Fiction Review

The Diana Gabaldon/Poisoned Pen Writer in Residence for February, 2018, is Toronto’s Ian Hamilton.

Ian Hamilton is the author of the Ava Lee series. The books have been shortlisted for numerous prizes, including the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award, the Barry Award, and the Lambda Literary Prize, and are Canadian bestsellers. The Water Rat of Wanchai was the winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel and was named a best book of the year by Amazon.ca, the Toronto Star, and Quill & Quire. BBC Culture named Hamilton “One of the Ten Mystery/Crime Writers from the Last Thirty Years That Should Be on Your Bookshelf.” The series is being adapted for television.

Mr. Hamilton will do a program/signing with another award-winner, Leslie S. Klinger, on February 10 for his January 30 release, The Imam of Tawi-Tawi; host authors Matt Haig (February 11) and Tom Sweterlitsch (February 13), and teach a Writers Workshop on February 12—all at The Poisoned Pen.

Proceeds of the workshop will go to new newly created Poisoned Pen Foundation which plans to host other Writers in Residence to support published authors and to develop other programs to foster writers and publishing including visits from professional publicists and sending writers to conferences and other residencies. Contributions to the Foundation are fully tax deductible.

 
Mr. Hamilton’s website is https://ianhamiltonbooks.com/. His publisher is House of Anansi Press, distributed in the US by PGW/Ingram Publisher Services. 

It could have been a Red Carpet event at the Poisoned Pen the other night. Author Hank Phillippi Ryan was here to interview Andrew Grant and Nick Petrie. But, other glamorous authors showed up as well.

Here’s Jenn McKinlay with Hank.

As I said, Hank interviewed Grant and Petrie about their new books. There are signed copies of Andrew Grant’s False Witness and Nick Petrie’s Light It Up available through the Web Store. https://store.poisonedpen.com

But, this IS the Poisoned Pen. Hank Phillippi Ryan’s signed copies of her latest, Say No More, is available.

Tasha Alexander’s Lady Emily mystery, Death in St. Petersburg, is in the Web Store.

There are signed copies of Rhys Bowen’s Molly Murphy mystery, The Ghost of Christmas Past, and her Lady Georgie one, On Her Majesty’s Frightfully Secret Service.

Bowen’s standalone, In Farleigh Field, just nominated for a Lefty Award for Best Historical Novel, is signed and available.

And, Every Dog Has His Day may be Jenn McKinlay’s latest book, but her previous Bluff Point Romance, Barking Up the Wrong Tree, was just nominated for the RT Reviewer’s Choice Award for Best Contemporary Love and Laughter Novel. There are signed copies of both these books, as well as McKinlay’s mysteries, in the Web Store.

Authors, glamour, award nominees, and signed books. The Poisoned Pen has it all for readers.

Have you read Jeffrey Siger’s latest Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis novel yet? An Aegean April is a powerful police procedural that discusses the refugee crisis in Greece. If you haven’t yet read it, you can pick up a signed copy through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2mDS5L5

Siger recently wrote a piece for Bookreporter.com called “Thoughts on Today’s Refugee Crisis in Greece from Jeffrey Siger, Author of An Aegean April.” You may want to read it. https://bit.ly/2DezFKe

Once you’ve read that, you may be even more interested in reading the latest book in the series. Here’s the summary.

The beautiful Greek island of Lesvos, birthplace of the poet Sappho, and for centuries an agrarian paradise famed for anise-flavored ouzo and tasty sardines, sees its serenity turn into chaos as the world watches boatloads of refugees daily flee onto its shores from Turkey across the narrow Mytilini Strait.

Mihalis Volandes is one of Lesvos’ elite, the patriarch of a storied shipping clan. He’s weathered many changes in his long life, and when a government policy accelerates the surge of refugees onto his island, he rises to prominence in relief efforts he sees as growing increasingly ineffectual.

One evening, after working to stir up support for his breakthrough plan to strike at the heart of the lucrative refugee trafficking trade, he returns to his mansion in darkness – only to fall victim in his own garden to a swishing sword.

A refugee-turned-local-aid-worker is found at the scene, splattered with Volandes’ blood, and swiftly arrested by island police. Case closed – or would be, if young Ali Sera were not working with SafePassage, an NGO (non-government organization), headed on Lesvos by American Dana McLaughlin. McLaughlin is having none of Ali’s arrest. Within hours the phone rings in the Athens office of Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis, and she’s requesting that Kaldis take over the investigation.

Volandes was a prominent citizen and the crime particularly gruesome. Could it be terrorism or something else? But whether Ali is guilty or framed, Andreas can’t ignore a powerful motive for the murder. Volandes’ daring plan, if implemented, would soon shut down the cash-generating refugee-trafficking pipeline between Turkey and Lesvos.

And so, we’re off on a nail-biting ride with Kaldis and his team through Byzantine island politics, deteriorating diplomatic relations, and a world on fire with intrigues and more brutal deaths.

This ninth Andreas Kaldis thriller once again links modern Greece to its ancient past, the powerful grip of myths upon its people, and cutting edge issues of societal change affecting our world at large.

The “Lefty Awards” are Awards presented each year at the annual Left Coast Crime convention. This year, the convention is in Reno, Nevada in March, and it’s called “Crime on the Comstock”. Congratulations to the two nominees from Poisoned Pen Press., Priscilla Royal and Wendall Thomas. Royal’s The Proud Sinner is nominated for the Bruce Alexander Memorial Award, the Lefty for Best Historical Mystery Novel. Thomas’ Lost Luggage is nominated for Best Debut Mystery Novel. Of course you can find signed copies of both titles in the Web Store. https://store.poisonedpen.com

Here’s the link to the announcement of the Lefty nominations. https://bit.ly/2rbxt1x. Check the Web Store for the titles. https://store.poisonedpen.com/

Today is the perfect day to discuss Lauren Willig’s latest historical novel, The English Wife. Tasha Alexander hosts Willis and Deanna Raybourn at the Poisoned Pen at 2 PM. If you can’t be there, you can still order signed copies through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2mz7SL0

Here’s the summary.

“Brings to life old world New York City and London with all the splendor of two of my favorite novels,The Age of InnocenceandThe Crimson Petal and the White. Mystery, murder, mistaken identity, romance–Lauren Willig weaves each strand into a page-turning tapestry.” -Sally Koslow, author ofThe Widow Waltz”Her best yet…A dark and scintillating tale of betrayal, secrets and a marriage gone wrong that will have readers on the edge of their seats until the final breathtaking twist.” -Pam Jenoff,New York Times bestselling author ofThe Orphan’s TaleFromNew York Times bestselling author, Lauren Willig, comes this scandalous novel set in the Gilded Age, full of family secrets, affairs, and murder.Annabelle and Bayard Van Duyvil live a charmed life in New York: he’s the scion of an old Knickerbocker family, she grew up in a Tudor house in England, they had a fairytale romance in London, they have three-year-old twins on whom they dote, and he’s recreated her family home on the banks of the Hudson and named it Illyria. Yes, there are rumors that she’s having an affair with the architect, but rumors are rumors and people will gossip. But then Bayard is found dead with a knife in his chest on the night of theirTwelfth Night Ball, Annabelle goes missing, presumed drowned, and the papers go mad. Bay’s sister, Janie, forms an unlikely alliance with a reporter to try to uncover the truth, convinced that Bay would never have killed his wife, that it must be a third party, but the more she learns about her brother and his wife, the more everything she thought she knew about them starts to unravel. Who were her brother and his wife, really? And why did her brother die with the name George on his lips?

*****

If you would prefer the short visual summary, check out Adam Wagner’s .GIFNotes at CriminalElement.com  His summaries are always funny. https://bit.ly/2r2hSBj.

C.J. Tudor’s The Chalk Man is a psychological suspense debut now available through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2mrJTwl

C.J. Tudor can introduce her book.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjtpOECs0bc?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

Here she is talking about the inspiration for The Chalk Man.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P07dnm3t4e8?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

Interested? Here’s the summary from the Web Store.

“I haven’t had a sleepless night due to a book for a long time. The Chalk Man changed that.”
—Fiona Barton, New York Times bestselling author of The Widow

A riveting and relentlessly compelling psychological suspense debut that weaves a mystery about a childhood game gone dangerously awry, and will keep readers guessing right up to the shocking ending

In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy English village and looking for any taste of excitement they can get. The chalk men are their secret code: little chalk stick figures they leave for one another as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing is ever the same.
In 2016, Eddie is fully grown, and thinks he’s put his past behind him. But then he gets a letter in the mail, containing a single chalk stick figure. When it turns out that his friends got the same message, they think it could be a prank . . . until one of them turns up dead.
That’s when Eddie realizes that saving himself means finally figuring out what really happened all those years ago.
Expertly alternating between flashbacks and the present day, The Chalk Manis the very best kind of suspense novel, one where every character is wonderfully fleshed out and compelling, where every mystery has a satisfying payoff, and where the twists will shock even the savviest reader.

Have you heard all of the media buzz about the Poisoned Pen’s current Hot Book of the Week, A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window? Until Fire and Fury came out, this book may have been the most talked about book in the last couple months. There are signed copies available through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2qTTrFP

Here’s the summary of the book.

“Astounding. Thrilling. Amazing.” —Gillian Flynn

“Unputdownable.” —Stephen King

“A dark, twisty confection.” —Ruth Ware

“Absolutely gripping.” —Louise Penny

For readers of Gillian Flynn and Tana French comes one of the decade’s most anticipated debuts, to be published in thirty-six languages around the world and already in development as a major film from Fox: a twisty, powerful Hitchcockian thriller about an agoraphobic woman who believes she witnessed a crime in a neighboring house.

It isn’t paranoia if it’s really happening . . . 

Anna Fox lives alone—a recluse in her New York City home, unable to venture outside. She spends her day drinking wine (maybe too much), watching old movies, recalling happier times . . . and spying on her neighbors.

Then the Russells move into the house across the way: a father, a mother, their teenage son. The perfect family. But when Anna, gazing out her window one night, sees something she shouldn’t, her world begins to crumble—and its shocking secrets are laid bare.

What is real? What is imagined? Who is in danger? Who is in control? In this diabolically gripping thriller, no one—and nothing—is what it seems.

Twisty and powerful, ingenious and moving, The Woman in the Window is a smart, sophisticated novel of psychological suspense that recalls the best of Hitchcock.

If you’re a fan of Brad Taylor’s Pike Logan thrillers, you’ll want to watch as Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen, interviews Taylor via Livestream. https://livestream.com/poisonedpen/events/8007953

Signed copies of Taylor’s latest book, Operator Down, are available through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2mh9WGB

Here’s the description.

Former Special Forces Officer and New York Times bestselling author Brad Taylor delivers a heart-pounding thriller where Pike Logan’s search for a Mossad agent and ally puts him on a collision course with a ruthless military coup in Africa—and tests his loyalties to the Taskforce.

It was to be a simple mission. Nothing more than assessing whether a merchant in the fabled Israeli Diamond Exchange was involved in a scheme that could potentially embarrass the state of Israel. But nothing is ever simple in the world of intelligence, as Aaron Bergman—a former leader of an elite direct action team under the Mossad—should have known. Executing the operation as a contractor, a cutout that gave the State of Israel plausible deniability, he disappears without a trace.

Pike Logan and his team know none of this, but he’s tracking an American arms dealer in Tel Aviv who may—or may not—be attempting to sell sensitive nuclear weapons components to the highest bidder. When Pike’s team breaks up an attempt at killing Shoshana, Aaron’s partner, they stumble upon much more than they expected—a concerted conspiracy to topple a democratic African country.

Beginning to untangle a web that extends through both the American and Israeli intelligence community, Pike is forced to choose between his Israeli friends and his Taskforce mission, even as the execution of the coup begins to form. At the heart of it is Aaron, and his disappearance is the one mistake the plotters made. Because Shoshana is the greatest killing machine the Mossad has ever produced, and she will stop at nothing to help Aaron, even if it means killing Pike Logan.

It’s on it’s way! If you’re a Maisie Dobbs fan, you’ll be happy to learn the latest book in the series, To Die But Once, will be released March 27. You can pre-order a signed copy through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2mgAgl1

And, I would have linked to Jacqueline Winspear’s newsletter in which she discusses the background of the book, but the newsletter isn’t up on her website yet. So, I’ll just have to share. The formatting is off because it was taken from my email, but the information is worth sharing.

As this is my first newsletter of the year, I would like to wish you all the very best in 2018. May your days be filled with joy, peace, contentment, love and good health—and anything else on your dream list! As soon as January rolls around, the final countdown to publication of a new novel in the Maisie Dobbs’ series begins. TO DIE BUT ONCE will be published on March 27th this year, with the accompanying book tour kicking off in Houston on March 26th. I’ll have the full details soon, and will post dates and event locations on my Facebook page as well as on my website and indeed in my next newsletter. TO DIE BUT ONCE opens in May 1940. The British expeditionary force—with Billy Beale’s son among them—is at great risk on the other side of the English Channel, and Maisie’s friend Priscilla is worried about her son, who has joined the RAF. But as the story opens, another young man—the 15-year-old son of a local pub landlord—becomes the focus of Maisie’s concerns. The lad is apprenticed to a firm of painters and decorators that has landed a big government contract to paint the buildings on airfields throughout Britain with fire retardant, and the young man is part of a crew of workmen going from one military airfield to the next, staying in lodgings along the way. His parents have become worried because he seems not to be his usual self—and he’s missed a promised telephone call to let them know he’s well. They are particularly concerned because he’s been suffering pounding headaches. Maisie has seen the lad grow up and has always liked his sunny disposition—so she is determined to find out what has been happening to him. The main story underpinning TO DIE BUT ONCE—that of the young apprentice—was inspired by my father’s experiences during the early part of the war. Dad was fourteen in 1940, but had left school earlier because he was tapped to be a “runner” between ARP (Air Raid Precautions) and military posts in south London. The ARP men went around to the schools, picking out the best sprinters for the job—and Dad was the fastest runner in the school. But having run though burning bomb-sites during the early part of the Blitz, he must have been relieved when he began an apprenticeship later in 1940, soon after he turned fourteen—the age at which you started full-time work in those days. I knew my father had a job that took him from place to place around the country before he joined the army, but I didn’t really know the details until his last weeks. During those hours in the hospice, when we’d watch his favorite TV shows, talk about a book he was reading, or discuss the news, Dad also told me stories of his childhood in London. It was a lovely, precious, yet bittersweet time. He also told me more about that job, and I became even more curious as he described his work to me, and what was involved in using a brand new type of emulsion to paint the buildings at military airfields around Britain. “It was amazing,” he said. “After we finished painting each building we had to test the surface, so we’d stand a line of four blowtorches right up against the wall, and let them run for three or four hours. The first time, well, we couldn’t believe our eyes—there was not a mark on the wall, no burn marks, no bubbling of the paint, nothing.” I was shocked and asked what the paint was called. “Oh, it didn’t have a name,” he replied. “Just a number.” Many of those airfields were situated in southern England where much of TO DIE BUT ONCE is set, though the job took him all over the country. By coincidence, one of my cousins lives in a region where Dad was billeted for a while. It was when my cousin told me about the area’s links to the Bank of England during the war, that I knew a story was coming together. My father’s apprenticeship was a “protected” position because he was involved in essential government work—if he chose to, he could have remained in that job for the duration of the war and avoided the armed forces completely. But by the age of 17 he’d had enough of going from place to place, so he gave in his notice. His employer told him he was a fool to even think about leaving, but he left anyway—and within one day of being at home, his enlistment papers had arrived. He was off to join the army. My father died at age 85 from a serious blood disorder, and though the strain he was suffering from was termed “idiopathic”—there is no known cause—research has indicated that it is linked to toxin exposure. My father had no idea what was in the fire retardant he worked with for three years when he was little more than a boy, but he told me that the workers were not issued with special masks, or gloves or any of the protective clothing one would expect to use today. And when I put that together with his later work in the war—in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME), he was assigned to “explosives’ given his calm demeanor under pressure—and the possible toxins he was exposed to there, I can only conclude that we were lucky to have had him with us for so long. In the next pre-publication newsletter, I’ll be telling you about other themes you’ll find in TO DIE BUT ONCE, and how they were inspired by family stories of the Second World War. With all good wishes, Jacqueline

Most of us have never heard of the Scottish writer Susan Ferrier. But, author Val McDermid is a big fan, and she’s leading a city-wide effort in Edinburgh to revive the reputation of the 19th century author. You can read about it in The Guardian. https://bit.ly/2CSSO4X

While it may take a little while to get Ferrier’s books through the Web Store, it may turn out to be easier with McDermid’s efforts. You can order here. https://bit.ly/2CFLm9m

In the meantime, if you’re interested in McDermid’s books, such as her latest, Insidious Intent, you can find them here. https://bit.ly/2AHVqg1