It’s 1867, and a 20-something civil war widow has just set up a detective agency with a former rebel soldier named Gabriel Garnick. She uses a professional name, Mrs. Paschal, so nobody connects her with the former in-laws who are trying to stop her from receiving her dead husband’s estate.

Fifth in the Henrietta and Inspector Howard Mystery Series, A Child Lost (She Writes Press, 2020) begins in 1935, with Henrietta’s younger sister, Elsie, falling in love with Gunther, a German refugee.

Alex has always wanted a real family. Her father commits suicide, her mother has never noticed where she is, and at 15, she falls in love with a 27-year-old photographer. When she comes of age, she’s about to marry him, but someone else has turned her head, Ted Neal, a charismatic activist on his way to Mississippi for 1964’s Freedom Summer.

Imagine a Jewish village hidden in the forests of Poland that somehow escapes the Holocaust. Eighty years later, a young woman divorces her husband and runs into the surrounding forest. The town sends a young man to find her. He’s an orphan and expendable because he’s not that good a marriage prospect, but suddenly he finds himself in modern-day Poland.

Cora, who works at Harlem’s 135th Street library, reads a powerful poem by the young Langston Hughes, who begins to offer advice about her own writing. She’s awakened to thoughts about society and the role of women, prejudice, and the plight of Black women.

It’s December 1667 and London is still recovering both from the Plague and the Great Fire. Lucy Campion visits retired judge Master Hargrave and discovers that he’s been attacked and robbed in his home.

The Mosbys leave their life in Sedalia within hours after six-year-old Percy loudly notes that his father’s boss has made a mistake in calculating what is owed. Percy’s parents know what would happen if they stayed.

n Karen Odden’s latest mystery it’s 1878 in London, and Scotland Yard inspector Michael Corravan, a former thief and bare-knuckles boxer, is battling demons, including his urge to drown his troubles in drink.

At the end of a long, sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince.

It’s 1968 and 13-year-old Zach is about to become a bar mitzvah. That’s when his sister changes his life by switching his radio from AM to FM.

Author and scholar David Wright Faladé tells the story of Richard Etheridge, who towards the end of the Civil War joined America’s first and only “African Brigade.”

The story of Ben and Nina, two people who meet at a college outside of Atlanta.

Philadelphia, June 1780. George Washington's two least likely spies return, masquerading as husband and wife as they search for traitors in Philadelphia. Months have passed since young widow Becca Parcell and former printer Daniel Alloway foiled a plot that threatened the new nation.

Sharon Solwitz's novel, Once, in Lourdes, is the story of four close friends in the fictional town of Lourdes, Michigan, who decide, during the summer before their senior year of high school, to make a suicide pact.

In 1850, at age six, Dahlia Holt is taken from the only home she knows and moved into the big house to serve her two older sisters. They share a father, who owns the house and its slaves. On her sixteenth birthday, Dahlia gets to dress up in one of the sister’s discarded dresses for a trip to the city. There, she gets separated from her family, and meets a young Englishman who thinks she’s white.