The Sea Captain’s Wife

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

Based on a true story of terror, resilience, and the unstoppable majesty of the world’s most tumultuous seas.

From the first word, we can tell we are in the hands of a master storyteller. The sea is fully alive, the wind too. The inescapable strain of keeping a wind-driven clipper afloat amid seas as tall as its masthead is thundering through every line. And that’s before we get to the dangers faced by the captain‘s pregnant young wife, nursing her deathly ill husband and, hour by desperate hour, coping alone with a ship-killing storm, a dangerously incompetent first mate, and a ship full of men who have never in their lives at sea taken an order from a woman.

This is, however, based on a true story, a real woman, and thus the next few chapters turn to her antecedents on land, and her husband’s, in a coastal region famed for its sailing families and its crucial place in the world trading routes. The family history up to the 1830s is detailed but the writing never lets it lag. Long dead townsfolk, captains of industry, farmers, shipwrights flicker to life, and then recede as quickly. Even the geography gets its due in elegant prose that is a delight to read. All this before the main action gets underway, and including an ominous historical note that sea captain’s wives were alarmingly over-represented among the women confined to the Maine Insane Asylum and other institutions. For saying no, for not bearing children, for not keeping the house up to the husband or in-laws standards, for getting ill. For any reason, and for none.

Another historical foreshadowing is the mention of an enduring vampire panic in rural New England, believed responsible for the spreading paleness and wasting common to tuberculosis. Apparently it began in 1782 and lasted for a century. [No word here whether anyone was staked on account of the mistaken belief but possibly that topic has been covered by other authors.] But the very real damage wrought by tuberculosis overshadows any monster myth. At the start of the century nearly 15% of all the people who had ever lived in the United States in Europe had been killed by tuberculosis. By the end of the century, 80% of the US population would be infected with a bacteria that had an 80% mortality rate. 

 

Small wonder, then that Marianne‘s mother wanted her children educated enough to escape the over-crowded seaport slums before they too were consumed by tuberculosis. Despite working six days a week to sustain her brood in the frequent absence of their father, she took them all to church each Sunday morning so they might learn to read, write, and do basic math at the Sunday School. Sending pretty Marianne, then under 16, into marriage with a man a decade older, of seemingly prosperous family and excellent prospects, could be the whole family's salvation. 

 

None knew that Marianne's brave young sea captain already held the spores of his own, and his family's, devastation. 

Marianne had a quick intelligence that made good use of her Sunday School education. By the end of her first voyage, she was competent at both celestial navigation and, by poring over medical tomes during her many lonely hours, at nursing injured and ill sailors. Her second long voyage tested everything she knew. Her husband, already suffering from a cough and migraines, had to confine his first mate to the brig for sleeping on watch. The second mate could neither read nor write and thus is unable to navigate the ship safely through the turbulent waters around the tip of South America. The captain, ill as he was, must stand watch day and night to keep the ship on course through sleet and stormy seas that have already sent many a clipper ship to the bottom of Drake’s Passage.

When her husband collapses on deck, semi-conscious and feverish, it is up to Marianne to keep the ship together. 

 

If you have seen the snowy, gale-tossed passage of those waters in the movie of Master and Commander, when everyone was freezing and the ship was groaning over every wave as if it would disintegrate beneath their feet, you will have an idea what Marianne endured. Not yet twenty, and pregnant for the first time, she alone was responsible for the ship, crew, and the cargo that is supposed to set her little family up in financial comfort for life. She'd spend the next 18 days standing watch, navigating, and nursing her husband while the wind dragged the ship one way and the heavy currents around the Cape pulled it in the other direction.

 

The suspense at this point in the book is intense. The wind and waves are merciless. The clipper passes another ship already lying 'hull-to' and hoping merely to survive, and are unable to close the distance to render aid. They're swept onward, possibly to their own doom. 

I'd love to tell you how the voyage ends, whether there is an 'after' of prosperity for Marianne and her unborn babe, but you'll have to read the book for that. 

 

I'll tell you this much, though: the brutal reality of women's lives in the mid-nineteenth century, when marriage meant putting yourself and your financial security completely into the power of a man who might gamble it away, squander it on mistresses, and throw you into an asylum if you protested, will make you first terrified and then furious. There is nothing in the aftermath of Marianne's famous voyage, nor in her enduring reputation for courage and seamanship, that can disguise how destructive her marriage to that particular captain was for her and her whole family. 

Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys nautical history, economic history, American history, women's history, and true stories of danger and inspiration.

 

#ThanksNetgalley #Netgalley #history #USA #Boston #tuberculosis #seacaptain #SeaCaptainsWife #clippership #steamship #CapeHorn #DrakesPassage #Antarctica #TeaTrade #sailing #TilarJMazzeo #StMartinsPress #bookreview #amreading #booksta #bookstagram #nonfiction #historical #WomenAtSea 

Part-time Girl, full time page-turning!

 Part-time Girl 

by Adriaan Brae

New from Renaissance Press 

What if being gender fluid wasn’t just a feeling? What if your whole body changed day by day? That’s the central question in this compelling young adult novel by this Calgary writing team, newly out from Renaissance Press.

Mike has been changing genders, full body, for years. It wasn’t much of a problem when he was a kid - lots of kids look fairly androgynous - but come adolescence, and especially gym class, things get a lot more complicated. We join him on one of those days.

Adding to the complexity is that this book extends Alberta‘s, and the USA’s, anti-trans panic and legislative bias to the point where it is not safe for his entire family if he's caught out in public while he’s in girl form. His parents have already lost their jobs and fled one home in the States because of his changes. He doesn’t want that to happen again. But increasingly his feminine alter is demanding her own clothing, refusing to go back into the closet he's tricked her into for the past decade, and even, accidentally, getting a part-time job while in girl form.

Meanwhile, in Mike’s high school friend group, the secrets are starting to crack at the seams too. There’s a very tense plot around his friends that also embodies the “anti-difference” theme. And some threats.

This is a competently handled coming out story with an alternate reality twist. And it’s a tense, high stakes episode in a long-running war against fascist wizard clans.The writing is crisp and confident, an effective blend of interiority and dialogue/action/text messages. All the usual hallmarks of high school novels are present: worry about grades, worry about friends and one’s place in the pecking order about attraction growing from friendship to something more. And all of it is masterfully overlaid with needing to meld tech and magic into plans that would not be out of place in a Mission Impossible movie or the Alex Ryder streaming series. Assuming either one was ever set in Banff National Park, or in the illustrious Banff Springs hotel. (true confession: I live fairly near Banff and the settings were all quite familiar to me. Except the rooftop of the massive 1928 hotel)

I really appreciate the emphasis on building communities of trust, and on not judging people by whatever they need to do to cope with their own unique traumas. Those are prosocial lessons that all of us need reinforced.

Adriaan Brae has 3 novels and several short stories available

 

#RenaissancePress #AdriaanBrae #PartTimeGirl #lgbtq+ #wizards #magic #mage #spells #genderfluid #nonbinary #Banff #BanffSprings #specfic #SpeculativeFiction #ComingOfAge #ComingOut #HighSchool #cult #indoctrination #FoundFamily #bookreview #bookstagram #teens #YoungAdult #ContentWarning #Violence

Bright Shining As the Sun

Bright Shining As the Sun

by John Farrow 

This is a novel of contrasts. Shabby Park Avenue in Montreal against elegant Park Avenue in New York City. French language and churches against the English-language glass towers of high finance. The lifelong criminal against the ageing, ailing Sargeant-Detective Emile Cinq-Mars. 

 

A novel of Hells Angels' violent expansionism layered with psychological, even philosophical, suspense.

It’s also history, both of old school policing and old style biker warfare between the Rock Machine and Hells Angels that only ended after 150 bombs, uncounted shootings, and gang leadership on both sides imprisoned or entombed. 

 

In some ways, it's a retrospective of the long history of the Emile Cinq-Mars novel series.

Yet for all that, a person can pick this book up knowing nothing about the characters or the series, and to be drawn in by the strange request of a suspect in a biker bank massacre for a conversation with a retired cop now recovering from a gunshot wound. Once you're in, you may well find yourself going back to the earlier novels to learn how our wounded detective became this complex individual attempting to orchestrate a just solution to a whole symphony of criminal activity.

The external settings change as the evolving plot demands, but the internal landscapes of these men - the main suspect, the detective, an imprisoned biker leader, and a low level hitter with unsuspected connections - are more deeply explored. Can Emile unravel these criminals' business, emotional, and psychological links to make sense of the growing spiderweb of crimes. Can he settle this complex business before one of them, or their minions, catches up with his own wife while he is helpless to protect her?

This quote from the novel may be the best summation: 

 

“a good story, a good metaphor, a strong mythology that appeals to the imagination, that’s a way to interpret the world and keep us yearning, going forward forever. Revealing the intricacies of the trick has to await its time.“

The novel draws readers from the early, strange request and keeps us immersed through layers of investigation and excavation, through ethical and legal conundrums, to the final reveal. Storytelling in the hands of a master.

 

 #BrightShiningAsTheSun #ExileEditions #JohnFarrow #bikergangs #HellsAngels #gangwar #massacre #hitman #criminal #crimefighting #policeprocedural #Montreal #Quebec #psychology #suspense #crimefiction #NewRelease #OnSale #amreading #ARC #bookreview #CanLit 

Alice Rue Regrets... or does she?

Alice Rue Evades the Truth

by Emily Zipps 

“While You Were Sleeping” meets the 21st century, with better diversity representation and more complex relationship questions than just which potential mate will give her a happily ever after. Better still, if that’s all it was - a gender queer retelling - it would still be a worthy read because of Alice's inimitable voice: first person energy in a third person POV, which makes it easy to keep turning the pages, even when it’s late at night and you should be sleeping. 

After all, Alice isn’t sleeping. Between her first experience of performing CPR and fielding paramedics’ questions, and watching the hottest, richest crush of her entire adult life being shoved into the back of an ambulance, it’s not exactly her typical 4 AM.

And two hours later, her boss is trying to fire her when her crush Nolan's whole flaky family stops by on the way to the hospital, talking nonstop amongst themselves and with Alice, all yearning to learn what happened and whether Nolan will survive.

There is definitely more sexy chemistry than there was in that movie with Bill Pullman as the home-grown handyman sibling of sleekly handsome Coma Man. And yet it’s all tastefully done, easing Alice and Nolan's sibling Van believably closer by the day, with all the accompanying guilt feelings and a bit of obligatory cookie-baking. The comedic impact of the giant dog and cuteness factor of the adorably messy preschoolers adds a lot of heart to this tale of true love not running smooth.

True love isn’t the only thing at stake here either. Because Alice has some some trauma in her past to work through, and Van has some related issues that definitely trigger her, a HEA is far from guaranteed. There's unexplained tension between some family members and a bit of very polite homophobia that has to be managed. All in all, Alice faces a very real possibility that she is going to rue the day she ever met this family, especially as she keeps hurting the one member she most cares about.

Moral complexity, personal growth, issues of creating one’s own future place in the world, all raise this novel above its sweet and charming holiday rom-com inspiration. And it is way more thirsty than the sanitized for TV. Bill Pullman and Sandra Bullock story. 

 

Fun and heartwarming and touching in so many ways. And did I mention thirsty? If you yearn for a plaid-wearing, cuddly, sexy girlfriend this holiday season, this is the book for you.

 

#Netgalley #Penguin #EmilyZipps #romcom #lesbian #LGBTQ #Channukka #Christmas #sleepover #familydysfunction #siblingrivalry #mustlovedogs #friendship #deadendjob #coma #crisis #bossfromheck #hospital #baggage #trust #lies #relationships #love #foundfamily

Prodigals: the return is the same in any language

 Prodigals: a play by Sean Minogue

It's about a murder trial. Or is it?

 

Wesley broke the chains of small town drudgery right after high school, heading to the big city to study law and make something of himself. Now he's back, called to testify as a character witness for a man he used to know. At a loose end, he winds up back in the bar where he hung out in the old days, and finds his old gang still propping up the duct-taped bar stools, still airing the same grievances over the scarred pool table. To them, he's a reminder how far they haven't come, and old resentments stir in their sullen depths. 

 

Little do they know that Wesley's big city life isn't all cocktails and fashion models.  

 

Before he moved to the big city (Toronto) and started writing for magazines and newspapers, playwright Sean Minogue grew up in Sault Ste Marie, a steel town and Great Lakes transit hub in Ontario's rocky, mineral-rich northern vastness. Prodigals is set in Northern Ontario but it could be any small town in any Canadian province. Any shoddy bar you were a regular at as high school ended. The cast is everybody you left behind, or who left you behind when they went away. Now they're back, or you're back, dragging old hopes, forgotten failures, former loves and future hook ups. It’s a world where you don’t so much choose your life partner as drift into habits that aren’t easily broken. The best of a lot of not great options.  

(True story: faced with being stuck in a different Northern Ontario mill town for life, I bailed on my high school boyfriend and lit out for post-secondary too. Once you're gone, it's really hard to go back. You'll never fit into that small world again.) 

The prodigal son's return to his local bar is a trope familiar in many contemporary societies, as anyone who watched in cringing fascination the droll machinations of Bastian in the well-lubricated German mini-series  ÜberWeihnachten (2020) can attest. The secrets and desperation of small-town life get a darker and grittier outing in El Camino Christmas (2017), with the addition of American gun violence.  

No gun violence in Prodigal.and a bit less booze. It's very Canadian that way. Polite until pushed and then the blunt truth lands with the force of a one-two punch. 

 

The cast is tight: four men and two women, although you might believe you've met Benny, the man on trial, because he gets mentioned so often he's almost a presence even though he's never seen or heard from directly. The dialogue is spot on for its milieu: not the sparkle of a Noël Coward play nor the suburban marital snark of Neil Simon, but the everyday despair of Death of a Salesman. They're Canadian Willie Lomans here, minus the necktie and the travel. The ring of real life in every scene.  Questions of friendship, sex, loyalty, love, and the ethical challenges those can raise all get a look in without bogging down the narrative. 

 

You can take the boy out of the North, Wesley's visit tells us, but old bonds will strangle you just as surely when you return. For all its small-town roots, this Northern Gothic play - now book - makes for compelling theatre with a surprisingly wide appeal. 

 

Thanks to @lat46publishing and @river_street_writes for the review copy.  

Also check out Sean Minogue's debut novel, Terminal Solstice, from Turnstone Press.

 

#Latitude46 #RiverStreetWrites #Prodigal #SeanMinogue #plays #Canadian #playwrights #NorthernGothic #SaultSteMarie #murder #highschool #reunion #friendship #loyalty #casting #characters #smalltownbar #drinking #infidelity #trial #Ontario #betrayal #backstabbing #TurnstonePress 

 

On the Lam: entertaining shenanigans of Canadian escapers

On the Lam 

by  Lorna Poplak

Dundurn Press 2025

This entertaining and thoroughly researched little book starts off with a crafty escape involving glue and plastic trays. Then we get into a brief history of the prison system as it developed in Canada, after which follows a series of case studies in escape. 

 

Taken altogether, they showcase the inventiveness of Canadian criminals, and the loopholes in prison security. As the author puts it in her introduction, “the stories highlight the attempts of masterminds, tricksters, villains, and innocents to claw their way to freedom – – sometimes successful, mostly abortive, occasionally deadly.”

The book more than delivers on this promise to the reader. The writing is clean and competent, and ideas are presented in logical and consistent order. Research into the individual criminals, their escapes, and the prison system in general is obviously thorough, well presented, and referenced. 

 

From the notorious squalor and child punishments of the first Kingston penitentiary through the early 20th century shenanigans of Ernest Cashel around Calgary, and on up to the 21st-century, this is more than just an entertaining tale of criminals versus prison guards,. It’s a look at a whole section of Canadian history that is not generally taught in school.

 

#Canadian #bookreview #CanLit #NonFiction #BuyCanadian #stockingstuffer #prisonhistory #jail #CanadianLaw #escapees #prisonbreak #criminals #heist #caper #crooks #robbers #hustlers #murder #amreading #DundurnPress #OnTheLam

Wavelength: coming out from under the helmet

Wavelength

By Cale Plett

AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER until Oct 7

 This punk band novel will grab you from the first page. There’s a great mysterious set up, and just when it looks like the payoff is in sight, that we will find out what’s going on with Alexander, if not with his brother, the narrative jumps to Lillian, driving force in her high school band, who has just been dumped by her adored bass player, leaving the band torn by conflicting loyalties while its leader spirals.

Early on, much of the narrative is told with message chats, interspersed with one narrator or the other internalizing. It’s a style that works well and feels very contemporary. and even though we eventually realize it is teenagers talking, the issues they deal with are contemporaneous well into adulthood.: Education, breakups, coming out, the perils of being too recognizable, what to do with your life besides being part of something bigger?

Of course, these two worlds are going to collide, specifically over band practice. But since one of the participants is under deep cover, and the other is deep in emotional fallout, it is going to take a while to see where this goes.

Truthfully, after the frenetic feeling of these early chapters, the slowing pace feels like a relief, a chance to draw a breath, rather than a drag on the narrative. It’s really genius pacing for an age group raised on TikTok reels and 24/7 chat groups. Without the lulls, they would forget to breathe. it is the pause that refreshes.

Also, there are some delightfully snarky insights into the music industry, such as “lyrical, complexity of corn puffs”.

Something that interests me as a writer is that, because they don’t cross paths until the story is well begun, we readers literally don’t know what each narrator looks like. Each narrator eventually describes the other, illuminating the other’s appearance in their unique style/word choices, and that’s what gives us readers the full visual.

As the characters interact more in real life, and the text messages fade into the background, both narratives get a little bogged down dissecting every moment of their old and new relationships. The early tension in both narratives fades, the goals and consequences drift away, everything comes down to the immediate feelings. The intense interiority may not be a dealbreaker for you but, by the halfway mark, I was starting to yearn for some of that earlier tension again.

Fortunately, the stakes pick up again for both narrators, personally and professionally. Soon it is a breath-holding corkscrew read to the finish.

Themes include teen sexuality, gender identity, self expression, hyperfocus, rejection sensitive dysphoria, corporate pressures, music industry, and the anonymity of life as a corporate pawn.

Bonus content: 

The song 'Elevator' from the novel 

Link to Livestream of the book's launch on October 9th, 2025

#Netgalley #HouseOfAnansi #lgbtq #adolescence #YA #highschool #bandpractice #bassplayer #vocals #songwriting #fashion #celebrity #contracts #consequences #music #musicindustry #scandal #consent #statutory #imagepolishing #comingout #breakup #heartbreak #lies #secrets

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

This Princess Totally Slays

This Princess Kills Monsters
(the misadventures of a fairy tale stepsister) 

by Ry Hermann

If it wasn’t clear from the title that this novella has a fairy tale slant, it is very quickly apparent from the opening pages. The writing is delightful, at once homage to older fairy tale stylings and crackling, near constant, send up of the same.

The prince - who proclaimed and declaimed rather than merely said (see what I mean about sending up the language) - has turned out to be [spoiler] a bit of a cad regarding the princess to whom he was swearing his undying love not long ago. Or rather proclaiming it. When he throws her over, inevitably, her ensuing rage is such that her father promises her literally anything if she will simply stop smashing the crockery.

I will leave you to discover what she asked for and let you meet the stepsister and find out where she fits into this topsy turvy melange. The language is assured and the characters sparkle (some literally). There's some nested subtext about feminism and power imbalances but this is first and foremost a lark that should come with a 'beverage alert' label on every chapter. 

 

This lively little fairy tale is full of derring-do and disguises, brave and foolhardy exploits worthy of love and laughter, all propelled by the most contemporary of fairy tale princesses. 

#princess #fairytale #castle #monsters #legends #BrothersGrimm #prince #ogres #stepsisters #stepmother #WickedStepmother #ThisPrincessKillsMonsters #PenguinRandomHouse #queer #huntsmen #sendup #satire #fantasy #fiction 

 

The Resistance Daughter is personal, passionate, packed with detail

 
An ambitious debut by Canadian author Joanne Kormylo. 

The daughter of the title is Anna, a younger sibling in Nazi-controlled Poland whose father and brother are both involved in smuggling weapons, aiding Allied spies, and otherwise thwarting the regime. Anna is deliberately kept out of things until the younger neighbour girl she walks to school is taken by the Nazis because of her Aryan good looks. That loss sets Anna off on her own type of underground war work, trying to recover and smuggle out stolen children. 

After circumstance introduces her to Johnny, an allied airman, the plot unfolds with plenty of realistic wartime and camp details. The depth of research is evident, and the author‘s personal connection – her father was a prisoner of war – infuses the writing with passion and focus. Anna’s family members and Johnny’s friends are used to illustrate different aspects of daily life during the war, and the conflict's impact on different populations. Mistakes and vengeance by both the Nazis and Russians, and by citizens of the liberated nations as they struggle to find normality, are all touched on in the war’s aftermath. 

For all the political issues and the inevitable disasters of sorting and repatriating millions of displaced people while holding accountable those who committed the worst atrocities, the focus remains firmly on our two lead characters, Anna and Johnny. Their bond, forged early in the war, survives past its end and acts as the continuing thread of this love story set against the vast canvas of World War II that has the power to expose a whole new generation to the horrors of unbridled warfare and the triumph of the human spirit.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hodder

Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 29 2025 (North American release)

Language ‏ : ‎ English

Print length ‏ : ‎ 384 pages

ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1399744887

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1399744881

#NetgalleyUK #Netgalley #WW2 #lovestory #romance #resistance #war #POWs #prisonersofwar #Polish #Poland #spies #smuggling #nazis #ConcentrationCamp #Ravensbruck #Vatican #airforce 

The Silent Film Star Murders by Melodie Campbell

 

This brand new traditional mystery from accomplished Canadian crime writer Melodie Campbell has all the panache of the original Golden Age crime fiction by notables Dorothy, L Sayers, Margery Allingham, and the inimitable Agatha Christie herself. In fact, several of those names are dropped by our illustrious sleuth, Lady Revelstoke as she cruises the high seas, partaking of delicious desserts in the First Class Dining Room.

Lady Revelstoke is no lady. She’s from the colonies, from a crime family (but that's a secret!) and widowed too soon after the Great War, left with a young son and a slew of business holdings as well as that convenient title. (And a castle, but we don’t see the castle in this book, it being inconvenient to pack and transport even on a grand ocean liner). 

 

In this second of The Merry Widow Murders from Cormorant, our Lady Detective is not even settled into her cabin yet when she realizes that she will have a famous silent film star as a dining companion at the captains table, along with the star’s current husband and mousy younger sister. They’ve barely left England when the first mystery of many pops up. Soon we are up to our ears in rival starlets, old flames and new, mysterious disappearances, and an inexhaustible stream of clues that seem to lead in too many directions.

Sorting out the real from the smoke and mirrors is a full-time job for Lady Revelstoke and her indomitable maid Elfreda. But they are more than up to the task, and Lady R makes good work of connecting with other bereaved wives and mothers, gaining vital clues along the way. 

 

In addition to the well woven shipboard background and the many discreet background references to the culture of the era, our illustrious sleuth, and her female, secondary characters, make clear the struggles and hopes of women who saw the Great War not only as a terrible tragedy, but as a step forward in the liberation of women, not only in work and family, but in politics and society. There is something bittersweet about their hopes, as here we are nearly 100 years after the fictional events of this book, and women are still struggling to keep the rights so long and hard fought for.

All in all, this is a very pleasant and also thought-provoking traditional mystery of an era long past, that will satisfy any weekend reader's murderous impulses.

#MerryWidowMurders #TraditionalMystery #CosyMystery #GoldenAge #OceanLiner #starlets #Hollywood #SilentFilm #talkies #CormorantBooks #GreatWar 

A Queer Case from 1929

A Queer Case 
by Robert Holtom 

It's 1929 and almost the Golden Age of the English murder mystery when bank clerk and would-be bon vivant Selby Bigge is out prowling Hampstead Heath in search of brief, illicit human connection when he bumps into an old flame from his university days. Well, not so much an old flame as a brief flicker of connection/affection/prospective amour at the end of a drunken night among fellow undergraduate academics. When Patrick, that well-dressed scion of a recently knighted sire, invites him for a meal at The Ritz, Selby's hopes rise for a rekindling.

Except this evening turns out to be a family dinner with the knight and his new wife, a lady much nearer Patrick's age than his father's. It soon becomes apparent that all is not well in that family circle. And, to further deepen the familiar trope, Selby is invited to the knight's upcoming birthday dinner at his relatively isolated manor on the far side of Hampstead Heath. 

 

Any reader of a Golden Age mystery knows what happens next.

This is very much a classic murder mystery, except that it's set amid the very real perils of being homosexual in the England of (barely) yesteryear, where the wrong glance or word at the wrong time or place could bring unwanted attention from the ever-vigilant police and public anti-sodomy brigade. Being caught in a compromising position with another man, even in the privacy of his own home, could cost cost Selby his freedom, his reputation, his job, and possibly his ability to live in England without being hounded everywhere. And yet he yearns for another kiss from his longtime crush. And so he agrees to help when Patrick falls under suspicion.

 

The subsequent investigation takes Selby through various London underground clubs and furthers his acquaintance with a cross-dressing baronet‘s daughter, Theo, who also wants to solve the murder. Tension is inevitable as Selby juggles and conceals his intermittent contacts with other gay men. There are some sage and essentially timeless observations about life and relationships, and especially marriage, from several angles of LGBTQ+ life experience. There's an homage to one of Agatha Christie's lesser sleuths, Ariadne Oliver, in the prolific if not, highly respected, crime writer who thinks Agatha Christie is stealing her plots. Any violence is constrained in true traditional crime novel style, and the solution owes more to careful thought and deduction than to anything so sensationalist as a climactic action scene.

All in all, a lot to enjoy, and ideal timing for its release at the start of Pride Month across North America. 

Thanks #NetGalley
#LGBTQ #murder #GoldenAge #murdermystery #HampsteadHeath #stepmother #knight #crossdressing #1920s #RoaringTwenties #detective #aqueercase #SelbyBiggeMystery

Give My Love to Berlin

Give My Love To Berlin

 by Kathrine Bryant 

 

An increasingly tense dual-timeline story split between a young woman in 1920s and 30s Berlin, and her American granddaughter many years later, piecing together this hidden portion of her family's history. 

 

The earlier timeline, following Tillie (Matilda), occurs when Berlin is the gay capital of the world. Homosexual, lesbian, and trans people are making strides in public acceptability and becoming stage sensations in Berlin's vibrant club scene...only for the rise of Hitler and his young extremists to push them underground again with increasing ferocity. 

 

These are the very early years of the National Socialist Party, when it is plotting strategy in the homes and offices of respectable lawyers and businessmen, aiming to make further seat gains fort the next election. Tillie's working in her father's law office when she first becomes aware of the political maneuvering, but at first she's unable to believe it could be a risk to her or anyone she knows. Not even when Ernesto, her best male friend, is spurned by his father, one of her father's main clients, over his homosexuality. But it begins to hit harder for Tillie's lover, Ruth, who is not only a cross-dressing nightclub entertainer and a lesbian; she's also Jewish.

 

In the modern timeline, the young Tillie is a grandmother now suffering from increasing dementia, which we see through the eyes of her granddaughter Thea, who is uncovering the old woman’s past even as the owner is losing it. The names of the two women, Tilly and Thea, take a bit of getting used to of separating mentally. 

 

As is often the case with dual timeline books, the modern narrative is less compelling than the one set in the past. We learn little about Thea except that she is poking around in her grandmother‘s stuff, trying to find out what the reader already knows from the past timeline. The author readily conveys Thea's struggle to accommodate her grandmother's increasing dementia while coming to terms with the void underlying the official family history she thought she knew.

Give My Love to Berlin is an Aimée & Jaguar tale for the current generation, but where the book by Austrian author Erica Fischer was based on a true story, Tillie and Ruth's doomed love story is fiction. Tillie is the daughter of a mid-level Party official, where the very real Lilly Wust was the wife of a high-ranking one. The resonances to struggles that current 20-somethings in the LGBTQ+ community face in many countries, both in the 1990s when the book came out and now, in the 2120s when Russia, much of the USA, and parts of Canada are actively dangerous for openly queer people once again. 

 

We have recent history to reflect on as well. France narrowly escaped rule by a far-right party through arcane constitutional shenanigans. Australia booted its harder-right government. Yet Germany’s AfD party has seat gains in their recent election, not quite 100 years after the events of this book.

It is very creepy sitting in Canada after a hotly contested federal election fueled by propaganda against the governing party and individual politicians, where homophobic slurs have become once more common currency. There are small local/regional newsheets and pamphlets in blue-collar coffee shops that  sound very much like those the Germans were using in the 1920s to turn citizens against at foreigners, immigrants, undesirables like trans and queer individuals and groups. There is less overt bias in mainstream media , except by their decision not to call out certain politicians or push back against certain statements or public actions to avoid backlash by (mostly) online thugs. And of course social media is a sewer filled with hate speech and more subtle disinformation pushed by bot farms and paid for by right-wing dark money, both home-generated and flowing in from the same US tech bro class that is currently looting and pillaging the government of that country. Are Canadians wise enough to see where this hate-fomenting trend could go and push back harder against the conservatives‘ more extreme base, both federally and provincially?

Ultimately, a good novel entertains you - takes you to a different time and space, into another person's story - even while it pushes you to reflect on your own world and time. This novel gives much food for thought.

 

 Give My Love To Berlin

 

by Kathrine Bryant

#Netgalley #AmphoraePublishingGroup #LBGTQ #GiveMyLoveToBerlin #BookBirthday #NewRelease #WW2 #NaziParty #history #persecution #propaganda #refugees #Jewish #lesbian #gay #Berlin #GermanHistory #nightclubs 

Bonus content: review of another wartime book by Erica Fischer, this one a memoir of her parents' struggles against Nazism and the belligerent vagaries of refugee life during and post-World War 2 

WHACK JOB: a history of axe murder

 WHACK JOB: a history of axe murder 

by Rachel Mccarthy James

 

Maybe not everybody gets as excited about axe murderers as I do.

 

Except possibly other crime writers, or true crime readers. And some historians.

But let me tell you, this little book has axe murders going way back into pre-history, including a fascinating digression on how to shape a hand axe for the best killing edge. That alone is worth the price of admission. 

 

The book then moves forward to/through recorded history: axe killings and forensic examinations of ancient Egypt, 1200 BCE in China, a Norse record of a mass killing in North America, the infamous Lizzie Borden murder, then on to the last, possibly darkest one a few years later. By the 1960s most homes had central heating and axes were less available. Methods for convenient or impulse murder shifted to more common household items.

This book is well written, in a breezy narrative style that yet stays quite focused and relays information in an anecdotal style that is yet very historically accurate. Highly recommended for fans of true crime and those with a generous range of historical lore already under their bonnets to fill in the cultural backgrounds behind the various deeds. 

 

Whack Job
Macmillan (May 2025)

 #WhackJob #axe #weapons #murder #history #historicalmurder #Norse #Vikings #LizzieBorden #weaponshistory #prehistory #prehistorical #handaxe #flintknapping #bronze #edgedweapons #killing #homicide #Macmillan

The Queens of Crime - early feminists?

The Queens of Crime

By Marie Benedict

The woman coming into the tea shop has drastically changed since the last time our narrator (Dorothy L. Sayers) saw her, only five months before. Very quickly we realize that the new arrival is the famous, even notorious, fellow crime writer Agatha Christie, who is still being hounded by the press after her mysterious disappearance years before. That's two Queens of Crime already! They're meeting to discuss the formation of The Detection Club, and how women writer-members are already being 'put in their place' by male writers, even though Dorothy had the idea for the club and got it off the ground.

Sounds familiar to any woman who has ever had a project taken over by a man once she's done all the legwork for it.

Dorothy and Agatha have a plan: lure their female crime-writing competitors to set aside past rivalries, stop the snark about each other's plots and characters, and form a cohesive resistance against the male takeover of the Detection Club. Baroness Orczy of Scarlet Pimpernel fame (with many other stories to her name), Ngaio Marsh with her Roderick Alleyn (and later Troy Alleyn) mysteries, Margery Allingham whose gentleman sleuth, Albert Campion, brought a touch of chaotic whimsy to his atmospheric adventures, are all invited to solve a ‘body in the library’ scene... in a real library, thanks to Dorothy's connections. 

 

Nowadays, crime writers' organizations, associations, and sisterhoods take women's membership for granted, but early in the novel there's a lifelike depiction of the first meeting and swearing in of Detection Club members, complete with a skull named Eric to swear on. And some overtly paternalistic and even misogynistic shunning of female members that goes a long way to convincing the other Queens they need to band together. An early sisterhood of crime writers, in fact, foreshadowing (a lovely mystery fiction concept!) the work of Sisters In Crime so many decades later.

 

Does it work? Well, that's part of the story of how these amazing crime writers end up collaborating to solve a real-life murder.

The author shows her knowledge of Dorothy L Sayers' personality and passions in both overt and subtle ways. One, early on, occurs when Dorothy is extolling the general benefits of women crime writers gathering together to support each other, and another when she notices a reporter referring to body of the murdered woman as 'it' rather than as 'she'. The author of Gaudy Night, that feminist exploration of women's higher education disguised as a mystery novel, could do no less than speak up for another woman stripped of her humanity in death. 

 

In fact, the dehumanization of the victim by the male-dominated police and press forms a large part of what drives the collaborating Queens to investigate the disappearance and death of a young woman on a day trip to France. There are similar nods to the known personalities, public quotes, and styles of the other Queens, but Dorothy's personal life forms the backdrop, showing an early modern variant of a double-career household.

The prose itself is solid and practical with occasional flights of fancy, but does not attempt to ape the styles of any of the Golden Age Queens in its dialogue or overall style. Descriptions are focused on the detecting, as they should be. Our narrator even reflects at times on the differences between detecting as portrayed in her novels and the processes - including the psychological and emotional - of detecting in real life, with a real person as the victim.

Overall a very enjoyable read with quality crime-solving, although historical purists may remark on the odd false note, such as when the elegant and refined Baroness Orczy (born 1865 to Hungarian nobility, and raised in an pre-WW1 era of unrelenting propriety of dress and deportment for women) would be seen leaning on a French train station wall at the venerable age of 66 years.  

BONUS CONTENT: A February 2024 essay about how those real-life Queens of Crime brought about the worldwide fascination with the detective novel.

While men seeded detective fiction, it was women who brought the genre to lustrous fruition. In the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, four stellar queens of crime writing — Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh — became doyennes of a popular culture phenomenon in publishing that would establish their dominion over a worldwide audience.

#Netgalley #StMartins #review #crimefiction #QueensOfCrime #historicalfiction #AgathaChristie #DorothySayers #MargeryAllingham #NgaioMarsh #BaronessOrczy #LordPeterWimsey #RoderickAlleyn #TroyAlleyn #AlbertCampion #ScarletPimpernel #HerculePoirot #MissMarple