The Vicky Bliss series and the Jaqueline Kirby series by Elizabeth Peters. Both are fun.

I like Anne Perry's books, and/but in real life she was one of the girls in the movie Heavenly Creatures. [link]

The Dark Days Club by Alison Goodman is a Regency story about a young lady who finds out that she has the power to fight demons (sound familiar?). There's a sequel, The Dark Days Pact, with the promise of more to come.

Murder, Magic and What we Wore by Kelly Jones. A young lady finds herself penniless after her father's mysterious death. She finds she has the ability to sew glamours, and decides to become a spy. A very satisfying ending.

Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal is the first book in the Glamourist Histories. It's Jane Austen-y with magic; two sisters with glamour skills try to find suitable husbands. One sister is on the verge of making a disastrous match and the other tries to prevent it.

She also wrote decent mysteries--though more typical of the genre of "woman in peril solves mystery and finds love"--under the name Barbara Michaels. But I've always like her versions better than others.

A friend recently gave me a stack of the supernatural-tinged ones, and I've been happily reading through them. They're not quite gothic romance, but they're close enough, and well-written.

My favorite of Barbara Michaels' is "Witch."

I just read that last night! It was a lot of fun.

Ooh, I don't think I've read that one. My favorite is Shattered Silk.

I started Ammie Come Home at bedtime last night, and I know that Shattered Silk is the sequel to it. I've already read Stitch in Time , which is apparently the third book in that ... not quite trilogy, but narrative stream.

Hm, I know I read Ammie Come Home, but did I read Stitch in Time? I think so, but I'll have to look at a description...

I first discovered the writer as Barbara Michaels, and devoured the books as fast as I could find them. Which is the one where she buys a house in rural Virginia and discovers the neighbor boy has been torturing animals?

Something I loved about her books is the domestic detail, like the dinner party in Ammie Come Home, "I squashed my roll"--I still remember her description of forsythia in the garden as "like little suns"--or remodeling the Virginia house and the debate between spoiling the symmetry of the front facade vs. needing a screened porch for summer. It's those details that ground the character and the story in reality and take it a notch above many gothics, at least for me. Mary Stewart had the same talent in her books, of setting the reader in realistic details before everything began to slide sideways.