New Books In Historical Fiction

When we meet Maple Bishop in the first book in her series, Death in the Details, she is reeling from a series of life-changing circumstances. Rural Vermont in 1946 doesn’t have much use for a childless widow with limited means of support and even less interest in knitting, baking, and chitchat. Maple ruffles feathers, including those of Ginger Comstock, the leader of local female society in Elderberry, the very small town where Maple moved two years before with her doctor husband, Bill. That’s another strike against her, in fact: Elderberry is the kind of town that accepts newcomers slowly, if ever. It doesn’t help when Maple, who builds dollhouses to fill her empty days and decides to sell them to supplement her income, uncovers a murder. Even the local sheriff barely tolerates what he sees as her interference in an open-and-shut case. Fast forward a few months, and Maple’s situation has improved—a little. In Murder in Miniature (Crooked Lane Books, 2025), she’s still something of a social outcast, but her