The most recommended books about the upper class

This is one of a series of Spenser novels. It is set in modern-day Boston, and this novel follows the protagonist, Spenser, as he tries to find out who shot his associate Hawk. Parker takes the reader into a murky netherworld where all is grey, even justice.

The novel's pacing is slick, the characterization believable, and the dialog takes one back to Raymond Chandler. I read it in two sittings. 

This beachside romance features a female entrepreneur who started her business at a young age, which I related to immediately, having started self-publishing books as a freshman in college.

She’s a go-getter with a knack for business and fights for her passions despite the people in her life telling her she shouldn’t. I adored the enemies-to-lovers romance between Cooper and Mac, as well as the message that not everyone is what they initially seem. 

Can I make this list and not include a golden-age detective story set in a country house at Christmas? This one has all the ingredients required for an afternoon by the fire, looking out at the wintry weather—a locked room, an appealing detective, and a cast of people compelled, rather unwisely, to spend Christmas in each other’s company. "If you ask me, there very likely wouldn’t have been a murder at all if it hadn’t been for him getting ideas about peace and goodwill, and assembling all these highly uncongenial people under the same roof at the same time.” 

I love historical mysteries, and the Cleopatra Fox Mysteries series by C.J. Archer was a wonderful find for me this year.

Cleo is the “poor relation” of a wealthy London family who are owners of a swanky hotel. After her grandmother’s death, she goes to live in the Mayfair Hotel with them and meets all kinds of fascinating people. It’s December 1899, and a huge New Year’s Eve ball will be held at the hotel.

When a guest is poisoned on Christmas Eve, the hotel’s reputation and financial stability are in danger. That’s where Cleo comes in. She won’t be satisfied until she learns the truth. I found this series in June, and my husband and I have already read the first six. Book 7 is on pre-order.

I read An Inconvenient Wife years ago and it has always stuck with me.

As I dove into my research for my book, I reread this book and was just as impressed with it as I was the first time.

Lucy is the epitome of the upper-class New York Victorian woman but only if she bends to the will of her husband and physicians. It is a classic tale of yet another 19th-century woman forced into an asylum.

Lucy is subjected not only to medications but treatment for her “hysteria” which was the common diagnosis for most women in the asylum at the time. It was brilliantly researched and written!

I absolutely loved this book because it really followed the lives of many American families and how they became millionaires.

It gave simple and yet effective strategies to become wealthy. It dispelled many rumors as well. I loved the fact that the book talked about how most, if not all, families valued education for their children. The families, no matter what, made sure their children had education paid for so their children could focus on education.

If you’ve ever had a significantly eccentric or doctrinaire friend, you know that there are risks and rewards. I love the way this novel acknowledges the jagged edges of certain friendships, which can be deep friendships all the same.

The novel begins at Barnard College when George, who grew up poor in upstate New York, meets Ann, her righteous and intense roommate. Ann is doing her best to renounce her privileged background, and although George finds her flagrant acts of idealism strange and embarrassing at first, the two women develop a strong bond.

Told in first-person, we get George’s very unfiltered take on Ann: all the ugly thoughts and frustrations, as well as her deep admiration. That George is not always a cheerleader for Ann is not disloyalty; it’s a normal response to a very challenging person, and that’s refreshing.

Pamela Kelley makes historical fiction come to life on the page in this rags-to-riches story that empowers women during an unheard-of time, as Eliza Chapman, a lady’s maid, learns her father is actually one of the richest men in NYC, and this changes her whole world.

This book was like the tensest and most darkly compelling roller coaster ride that I could not get off until the devastating final page.

Emma Cline is so good at delineating the messy inner lives of young women. In this book, she charts with almost real-time microscopic detail the weeklong meltdown of one pretty, very lost young woman, Alexa, as she perpetrates fraud after fraud on members of a uberwealthy summer town in the Hamptons, as well as their staffers and servants.

I was agog at Alexa’s brazenness, horrified and touched by her obvious unwellness and chilled by her ever-increasing detachment from reality. I feared on every page that her jig would soon be up and beheld the conclusion, at a glittering outdoor party, the way one might stare dumbly at a slow-motion train wreck.

An incredible literary feat of holding the reader in absolute thrall to the narrative from… show more.

This book is on my list because it combines classic Regency backdrops—picnics, estates, rambles by the river, and delicious tea trays—with a bit of intrigue that keeps the reader turning the page. Nathaniel, Duke of Rothaven, is hiding a dark secret, and where there’s one dark secret, there are likely a few more.

It’s all well and good until a woman comes along who tempts him to want a different life than the one he’s built to protect his brother and his family name. On the surface, this book is an excellent example of how to execute a story against a vivid Regency backdrop full of manners and social restriction, but it is also a look at critical human dilemmas that transcend the Regency, such as weighing personal happiness against the happiness of others.

This book demonstrates the nuances of the Regency in shaping the way one might have solved… show more.