We list mainstream and small press titles set in the 1960s and earlier. Details are compiled by Sarah Johnson (US) and Sarah Cuthbertson (UK), and are based on publisher descriptions. This is a work in progress; as of August 2015, only a few publishers are represented, but happy browsing!
January 2016
Mark Alder, Son of the Morning, Pegasus (novel of the Hundred Years War, historical fantasy where angels and demons choose sides on the battlefield)
Martine Bailey, A Taste for Nightshade, St. Martin’s (novel of suspense, cooking, and revenge in early 19th-century England)
Melanie Benjamin, The Swans of Fifth Avenue, Delacorte (novel about Truman Capote’s scandalous, headline-making, and heart-wrenching friendship with Babe Paley and New York’s society “swans” of the 1950s)
Vanora Bennett, Midnight in St. Petersburg, St. Martin’s (one woman’s fight for survival and love in revolutionary Russia)
P. J. Brackston, The Case of the Fickle Mermaid, Pegasus (Gretel of fairy tale lore solves a mysterious case involving mermaids in 18th-c Bavaria; historical fantasy/mystery)
Taylor Brown, Fallen Land, St. Martin’s (debut novel about a couple fleeing pursuers during Sherman’s march through Georgia)
Bernard Cornwell, Warriors of the Storm, Harper (latest in Uhtred saga set in Anglo-Saxon England)
Phillip DePoy, A Prisoner in Malta, Minotaur (historical mystery involving Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe)
Suzannah Dunn, The Lady of Misrule, Pegasus (Lady Jane Grey in the Tower of London)
Sebastian Faulks, Where My Heart Used to Beat, Henry Holt (story of war, memory, and desire that sweeps through the 20th century)
Anne Girard, Platinum Doll, Mira (novel of Jean Harlow, star of Golden Age Hollywood)
Daniel Kalla, Nightfall over Shanghai, Forge (story of one Eurasian family in Shanghai during WWII, 3rd in series)
Morgan Llywelyn, Only the Stones Survive, Forge (story of the Túatha Dé Danann, the ancient gods and goddesses of Ireland)
Susan Meissner, Stars over Sunset Boulevard, NAL (an elegant hat once worn by movie heroine Scarlett O’Hara unlocks a hidden tale of love and loss; multi-period novel)
Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini, The Plague of Thieves Affair, Forge (a Carpenter and Quinncannon mystery in which the private investigators investigate a Sherlock Holmes impostor)
Oliver Pötzsch, The Castle of Kings, HMH (epic standalone novel of historical fiction tinged with mystery, set against the backdrop of Medieval Germany’s Peasant War)
Brandy Purdy, The Secrets of Lizzie Borden, Kensington (the real woman behind an unthinkable crime)
Jennifer Robson, Moonlight Over Paris, Morrow (story of an aristocratic lady in decadent 1920s Paris who’s drawn into the world of the Lost Generation)
Saskia Sarginson, The Other Me, Flatiron Books (from 1930s Germany to 1990s England, the revelation of a family secret and its repercussions)
February 2016
Frances Brody, Murder on a Summer’s Day, Minotaur (in 1920s England, amateur detective Kate Shackleton investigates a missing Maharajah on behalf of the India Office)
Alison Case, Nelly Dean, Pegasus (Wuthering Heights retold from the servant’s viewpoint)
Paul Goldberg, The Yid, Picador (tragicomic novel set in 1950s Moscow)
Tim Flannery, The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish, Minotaur (in 1932 Australia, an anthropologist discovers odd goings-on involving a ceremonial mask in a Sydney museum)
Amy Gottlieb, The Beautiful Possible, HarperPerennial (literary fiction; follows a postwar love triangle between an American rabbi, his wife, and a German-Jewish refugee)
Nicholas Guild, The Ironsmith, Forge (the behind-the-scenes political plots to kill Jesus of Nazareth, and one man’s attempt to save his life)
Ben Kane, Fields of Blood, Griffin (story of Hannibal’s campaign to defeat Rome)
Dewey Lambdin, A Hard, Cruel Shore, St. Martin’s (22nd Alan Lewrie naval adventure, set in 1809)
Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country, Harper (Lovecraftian horror and fantasy that makes visceral the terrors of life in Jim Crow America)
Charlie Smith, Ginny Gall, Harper (race and violence in the Jim Crow South)
Katy Simpson Smith, Free Men, Harper (in the 18th-c American South, a singular group of companions—an escaped slave, a white orphan, and a Creek Indian—who are being tracked down for murder)
F.R. Tallis, The Passenger, Pegasus (supernatural thriller set in the stormy North Atlantic in 1942)
Charles Todd, No Shred of Evidence, Morrow (in the 1920s, Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge investigates murder in Cornwall)
Tamera Valentine, What the Waves Know, Morrow (a young woman’s quest to find herself on an island off the Rhode Island coast, set in the ’60s and ’70s)
March 2016
Tessa Arlen, Death Sits Down to Dinner, Minotaur (Lady Montfort and her housekeeper become involved in a clandestine murder investigation in Edwardian London)
Rhys Bowen, Time of Fog and Fire, Minotaur (in early 20th-century San Francisco, Molly Murphy Sullivan suspects her policeman husband may have faked his own death)
Paula Brackston, Return of the Witch, St. Martin’s Press (sequel to The Witch’s Daughter, historical fantasy)
Conor Brady, The Eloquence of the Dead, Minotaur (murder and intrigue in Victorian Dublin)
Susan Higginbotham, Hanging Mary, Sourcebooks (the story of Mary Surratt and a scheme to save the dying Confederacy)
Weina Dai Randel, The Moon in the Palace, Sourcebooks (based on the life of the famed 7th-century Chinese Empress Wu)
Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie, America’s First Daughter, Morrow (the untold story of Thomas Jefferson’s eldest daughter, Martha “Patsy” Jefferson Randolph)
Ellen Feldman, Terrible Virtue, Harper (novel of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood)
M. R. Kasasian, Death Descends on Saturn Villa, Pegasus (#3 in the Gower Street Crime series set in Victorian London)
Victoria Kelly, Mrs. Houdini, Atria (the passionate marriage of Harry and Bess Houdini)
Linda Cohen Loigman, The Two-Family House, St. Martin’s (a multigenerational story and a family secret, set in 1950s Brooklyn)
Lucy Ribchester, The Hourglass Factory, Pegasus (in 1912 London, a Fleet Street reporter looks into the disappearance of a trapeze artist)
Lucinda Riley, The Storm Sister, Atria (in this 2nd in an epic series following The Seven Sisters, this volume intertwines the story of a modern Olympic hopeful with a century-old story of a female singer from Norway)
Ilka Tampke, Daughter of Albion, St. Martin’s (the collision of two worlds, set in Britain on the cusp of Roman invasion)
Sam Thomas, The Midwife and the Assassin, Minotaur (in 17th-century England, midwife Bridget Hodgson travels to London and is forced into service as a spy)
Heather Webb, editor, with Hazel Gaynor, Beatriz Williams, Jennifer Robson, Jessica Brockmole, Kate Kerrigan, Evangeline Holland, Lauren Willig, and Marci Jefferson, Fall of Poppies, Morrow (short stories of love, longing, and hope, set during the Great War)
Jack Whyte, The Guardian, Forge (two men who shaped the destiny of Scotland: William Wallace and Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick)
Jacqueline Winspear, Journey to Munich, Harper (working with the British Secret Service on an undercover mission, Maisie Dobbs is sent to Hitler’s Germany)
April 2016
Susanna Calkins, A Death along the River Fleet, Minotaur (in 17th-century London, Lucy Campion looks into the mysterious backstory of a girl in a blood-spattered nightdress)
Sally Christie, The Rivals of Versailles, Atria (the story of Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, the first bourgeois royal mistress in Versailles)
Weina Dai Randel, Empress of the Bright Moon, Sourcebooks (follows the continuing story, after The Moon in the Palace, of the famed 7th-century Chinese Empress Wu)
Maurice Druon, The King Without a Kingdom, Harper (final volume in Accursed Kings series set in medieval France)
David Dyer, The Midnight Watch: A Novel of the Titanic and the Californian, St. Martin’s (why didn’t the crew of the nearby SS Californian come to the rescue of the Titanic‘s passengers?)
Ashley Hay, The Railwayman’s Wife, Atria (after World War II in a small Australian coastal town, a widow, a poet, and a doctor search for lasting peace and fresh beginnings)
Lian Hearn, Emperor of the Eight Islands, FSG (first of a four-volume adventure in a mythical, medieval Japan)
Paulette Jiles, News of the World, Morrow (after the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people)
Jennifer Laam, The Tsarina’s Legacy, Griffin (dual-period novel involving Catherine the Great, and a lost heiress to the Romanov throne in the present day)
Laura Lebow, Sent to the Devil, Minotaur (in 1788 Vienna, librettist Lorenzo da Ponte looks into the murder of an old friend)
Sarah Maine, The House Between Tides, Atria (the heiress of a house in Scotland’s remote Outer Hebrides uncovers a dangerous century-old mystery)
Julie McElwain, A Murder in Time, Pegasus (an FBI agent pursued by a serial killer stumbles into the past – the year 1812 – to solve a case before it takes her life, 200 years before she was even born)
Diane McKinney-Whetstone, Lazaretto, Harper (a cast of 19th-century characters whose colorful lives intersect at the legendary Lazaretto—America’s first quarantine hospital)
James McManus, Midnight in Berlin, Thomas Dunne (a British military attache falls in love with a German Jewish woman as he plots to assassinate Hitler)
Ian McGuire, The North Water, Henry Holt (a 19th-c whaling ship sets sail for the Arctic with a killer aboard)
Jan Moran, The Winemakers, Griffin (in 1956, an heir to an American vineyard travels to her family’s ancestral home in Italy)
Kate Mosse, The Taxidermist’s Daughter, Morrow (Gothic historical thriller set in early 20th-c England)
Patrice Nganang, Mount Pleasant, FSG (transformation in colonial Africa, in the ’30s and today, about a woman taken from her family and brought as a gift to an exiled sultan)
Renee Patrick, Design for Dying, Forge (mystery set behind the scenes in Hollywood during its Golden Age)
Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Sarah Crichton/FSG (the sole surviving work of a female Dutch painter, over time)
S.D. Sykes, The Butcher Bird, Pegasus (crime novel set in the medieval English countryside)
David C. Taylor, Night Work, Forge (historical crime fiction set in NYC as Fidel Castro arrives in town)
Kathleen Tessaro, Rare Objects, Harper (in Depression-era Boston, a city divided by privilege and poverty, two unlikely friends are bound by a dangerous secret)
Nicola Upson, London Rain, Bourbon Street (mystery featuring Josephine Tey)
May 2016
Alison Anderson, The Summer Guest, Harper (interweaves past and present in a novel centering on a diary written by a young woman doctor who befriended Chekhov at the end of her life)
Sharyn McCrumb, Prayers the Devil Answers, Atria (Depression-era novel, set in rural Tennessee, about one of the most public executions in US history)
Arturo Perez-Reverte, [Untitled], Atria (the dangerous and passionate love affair between an accomplished tango dancer turned elegant thief and a beautiful, intelligent society woman in Europe and South America between the ’20s and the ’60s)