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.

The one with the house is "Witch." And I adore Mary Stewart as well. Jane Aiken Hodge is another on in their rank for me. I re-read a Hodge after several years and suddenly understood some of the subplots and dialogue a lot better than I did when I was a naive teenager.

The Crying Child? Yes. I'd been reading gothic and romantic suspense for a while and was feeling pretty jaded, but The Crying Child had me turning on all the lights and pulling up the couch blanket to cover all of me, and clutching my bear closer so I could read further.

That was a spooky one. They made a movie (for TV?) of Ammie Come Home (with Barbara Stanwyck!) but deviated a lot from the book.

One year, a courtesy uncle was staying with my mother and wanted to buy something for my sister; I recommended Shattered Silk. He was dubious, but went along ... sometime around dinnertime on Christmas he said I was right - my sister was halfway through the book.

I once went to a reading the author did for The Last Camel Died at Noon - she came rushing in dressed more or less like a Victorian lady archaeologist would have been - long skirt, white shirt and a pith helmet with a scarf/veil trailing from it.

IHave now read Witch and The Crying Child. Good stuff! The kindle suggested the Jacqueline Kirby series (under Elizabeth Peters) and I'm enjoying them muchly so far. She's a mysterious librarian who solves murders, apparently.