Frances "Frankie" Howard, countess of Essex, is young, beautiful, rich, and trapped in a miserable marriage. Anne Turner is luckier; her physician husband offers security and affection, and he values Anne's happiness enough to encourage her affair with a young lover. Anne holds a patent for yellow starch and a talent for fashion, providing entrée into Frankie's circle. Inclination and need meld into friendship. Anne's husband dies; as a widow the monetary benefits of her association with Frankie keep Anne and her six children afloat. Frankie craves emotional support and needs the temperance of Anne's good sense. Then, when the impetuous countess falls for the king's favorite, she seeks to be rid of all obstacles to their union, thus proving herself to be a dangerous friend. Jago presents a realistic and absorbing tale based on historical events, convincingly portraying the Jacobean period and personal relationships during that time between husband and wife, lovers, and female friends. Her characterization is rock-solid, and Anne's voice resonates in this drama about how life choices, what is permissible and what isn't, especially for women, form a slippery slope that can end at the gallows.

The brilliant adult fiction debut from historian and YA author Jago (The Northern Lights) fictionalizes a 17th-century London murder. Anne Turner, a skilled herbalist with a gift for fashion, leads a comfortable middle-class life with her physician husband and six children. Frances "Frankie" Devereux, a member of the powerful Howard family, is married to the physically abusive Earl of Essex. When the two women meet in 1609, they feel a "profound sense of recognition" despite their differences in age, situation, and class. The following year, Anne's husband's death leaves her and the children impoverished, while Frankie becomes infatuated with Robert Carr, King James's favorite courtier. As Carr falls in love with Frankie, his doting friend Thomas Overbury, a bitter misogynist who loathes the Howards, grows jealous. Frankie's family decides to arrange the annulment of her marriage to Essex, but salacious rumors spread by Overbury sabotage her reputation and their plan. Swayed by Frankie's misery and reliant on her financial assistance, Anne accedes to her friend's conviction that Overbury must die. "If I were a man, I could end this with a duel," Frankie says as the two decide to poison him. Jago's striking depictions of bearbaiting and court mourning, wedding breakfasts and adulterous trysts capture both the brutality and the refinement of Jacobean London. Anne's shrewd narration grounds the novel's explosive drama even as she slides toward mortal danger one apparently logical choice at a time. It adds up to a remarkable exploration of the power, limits, and price of women's friendship. This is a sparkling achievement. (Nov.)

To find and follow her next mission in Brackston's City of Time and Magic, fourth in the time-traveling "Found Things" series, Xanthe must choose between the songs sung to her by a mourning brooch, a writing slope, and gem-encrusted hatpin; she also hunts for the missing Liam and seeks to block the Visionary Society from using the Spinners maliciously (50,000-copy first printing). In A Man of Honor, prequel to the 1979 megahit A Woman of Substance, Bradford tells the story of Blackie O'Neill, who travels from County Kerry to England as a young orphan and begins his rise in the world while meeting Substance's Emma Harte, still a kitchen maid (75,000-copy first printing). Jago follows up The Northern Lights, winner of the National Biography Prize, with the 17th-century-set debut novel A Net for Small Fishes, drawing on real-life events: when Frances Howard, the miserable wife of the Earl of Essex, meets the widowed Anne Turner, they form a friendship that leads to something radical (35,000-copy first printing). Driven to act after Pearl Harbor, new Steel heroine Audrey Parker and friend Lizzie join the Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron, Flying Angels who regularly wing their way into enemy territory to rescue wounded soldiers from the battlefield. Harriet Szász once appeared in vaudeville with sister Josie as The Sisters Sweet, posing as conjoined twins at their parents' behest, but when Josie betrays the scam and runs off to Hollywood, Harriet must decide what to do with her life. In-house love for Weiss's debut.

Jago's novel retrieves two women "from the limbo of misogynist stereotype": the Countess of Essex, Frances Howard, and commoner Anne Turner, both of whom were charged with fatally poisoning a courtier in the Overbury scandal, which rocked the court of King James I in early-17th-century England. The women have strong wills and good looks in common. They are also both dangerously Catholic during a Protestant monarchy. But their friendship is never quite equal as seen through Anne's eyes. Married to the duke's personal physician, she holds a patent for the yellow starch used in ruffs and dabbles in designing dresses for high-born ladies to make ends meet. Frances is a member of the politically influential Howard family (as were two wives of Henry VIII, as Wolf Hall fans may remember). In 1609, Anne has been hired to help the 18-year-old countess dress to win over her impotent 17-year-old husband, the Earl of Essex, who has been whipping Frances raw during their loveless three-year marriage. (Almost as an aside, 34-year-old Anne brags that her own impotent husband condones her long affair with the father of her three youngest children.) As narrator, Anne at first seems more observer than participant, an outsider sharing her insights on the nobility, particularly Frances--a great beauty with a defiant streak--but it becomes clear that Anne recognizes that helping Frances reach her magnetic potential at court may raise her own station. As Essex's vicious attacks escalate, Frances begins an affair with Sir Robert Carr, King James' favorite, and the newly widowed and increasingly impoverished Anne becomes her sole confidante. Both idolizing and resenting the countess's self-centered privilege, Anne finds herself helping Frances acquire potions and illegal magic to control first Essex, then Carr's malevolent aide Thomas Overbury. Frances' motivations are clear: passion and revenge. But Anne's are a murkier mix of loyalty, desperation, and ambition. An empathetic--but not entirely sympathetic--portrait of women in the male-dominated society of post-Elizabethan England. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.