What I Read In February 2026

February is the cruelest month, I've decided. It's too short, the weather is foul, and this time around, it brought me some additional health challenges that interfered with day-to-day existence. With everything else taking me a bit longer than usual, it was my time for reading that suffered. So, only five books this month, without much variety.

An Infamous Army by Georgette Heyer

Heyer's Waterloo novel, famously so accurate that they used it at Sandhurst to teach military trainees about battles. Also so accurate that for me, someone who isn't that interest in the minute uniform differences between different regiments, the long military descriptions dragged quite a bit. However, I did love the glimpses we get of society life on the fringes of Wellington's campaign, and I liked Audley and Barbara as a couple. I was also full of admiration for the feat of historical fiction Heyer had pulled off in writing this book.

The Late Mrs. Willoughby and The Perils of Lady Catherine de Bourgh by Claudia Gray

I consumed both of these gentle Austen-inspired mysteries as audiobooks — a lovely recommendation from my Shedunnit colleague Leandra Griffith after I asked her for options that might suit my diminished powers of concentration. Each book has its own case, which is complemented by the longer character arc of the two "detectives", Mr Jonathan Darcy and Miss Juliet Tilney, both children of original Austen characters. I enjoyed Lady Catherine slightly more, just because it's always interesting to see how sleuths handle investigating attempted murder, rather than the death itself, but both were good.

Powder and Patch by Georgette Heyer

After completing the Alastair-Audley tetralogy, I jumped back to this Heyer from 1923. It's a Georgian makeover montage, with the main character — a country bumpkin named Philip Jettan — executing a full transformation into a society exquisite by the end of the book. I loved this story! It's not emotional complicated or especially deep, which suited me.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

This is the Shedunnit Book Club's chosen book for March, our first ever "Sherlock Holmes" month. Although I spend a huge amount of my time thinking and writing about crime fiction inspired by Conan Doyle, it's been several years since I actually read his work. And I was reminded all over again that there's a reason why his stories are adapted and reworked continually. They're really good. Revolutionary, I know. This collection has some of the all-time greats in it, like "A Scandal in Bohemia" and "The Red-Headed League", and some absolutely beautiful writing. Take this passage, for example, which is Holmes talking to Watson:

"If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable."

So often when I revisit a "classic", I find myself disappointed. Not so here!

That was my reading for February: five books, which wasn't bad considering how foggy I was. Here's to a better month in March.