Lots to Love in "Ladies in Hating"

 

Ladies in Hating

by Alexandra Vasti 

It is rare when the third book of a trilogy can be picked up cold and still be a delightful and engaging read. Of course it helps when the main characters here are peripherals in the other books and vice versa. Regardless, it's a quick, quality read that's vastly(!) entertaining.

 

This novel sparkles from the first word. Lady Georgiana, daughter of an earl, is a successful Gothic novelist...under a pseudonym, naturally. At present she is much beset by the realization that another author, using the pseudonym Lady Darling, is using similar situations and character names in their equally successful novels. Thus far readers have not complained, but Georgiana is certain that someone is spying on her writing, capitalizing on her success. And she must discover who it is. Because if she can’t, and if her writing career goes down the drain, then she and her mother, who left the family home to look after her, will have no income with which to feed and house themselves.

Cat Woolcott has a similar conundrum. She has just learned that the wealthy daughter of a house where her father used to be a butler is her chief rival in the matter of Gothic novel writing. Worse, Lady Georgiana accuses her, Cat, of stealing details and characters and even titles. If Cat's writing career goes down the drain, she will have no way to keep herself, her brother, and her older cousin Polly, who looks after them, from the poor house. She’s been working a day job all this time to keep them all fed and clothed while her brother studies law. But if she wants to get ahead of that despicable daughter of an earl, she will have to leave her day job at the pie shop to research a novel that Lady Georgiana cannot possibly know anything about. It’s a big risk and it’s all made worse by the fact that, under other circumstances, she would be more than happy to wangle a closer acquaintance with the delectable daughter of the big house.

When the two rival authors end up exploring the same moldering manor house, Gothic overtones balloon like a black cape against a full moon.Sapphic urges surge right along with them. There’s a nightgown in a moonlit library scene - a classic of the genre - and a secret garden, a scream in the night, a secret diary, and so much more. Even a cute dog with its own part in moving the plot along. 

Underpinning all the frivolity is a thoroughly convincing relationship-in-development that conveys the importance of deep honesty, owning one's mistakes, and mutual support through life's dangers and stressors. It's much more credible than a classic HEA where problems are expected to vanish the instant Love is mutually declared. It's easy to see why Alexandra Vasti is one of today's most popular Regency authors.

This is a fun, writerly, Regency romp that’s a send-up of the Gothic, equally as witty and ten times as naughty as Northanger Abbey.

 

#netgalley #Regency #romp #alias #gothic #ghost #ruinedmanor #secrets #love #lostlove #lesbian #family #foundfamily #macmillan #AlexandraVasti #romance #mustlovedogs #secretlovechild

 

 

When Deceit Becomes An Art Form

The Art of a Lie

by Laura Shepherd-Robinson 

A great many mystery novels start with a newly widowed person finding out the secrets of their deceased spouse. This one stands out, and not only because it is set in 1749. 

The money that could save Hannah Cole’s confectionery shop on Piccadilly is tied up in probate because the magistrate, Sir Henry Fielding, suspects that her dead husband came by his surprisingly large savings in some illegal way. With debts rising and every supplier determined to take advantage of a lone woman trying to run a business, it is very much in the widow’s interest to clear up the matter quickly. 

But Hannah has a secret to protect, especially from the handsome man who comes to her aid when she is at her most despairing. He finds her an Italian recipe for 'iced cream' that she can make with ingredients at hand. After some trial and error, Hannah's shop becomes a daily destination for the wealthy and noble citizens of London to try out the new delicacy. Her coffers are filling, her debt collectors learn patience, and she is flushed with success as much as from the attentions of this handsome, helpful gentleman.

But just as we've  becoming deeply engaged with the very sympathetic widow, there's a rather jarring switch of point of view, following which we learn that the helpful gentleman has his own secret, one equally perilous to his life as Hannah's is to hers. Yet he really would like to leave Hannah better off than when they met, and so he bends his skills to deflecting Sir Henry from seizing the money she should inherit. To do so, he must sniff out Fielding's secret weaknesses and exploit them.

Thus the dance of artful lies begins. Which of them will allow emotion to cloud their senses the most? Which will discover the other’s lies first? Will Sir Henry reach the truth about Hannah or her beau before he learns what the deceased was up to?

This is a novel thoroughly and believably embedded in 1749 London - in the accoutrements of daily living, such as carriages and urchins and lack of proper policing - and at the same time invoking the modern reader’s recognition of small-minded neighbours gossiping and the arrogant patriarchal attitudes of powerful men. Background characters and sidekicks abound, all easy to tell apart from each other where necessary .

One weakness is our helpful gentleman’s habit of spending pages regaling the reader with all his thoughts and intentions while not much action is happening. These we must take on faith as they do serve to deepen the character's background, and thus enhance his increasingly painful consciousness of having to to choose between his own best interests or Hannah's.

The stakes for both rise, the tension torques up, sometimes you root for one and sometimes the other. And soon you realize that every moment of respite, even of happiness, that our two protagonists snatch, together or separately, will have its full measure of payback. It's impossible to look away.

 

 Bonus content: a bit about iced cream as it was made and consumed in Georgian London

#Netgalley #SimonAndShuster #TheArtOfALie #Georgian #icecream #confectioner #historical #romance #fiction #historicalfiction #seduction #deceit #StJames #shopkeepers #London #murder #crime #historicalcrime #crimefiction #SirHenryFielding #widow #inheritance 

When the dress is made of money, folly's in the air

The Girl in the Green Dress

By Mariah Fredericks

It’s not often that a dead man opens the story that will be narrated by him as a young man. Common in memoir but less so in crime fiction, it’s redolent of the golden age of detective fiction, although set in 1920 New York City rather than an isolated English manor  house.

Our protagonist is Morris Markey, a striving reporter in a city famed for novelists, essayists, poets. All the famous people of the era get a mention in the opening chapter, none more than F. Scott Fitzgerald, larger and brighter than life, his meteoric rise just begun.

Following a disgruntling evening party where Fitzgerald is lauded and our protagonist is ignored, Markey spies the titular woman in the green dress going into a townhouse opposite his cramped basement flat with bon vivant womanizer Joseph Elwell. Come dawn, Elwell is dead inside his locked house and the girl is gone as if she never existed.

As the hunt for the woman in the green dress heats up, Mark spends more time with Zelda Fitzgerald, than her own husband does. This mercurial historical percentage is captured with delicate, nuanced admiration, not unmixed with cynicism. Scott and Zelda are a phenomenon, deliberately cultivating their image and fascinated by what is said and reported about themselves. Yet Zelda‘s keen observations help our reporter peer into the mysterious, to him, ways of women in that era, liberated on the surface although few control their own money and most are at the mercy of husbands who bought them for their pedigree or their looks. Markey makes his reputation as a reporter on the solution but he knows the story his paper printed isn't the whole truth. So he keeps digging.

One thing that jumped out at me, possibly because I’m a writer and possibly because I have long studied New York writer culture of the early 20th century, was the brief observation that Fitzgerald was using his wife’s words in his work. How much of the work is Zelda's rather than Scott's is dwelt upon, not being what this book is about. But what I’m taking away is the implication that Fitzgerald decided Zelda didn’t have the emotional  stability to turn the output of her erratic, brilliant mind into books, and therefore her words were fair game for him. Whether that’s his selfish justification for essentially mining that disturbed woman’s sparkling veneer for his best-selling books is still an open question to me. But it is at the core of that marriage, whether as cement or as an unbridgeable schism. 

 

And thus the Scott-Zelda relationship acts as both theme and spotlight against which the other marriages in the book, the excesses and spectacular flame-outs of the wild post-WW1 era itself, are set. Zelda's emotional fragility and Scott's alternating care for her with going off the rails himself reflect the instability and psychological damage that many veterans of the trenches, now trying to establish their post-war lives, carry with them.

Markey was of course a real newspaper, man, who did die at his home desk approximately as described in the opening chapter. While many of the characters are drawn from life of the era, and Elwell did in fact die under mysterious circumstances, all the rest of this Markey's fictional investigation is careful accretion, substitution, and juxtaposition of people and events that were in fact scattered over New York City and the surrounding states over several months.

All in all, this is a fascinating murder mystery, wrapped up in the wild mess of NYC’s showbiz and gambling and politics as covered by reporters who were often little better than modern paparazzi, chasing celebrities around the city and the clock for scandals to feed their fluctuating paychecks.

Competently written, elegantly character-sketched, this is a novel to pair with a glass of bubbly and a plate of canapés while big band razamatazz plays in the background.

Thanks, Netgalley and Macmillan, for the review copy.

 

Why is the world eternally fascinated with Zelda? 

By Studio photographer - F. Scott Fitzgerald Archives, Public Domain, 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93375600

 

 

By Zelda Fitzgerald - Google Images, Public Domain,

 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75476145

 

#Netgalley #Macmillan #MariahFredericks #RoaringTwenties #JosephElwell #murder #shooting #unsolved #fiction #reporter #politics #riches #socialites #writers #WW1 #PTSD #spying #ZeldaFitzgerald #FScottFitzgerald #MorrisMarkey