Charles Lenox is back in another of this extended series of gentle, Victorian era mysteries. Love in many forms turns up in unlikely places as the evil crimes are committed and solved. Finch uses this counterpoint thematically and it gives the book a benign lightness despite some grim moments.

George starts with Helen as a small girl and takes her all the way through the Trojan War, back to Sparta and beyond. The most compelling things about Helen of Troy, besides the abundance of detail of daily life and war in ancient times, are George’s character portrayals.

Imagine watching your loving, nearly perfect mother stand on the front stairs of your farmhouse, put the baby down behind her and stab a man to death and then act as if this brutal act had little to do with her? Fifty years later Laurel Nicolson sets out to find the real answer in a novel spanning London in the blitz and an idyllic childhood in the English countryside post WWII.

An historical romance set in early Rome and the Etruscans, this novel contrasts the frugal Romans with the sensual Etruscans while unfolding the complexities and crises of a marriage between a Roman girl and a nobleman of Veii.