I read a lot of historical fiction, mostly mystery novels. Books from Anne Perry and Victoria Thompson fill my shelves. There’s a great little series of books by Mark Graham set in post-Civil War Philadelphia, about Wilton McCleary, a police detective and war veteren, as he works his way through several cases.

• The Killing Breed, based in the 1874 kidnapping of Charley Ross, a four-year-old boy from Germantown
• The Resurrectionist, in which the white detective McCleary falls for a black female medical student while investigating the disappearances of women of color
• The Black Maria, about shady happenings in Shantytown, just across from the Centennial Exhibition (a favorite subject of mine)

Graham’s writing and storytelling bring you back in time to the 1870s Philadelphia that was dirty, both geographically and politically. The sights and sounds the books give show incredible and thorough research into that time and place.

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