Head-spinning historical fiction out this month: The Art Of A Lie by Laura Shepherd-Robinson, Lion Hearts by Dan Jones, Love, Sex & Frankenstein by Caroline Lea

Bluffs, double bluffs, twists, turns and emotional upheaval are the disorder of the day in Shepherd-Robinson’s deftly plotted fourth novel.

Set in the mid-18th century in an upmarket, but financially precarious, confectionery shop in fashionable Piccadilly, it unspools the entwined stories of recently widowed sweet-maker Hannah Cole, who’s nursing a dark secret, and the dashing, moneyed gentleman William Devereux, who’s not all he seems.

The truth is revealed in tantalising snippets as the brilliantly drawn main characters recount their version of events, which include a brutal murder, an inherited fortune in jeopardy, the investigation of magistrate, Henry Fielding, who’s on the case of the killer, and the introduction of the sensation of the season – ‘iced cream’.

This deliciously devious tale of skulduggery, questionable motives and untrustworthy appearances will keep you gripped.

It’s 1350 and the ten comrades in arms from Jones’s bold, bloody Essex Dogs and the Wolves of Winter have been winnowed down to a surviving few.

Battle scarred, older but not necessarily wiser, they’re attempting to find peace, especially leader Loveday, who once made his living ‘with his fists, his wits and his short sword’ and who’s now attempting to keep a failing Winchelsea tavern afloat.

But with the Castilians on the horizon, a population devastated by the Black Death and old debts to pay, it’s not long before the band are reunited and once again pressed into action.

Lion Hearts is a fitting conclusion to this trilogy; a salty, action-packed saga that sees old friends head into the fray.

Thrumming with emotion, Lea’s retelling of Mary Shelley’s dark night of the soul in the summer of 1816 is brimful of love, lust, hate and a strange kind of happiness as she comes up with the idea for her gothic classic Frankenstein.

Sequestered in Villa Diodati, by Lake Geneva, the weather is foreboding, the company complicated – Mary is there with her baby son Willmouse, her lover, the feckless poet Shelley, her troubled stepsister Claire Clairmont, the quietly observant Dr Polidori and Lord Byron. In the middle of the mayhem is Mary, who’s finding it hard to rein in her feelings, which are as tumultuous as the weather outside.