Let the beach sands of time creep into the cracks and binding of your summertime book fare this year with — among some choice present-day mystery/thrillers (Steve Martini, Jeffery Deaver), sci-fi/fantasy titles (Laurell K. Hamilton, Taylor Anderson, Sara Douglass), and romance adventures (Shannon McKenna, Shana Abe) — several escapist titles that let you seek novelty and diversion in the past.
Tracing an issue in the deaf community that persists even today, Victoria Thompson's Murder on Lexington Avenue (Gaslight Series #12) is another entry in a series of mysteries set among the upper classes in turn-of-the-20th-century New York City. Murder on Lexington Avenue sees Det. Sgt. Frank Malloy investigating the murder of Nehemiah Wooten, who was bludgeoned with a loving cup Wooten won for sculling at Harvard more than 30 years earlier. When Wooten's seemingly uncaring widow goes into labor Malloy, along with midwife Sarah Brandt, gains investigative access. They discover that nobody knew that Valora Wooten was pregnant — perhaps because the child is not her husband's! Wooten's views on eugenics — he was a follower of Alexander Graham Bell's advocacy of compulsory sterilization laws — alienated him from his wife after the birth of their deaf daughter Electra, who went on to lip read but had secretly been learning American Sign Language from a teacher from a rival school, who was the object of her affections and the source of detestation for her disapproving father. Meanwhile, the plot thickens, the web entangles, and the whodunit chases the pages, but Malloy is hot on the proverbial trail as your sunburn stings and deepens...
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