I'm Looking Forward to Reading...

Good-lookin' books coming out in the next few months! I'm especially looking forward to--
*Cara Black, Murder in the Rue de Paradis (March): The eighth in Black's sassy, smart Aimee Leduc series, set in Paris. This series keeps getting better and better, and I'm excited to read the next installment.

*Donna Leon, The Girl of His Dreams (May): The latest Commissario Brunetti mystery, set in Venice. You'd think Leon would start running out of ideas by now, but she hasn't. The last one, Suffer the Little Children, was the best yet, and the new one promises to be terrific too.

*Sandra Gulland, Mistress of the Sun (June): I usually shy away from the royal-mistress novels (there are SO MANY of them and, well, some are rather silly) but this one is about Louise de la Valliere, mistress of Louis XIV, and that's worth checking out. Gulland wrote a trilogy about Josephine Bonaparte which I haven't read, but I may check those out too if I like Mistress of the Sun.

*Karen Essex, Stealing Athena (June): I am ridiculously excited about this one. What a great concept: a parallel story of Aspasia, mistress of Athenian general and supervisor of the Akropolis building program, Perikles, and of Mary Nisbet, wife of the now-infamous Lord Elgin who orchestrated the removal of many of the Parthenon sculptures to Britain. I haven't read Essex's Kleopatra books but I enjoyed her Leonardo's Swans. Her website already has up a bibliography for Stealing Athena (now there's an author after my own heart--three cheers for bibliographies) and it's got the things it should for a book revolving around the Parthenon sculptures.

And on the van Gogh front...
Ann Galbally, A Remarkable Friendship: Vincent van Gogh and John Peter Russell (June): This is the first book to focus exclusively on the friendship between these two artists and so promises to be informative.