Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Six top historical crime novels set during The Gilded Age

Rosemary Simpson is the author of two previous historical novels, The Seven Hills of Paradise and Dreams and Shadows, and two previous Gilded Age Mysteries, What the Dead Leave Behind and Lies that Comfort and Betray. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, and the Historical Novel Society. Educated in France and the United States, she now lives near Tucson, Arizona.

Simpson's newest Gilded Age Mystery is Let the Dead Keep Their Secrets.

One of her six favorite historical crime novels set during The Gilded Age, as shared at CrimeReads:
The Gilded Hour, by Sara Donati

Set in 1883. Anna and Sophie Savard are doctors practicing in an era when women in medicine were both a rarity and often a subject of ridicule. Not surprisingly, their separate practices—Anna is a surgeon, mixed-race Sophie an obstetrician—expose them and the reader to a broad spectrum of the social ills that plagued the lives of rich and poor women alike in an age of Victorian prudery and relentless opposition to contraception and abortion. The crime thread is a serial killer who lures desperate pregnant women into submitting to procedures that end in death. Well researched and meticulously detailed, the author, who also wrote the Wilderness series, creates an extensive cast of characters whose private and professional lives intersect against a background of social injustices that range from orphaned children living in the streets to the plight of wretchedly poor immigrants in filthy, overcrowded tenements.
Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Gilded Hour.

--Marshal Zeringue