Recent Reads: The Abigail Adams Mysteries

I’ve had Barbara Hamilton (Hambly)’s Abigail Adams books on my TBR shelf for quite a while, based on my love for her Benjamin January books.

I didn’t like the Adams books as much as the January books, which kind of surprised me. It was partly, I recognize, the Puritanism in the books, which made me…impatient. I don’t have a lot of use for religious fundamentalists in real life, much less in my fiction, and the fact that Abigail Adams herself apparently struggled with her (literally) Puritanical faith did not help to endear her to me.

Anyway, I guess I got used to it, because it wasn’t as difficult to read the second two books as the first, but neither was I terribly sad there weren’t more in the series. I wish I had been, though, because she’s such a great writer. Like the January books, there’s a terrific sense of time and place built into the books, and the characterizations are wonderful. Overall, I can’t help thinking they’re worth a better response than I had to them, but that’s on me, not the books.

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