Summer Reading

So despite a looming deadline on my first mystery, I find I need to take a break now and then for some fun summer reads. Here's what's on the pile and in the Kindle: Poetic Justice, by Alicia Rasley. I would love this book even if the image on the cover were not one of my all-time favorite paintings. It's a Regency romance that is smart, smart, smart. The story features a brainy, feisty heroine, and a dashing hero whose intelligence is as formidable as his fighting skills. At the center of the story is a collection of rare books that the lovers lust after nearly as much as they do each other. AND there are Shakespeare references. (Be still my heart.) Death at La Fenice, by Donna Leon. Friends who are rabid fans of her series featuring Venice police Commissario Guido Brunetti have been urging me to read Donna Leon for months. I have just begun this one, which opens with a dead conductor at the Venice opera house--apparently someone has put cyanide in his espresso. I'm already hooked and looking forward to finding out who had it in for the maestro. 11/22/63, by Stephen King. My husband bought me this book for Christmas, but I haven't dared crack it open--I knew once I started King's latest, I wouldn't be able to stop. What baby boomer could resist the premise? An English teacher (an English teacher hero!) in Maine discovers a time portal in an old diner, and goes on a quest to stop the Kennedy assassination. But when he runs into a strange loner named Lee Harvey Oswald, things really get dicey. Saving this one for when I finish the first draft of my manuscript; I won't have a book to deliver otherwise!