Why am I passionate about this?
I love historical settings and detail – I love coming away from a novel feeling like I’ve also learned something about the world. But I also like lots and lots of plot and intensity. Historical fiction slash mystery novels hit the spot just right. Though my own work thus far is more on the historical fiction side, I do try to plot it like a mystery, with lots of questions, revelations, and discoveries to be made as you go along.
Emily's book list on historical fiction with mysteries
Why did Emily love this book?
I read this one in college, and it sparked my imagination for years and years. Set in 1890s New York, it combines the lowbrow pleasures of gory crime with lots of nifty historical settings and facts (the history of psychiatry! Early forensic science! Gilded Age politics!).
I read it on my bottom bunk in the dorms in about 8 hours, probably while I should have been studying. I’d love to recapture that intensity of pleasure in reading, but a job and two small children make it tricky.
7 authors picked The Alienist as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
The internationally bestselling historical thriller, now a major Netflix series starring Luke Evans, Dakota Fanning and Daniel Bruhl.
Some things never change.
New York City, 1896. Hypocrisy in high places is rife, police corruption commonplace, and a brutal killer is terrorising young male prostitutes.
Unfortunately for Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, the psychological profiling of murderers is a practice still in its infancy, struggling to make headway against the prejudices of those who prefer the mentally ill - and the 'alienists' who treat them - to be out of sight as well as out of mind.
But as the body count…