Wishing for Wednesday: More Irresistible Books Added to my Wish List

Can't-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme, hosted by Tressa at Wishful Endings to spotlight and discuss the books we're excited about that we have yet to read. Generally they're books that have yet to be released. (Based on Waiting on Wednesday, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine.)

A Mortal Likeness by Laura Joh Rowland
Release Date: January 9, 2018 by Crooked Lane Books

A photographer in Whitechapel, London, Sarah Bain is also a private detective—skilled at capturing others’ dark secrets, and expert at keeping her own. When a wealthy banker, Sir Gerald Mariner, posts a handsome reward for finding his missing infant, all of London joins in, hoping to win that money for themselves. Usually discouraged by a saturated market, Sarah is instead curiously allured as she realizes the case hits much closer to home than she first thought.

As she dives in, she discovers a photograph of baby Robin Mariner and his mother. But it eerily resembles the post-mortem photographs Sarah, herself, takes of deceased children posed to look as if they were alive. Now it’s unclear whether the kidnapping is a cover-up to hide the reality of his disappearance, or if it’s truly a cry for help.

The clock is ticking and Sarah must uncover the truth before her past catches up to her in A Mortal Likeness, the gripping follow-up to bestselling author Laura Joh Rowland’s The Ripper’s Shadow. [Goodreads Summary]

Why I want to read this: A female private detective in the Victorian age isn't very common. Seeing this upcoming release, I am curious about the series itself and hope to read both the first in the series and this second one to come.

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Peculiar Ground by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Release Date: January 9, 2018 by Harper Collins

The Costa Award-winning author of The Pike makes her literary fiction debut with an extraordinary historical novel in the spirit of Wolf Hall and Atonement—a great English country house novel, spanning three centuries, that explores surprisingly timely themes of immigration and exclusion.

It is the seventeenth century and a wall is being raised around Wychwood, transforming the great house and its park into a private realm of ornamental lakes, grandiose gardens, and majestic avenues designed by Mr. Norris, a visionary landscaper. In this enclosed world everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war. Dissenters shelter in the woods, lovers rendezvous in secret enclaves, and outsiders—migrants fleeing the plague—find no mercy.
Three centuries later, far away in Berlin, another wall is raised, while at Wychwood, an erotic entanglement over one sticky, languorous weekend in 1961 is overshadowed by news of historic change. Young Nell, whose father manages the estate, grows up amid dramatic upheavals as the great house is invaded: a pop festival by the lake, a television crew in the dining room, a Great Storm brewing. In 1989, as the Cold War peters out, a threat from a different kind of conflict reaches Wychwood’s walls.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett conjures an intricately structured, captivating story that explores the lives of game keepers and witches, agitators and aristocrats; the exuberance of young love and the pathos of aging; and the way those who try to wall others out risk finding themselves walled in. With poignancy and grace, she illuminates a place where past and present are inextricably linked by stories, legends, and history—and by one patch of peculiar ground. [Goodreads Summary]

Why I want to read this: I love a book where the setting is just as much a character as the characters themselves--especially when so richly drawn. I am dying to find out more about Wychwood. I want to visit there myself.

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Promise Not to Tell by Jayne Ann Krentz
Release Date: January 2, 2018 by Berkley

A broken promise reveals a terrifying legacy in this electrifying novel from the New York Times bestselling author of When All the Girls Have Gone.

Seattle gallery owner Virginia Troy has spent years battling the demons that stem from her childhood time in a cult and the night a fire burned through the compound killing her mother. And now one of her artists has taken her own life, but not before sending Virginia a last picture...a painting that makes Virginia doubt everything about the so-called suicide--and her own past...

Like Virginia, PI Cabot Sutter was one of the children in the cult who survived that fire--and only he can help her now. As they struggle to unravel the clues in the picture, it becomes clear that someone thinks Virginia knows more than she does and that she must be stopped. Thrown into an inferno of desire and deception, Virginia and Cabot draw ever closer to the mystery of their shared memories--and the shocking fate of the one man who still wields the power to destroy everything they hold dear. [Goodreads Summary]

Why I want to read this: A cult-ish past . . . I can't resist that. This is one I am really looking forward to!

Do any of these sound like something you would like to read too?

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