Highlights from Random House's spring list, and more randomness

The blogosphere is the fastest means of information transmission around, I swear. My review of Sara Donati's Queen of Swords is posted on her blog, though it's not out yet in Booklist. It'll probably be out in the Sept. 15 or October 1 issue.

One of the nice ladies from Acquisitions brought a huge box from Random House to my office yesterday afternoon. Okay, so I'm weird, but I always look forward to this box arriving, because it has a couple dozen catalogs from all the RH imprints and other publishers for which they act as distributors. However, since I spent the afternoon figuring out whether a new e-journal package deal would save our library money, rather than drooling over forthcoming novels, I took the box home. Here are some highlights.

- Sheridan Hay's The Secret of Lost Things (Doubleday, March) - "a young Australian woman takes a job at a vast, chaotic emporium of used and rare books in NYC and finds herself caught up in the search for a lost Melville manuscript." Not historical, but could be fun.

- Michael Wallner's April in Paris (Doubleday/Talese, April) - written up as a suspenseful love story about a German soldier and a French Resistance fighter in occupied Paris. Part of the publisher's new series of international fiction, something I applaud. This one's from Germany.

- Alison Weir's Innocent Traitor, about Lady Jane Grey, will be out from Ballantine in February but everyone seems to know this already.

- Judith Merkle Riley's long-awaited The Water-Devil (Three Rivers, Jan) is the 3rd volume in her Margaret of Ashbury trilogy.

I haven't posted about most of these on the HNS forthcoming books page. I may do that this coming weekend.

This has nothing to do with historical fiction, but I want a copy of linguistics guru David Crystal's The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left, and not just because I enjoy the title.

Meanwhile, I'm about halfway done with Beatrice May's Sister to Jane, a very short Robert Hale novel about Lady Katherine Grey that I'd hoped to review here, but it's not very good and I probably won't finish it. It's a quick read, though. (Does that count as saying something nice?)