family. Fortunately, her mind remains independent and highly observant. Much of the series’ appeal, besides the perfectly comprehensible Regency-inspired prose, is Dean’s seamless integration of the manners and culture of the period with the mystery plot. All carried off with...[read on]

About Whispers of Vivaldi, from the publisher:

Venice, 1745—an age of reckless pleasures, playful artifice, and baroque excess.

An accident has reduced Tito Amato’s glorious singing voice to a husky croak. A tragedy—but also opportunity. Tito can reinvent himself as a director of his beloved Teatro San Marco, staging operas to claim Venice’s fickle heart as he had as a singer. With the theater losing subscribers to a rival company headed by an unscrupulous impresario, San Marco’s Maestro Torani charges Tito with locating the perfect opera to fill the seats in time for the opening of Carnival. Surprisingly, a second-rate composer provides the very thing—an opera so replete with gorgeous melodies it might well have been written by Antonio Vivaldi, Venice’s greatest composer, dead these past four years. “Perhaps the Red Priest did write the opera,” whispers the gossip snaking through coffeehouses and cafés. Even more disconcerting are the rumors swirling around Angeletto, a male soprano Tito imports from Naples to sing the lead. Is this exquisite being truly a castrato, or a female soprano engaging in a daring but lucrative masquerade? Both More terrible: Maestro Torani undergoes a series of increasingly vicious attacks ending in his murder. And Tito is accused of killing the distinguished maestro so he can become the principal director of San Marco. His own life as well as the future of Teatro San Marco now depends on his skills as a sleuth….

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--Marshal Zeringue