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.

Did Barbara Michaels write "A Child Is Crying" too? I loved that one.