Charles W. Bentley – författare

Charity Royall, raised out of a mountain settlement by the man who is now her guardian, spends one summer with a young architect from the city and understands, before he does, exactly how it will end. Wharton called it Hot Ethan, wrote it during the war in France, and never flinched: the mountain, the doctor's house and the marriage that closes the book are the coldest ending she wrote.

Exmoor in the 1680s: the Doones, a clan of outlawed gentry, ride down from their valley to rob and murder as they please, and a yeoman's son who saw them kill his father falls in love with the girl they are raising as their own. Blackmore grew fruit in Teddington and insisted the market garden mattered more than the writing; this 1869 romance made Exmoor a place people visit, and John Ridd's voice - slow, literal, immovable - carries all thirteen hundred pages.

A man is found dying in a Washington law office, a red seal in his hand and the wrong people with alibis. Natalie Sumner Lincoln was a capital insider, daughter of a Washington family, and set her mysteries where she lived - among senators, embassy parties and the clerks who know everything.