The Silent Land

June 1, 2016
When a woman's body is found in the most expensive suite at Whitebridge's ritzy Royal Victoria Hotel, the case falls to DCI Monika Paniatowski and her team. There's no identification on the woman or in her room, but the hotel manager says she registered as Mary Edwards and paid cash up front. This slightly unusual fact, combined with the discovery that the clothes in her closet were two distinctly different typessome cheap, some very expensiveleads Monika to conclude that the woman wanted to disguise herself and perhaps hide the real reason she was in Whitebridge. Eventually, Monika's sidekick, Jack Crane, digs out the clue that finally unlocks the puzzle when he discovers that the victim had visited the Whitebridge library to research a decades-old murder case. As the clues finally start to make sense, a tragic story is revealed, and the victim is finally avenged in a most unexpected way. A gripping plot, twists aplenty, good pacing, and the tough yet vulnerable Monika make this an engrossing read in Spencer's British procedural series set in the 1970s.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2016
Departing from her usual British police procedurals, Spencer offers up a sweeping historical saga set in early twentieth-century Russia and featuring a woman, Anna Mayakovsky, who rose from her poverty-stricken peasant background to become a Russian princess and a Bolshevik revolutionary. Told from Anna's perspective as an old woman living in London, the story begins with Anna's difficult early life tilling the land on the Russian steppes. It then moves to the day she was taken into the house of the wealthy landowner who, unbeknownst to Anna, was her natural father. So began the agony for Anna of being torn between a life of luxury and her peasant roots. Anna's story then moves to her first lovea man who will later become a fiery revolutionaryand her marriage to Prince Mayakovsky, a man who harbors a dangerous secret. Anna's conversion from society princess to Russian revolutionary, allusions to an intriguing life after the Russian Revolution, and her struggles to remain independent in her old age add up to a mesmerizing page-turner that will appeal to fans of historical sagas.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)