STARR SIGN by CS O'Cinneide

 
If Crime queen Melodie Campbell‘s mafia-family heroine, Gina Gallo, had a goddaughter, it might well be O'Cinneide's Candace Starr, “a wisecracking former hit woman with a stunning array of ways to kill people“.

In STARR SIGN, 2nd in a new crime series from Dundurn Press, Candace finds herself in charge of a sulky stranger, the 13-year-old sister she never knew she had. Their highly erratic mother is missing. To Candace that's not unusual. What is odd is Mom's last known location: At the mansion of her estranged grandfather, a man she swore she'd never see again. The dying head of the vicious Scarpello mob.

Now Candace will have to choose: become a reluctant foster mom to a bad-tempered tween or try to retrieve their real mom from the clutches of her not-so-loving family.

The first thing that attracted me to this novel was the wise ass narrator's unique voice - as distinctive a hard-boiled lead character as any penned by Chandler. The second was the chaotic wake-up scene. They tell beginning writers never to start with a character waking up but there’s always an exception and this one is a boozy doozy of a hangover scene that flaunts the full chaos of Candace's standard non-business operating procedure.

From there the pace rarely lets up. By the end of the first chapter, not only was I fully grounded in the story and its main players,I didn’t need the exquisitely timed hook to get me flipping immediately to chapter two, and then three, and then reading well into the night. The sulky sister and the hot computer nerd are fun sidekicks if not fully-fleshed characters, and the mobsters, from the lowest goon to the coldly calculating mob wife, are deftly portrayed with a minimum of extraneous detail.

This is assured prose in the hands of a masterful storyteller, taking the reader effortlessly from the mansions of the very rich to the seedy sex-trafficking brothels where gangsters go to let down their guard.

Find out more about the author and her books at

https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B07H4VP3GT

#SheKillsLit #StarrSign #Dundurn #thriller

Starr Sign

by C.S. O'Cinneide

Dundurn Press (March 2021)

ISBN 978-1-45974-487-5

Review: The Book of Stolen Tales by DJ McIntosh

Opening sentence: Firelight on the faces of the villagers showed their lust for the burning.

A follow-up to the best-selling art-history thriller “The Witch of Babylon,” this sophomore novel is a sophisticated, literary thriller, rich in both modern European culture and centuries-old book history.

John’s quest takes him through libraries and bookstores that will garner the envy of every bibliophile. Each city he visits is infused with colour and life, from the rain-washed roads of London to a sun-drenched Naples marketplace. Landscapes parallel and enhance the action, whether angry seas on a rocky shore or the barren, sulfurous plain of the Solfatara volcano. A hint of the paranormal is as chilling as the inky waters of the Thames.

A new character is almost the antithesis of the cultured, book-loving John, and equally skilled in his own, very different sphere. An unexpected twist dramatically raises the stakes, drawing John into a second and even more deadly search. The two quests intertwine in the hands of a masterful storyteller. This is a gripping and literate race against evils old and new, from New York across continental Europe and into the sands of Mesopotamia.

The Book of StolenTales

By D.J. McIntosh

Penguin, 2013