Molly MacRae

Molly MacRae spent twenty years in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Upper East Tennessee, where she managed The Book Place, an independent bookstore; may it rest in peace. Before the lure of books hooked her, she was curator of the history museum in Jonesborough, Tennessee’s oldest town.

MacRae lives with her family in Champaign, Illinois, where she recently retired from connecting children with books at the public library.

Her latest novel is There'll Be Shell to Pay.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. MacRae's reply:

Shirley Rousseau Murphy’s Joe Gray books have been on my radar since the first one, Cat on the Edge, came out in 1996. I finally started reading them this spring and I’m up to book ten, Cat Cross Their Graves. The books are cozy with dashes of police procedure and fantasy. The three main characters are Joe Gray, Dulcie, and Kit, sentient house cats able to understand, speak, and read English. The mysteries are good and twisty and they aren’t told for the laughs one might expect from the set up. Except for their unusual talents, the cats act like cats. They’re also serious and successful amateur sleuths. There’s great situational humor, though. Not laughing at the cats, but at the issues they have using human technology, like computers and cell phones, and their very reasonable reactions to some of the things the humans around them do.

I love short stories and have had a subscription to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine for at least forty years. I’m reading the most recent issue with stories by some of my favorite authors including John M. Floyd, G. Miki Hayden, Janice Law, and R.T. Lawton. You can’t beat Hitchcock or Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine for great mystery shorts.

We don’t eat a lot of desserts at my house, but we like drooling over them in cookbooks. I’m reading a perfect cookbook right now—Malai: Frozen Desserts Inspired by South Asian Flavors, by Pooja Bavishi. Just leafing through for the gorgeous photographs is getting me through the heat wave we’re having. There are recipes for dairy and non-dairy ice creams, milkshakes, sundaes, ice cream pies, bars, frozen icebox cakes, toppings and sauces, as well as baked goods to go with the frozen treats. Sprinkled throughout the recipes are cardamom, ginger, black pepper, turmeric, and other warm spices. I have my eye on Bavishi’s Salted Brown Butter Pecan Ice Cream with Chocolate Cardamom Sauce.

Visit Molly MacRae's website.

My Book, The Movie: Plaid and Plagiarism.

The Page 69 Test: Plaid and Plagiarism.

The Page 69 Test: Scones and Scoundrels.

My Book, The Movie: Scones and Scoundrels.

The Page 69 Test: Crewel and Unusual.

The Page 69 Test: Heather and Homicide.

Q&A with Molly MacRae.

Writers Read: Molly MacRae (July 2024).

The Page 69 Test: Come Shell or High Water.

My Book, The Movie: Come Shell or High Water.

--Marshal Zeringue

Camilla Trinchieri

Camilla Trinchieri worked for many years dubbing films in Rome with directors including Federico Fellini, Pietro Germi, Franco Rossi, Lina Wertmüller and Luchino Visconti. She immigrated to the US in 1980 and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Under the pseudonym Camilla Crespi, she has published eight mysteries. As Camilla Trinchieri, she has published The Price of Silence and Seeking Alice, a fictionalized account of her mother’s life in Europe during WWII.

Trinchieri's new novel isMurder in Pitigliano, the fifth title in her Tuscan mystery series.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I am presently engrossed in two very different novels: The Searcher by the Irish writer Tana French and Jumping the Queue by the deceased English author Mary Wesley.

In The Searcher, Cal Hooper, a retired and divorced American police officer has bought a ramshackle house in a small Irish town. When a young boy asks for his help finding his brother, Cal, at first reluctant, accepts the challenge. French’s depiction of Cal is so well done I want to follow him as he gets in deeper and deeper. Through her incredible talent French brings the setting and the inhabitants so alive I felt I was hearing the rooks, feeling the wind in the trees and smelling the beer. That is so very hard to do.

I had heard of Mary Wesley but bought this book because I was intrigued by the title. Jumping the queue (British for line) is considered very bad manners and I was curious to know what that might represent. In the case of practical Matilda and the man she encounters on a wharf, it’s very bad manners to interrupt a suicide by wanting to kill yourself first. This meeting of two unhappy people starts a wonderfully humorous relationship. Back to the cleared out house they both go, the goose of course comes back to the animal’s great relief and I can’t wait to know more. Down to earth Matilda is someone I immediately wanted to meet in person. Wesley writes with great heart and humor. That too is so very hard to do.

I try to bring my readers to the small Tuscan town where widower Nico Doyle, like Cal, an American retired detective, has made his home. I hope they will find themselves with him, taste the food and the wine, enjoy the beauty of the patchwork of vineyards that brave the land of Chianti. I try.

Visit Camilla Trinchieri's website.

Q&A with Camilla Trinchieri.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in Pitigliano.

--Marshal Zeringue

Priyanka Taslim

Priyanka Taslim is a Bangladeshi American writer, educator, and lifelong New Jersey resident. Having grown up in a bustling Bangladeshi diaspora community, surrounded by her mother’s entire clan and many aunties of no relation, her writing often features families, communities, and all the drama therein. Currently, Taslim teaches English by day and tells all kinds of stories about Bengali characters by night. Her writing usually stars spunky heroines finding their place in the world…and a little swoony romance, too.

Taslim's new novel is Always Be My Bibi.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I recently finished Park Avenue by Renée Ahdieh. I’ve been a fan of her work in the young adult fantasy space for a long time, so I was very intrigued by the concept of her adult contemporary debut, especially because my own upcoming adult debut also involves the dramatic, sometimes cutthroat lives of an affluent Asian family. For being a completely new genre and age category, I think she did a wonderful job!

I’m also almost done with Lauren Blackwood’s debut, Within these Wicked Walls, which is a YA fantasy loosely inspired by Jane Eyre. The world building is fascinating, a gothic take on Lauren's Jamaican heritage. It's a perfect foil for the almost wholesome romance between the exorcist heroine and the tormented young lord of the estate she’s been hired to cleanse!

After that, I’ll probably read an ARC of Jesmeen Kaur Deo’s Reasons We Break. I absolutely adored her adorable and swoony YA contemporary debut, so I’m curious about the thriller slant of her sophomore novel, which actually brings back characters introduced in the first book in a much darker context. This one is about a former side character's life in a deadly gang. The tonal shift is fascinating!

My taste in books can be pretty eclectic, as you can see. If it sounds interesting, I’ll pick it up, especially if I can support marginalized authors—particularly authors of color—in the process!

Visit Priyanka Taslim's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Love Match.

Q&A with Priyanka Taslim.

The Page 69 Test: The Love Match.

The Page 69 Test: Always Be My Bibi.

--Marshal Zeringue

Simon Toyne

Simon Toyne is the author of the internationally bestselling Sanctus trilogy (Sanctus, The Key, and The Tower), The Searcher, The Boy Who Saw, Dark Objects, and The Clearing, and has worked in British television for more than twenty years. As a writer, director, and producer he’s made several award-winning shows, one of which won a BAFTA. He lives in England with his wife and family, where he is permanently at work on his next novel.

Toyne's new novel is The Black Highway.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Toyne's reply:

I just this second finished reading Fatherland by Robert Harris.

Harris is always dependable and is back in the limelight again recently after the success of Conclave, which weaves a taut thriller around the selection of a new Pope.

Fatherland was his first novel, written after a successful career in journalism, and is speculative fiction that follows the investigation of a senior Nazi official after the end of the Second World war after Germany won, Hitler is about to celebrate his seventieth birthday, Europe is United under the swastika, and the president of the United States, Joseph Kennedy (JFK’s dad), is about to visit the country to cement friendly ties between the two nations.

It’s a brilliant book, so well thought out and going into just enough detail about how things work post-war that you totally understand the repressive world you are in without ever losing sight of the central mystery, which involves looted art treasures and copied documents outlining the final solution and the creation then destruction of the concentration camps, an event that has been removed from history because, as we all know, the winners write the history books. The murder enquiry threatens to unearth this dark and buried secret and also implicate the beloved Fuhrer who had a hand in it so, needless to say, the Gestapo are very keen to stop the detective finding out the truth of why the man was murdered. There’s a love interest in the form of a feisty American journalist who works with the main character to try and bring the truth to the world and a parade of vivid secondary characters that could all have stepped out of an old Humphrey Bogart film.

I loved it, and, funnily enough, even though it was written back in 1992, this book about a fascist superpower run by gangsters and policed by masked thugs who use fear as their main weapon, felt somehow incredibly modern and relevant.

Visit Simon Toyne's website, Facebook page, Twitter perch, and Instagram page.

My Book, The Movie: Sanctus.

The Page 69 Test: Sanctus.

The Page 69 Test: The Tower.

My Book, The Movie: The Tower.

My Book, The Movie: The Searcher.

Writers Read: Simon Toyne (October 2015).

The Page 69 Test: The Searcher.

The Page 69 Test: The Clearing.

My Book, The Movie: The Clearing.

Q&A with Simon Toyne.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mary Anna Evans

Mary Anna Evans is an award-winning author, a writing professor, and she holds a PhD in English literature, a background that, as it turns out, was ideal for writing her new standalone, The Dark Library, the story of a woman still menaced by her dead father whose rare book collection holds the secrets she needs to escape him.

Recently I asked Evans about what she was reading. Her reply:

As always, my nightstand and my electronic reading implements are full of stuff I'm reading. I'm just not a one-book-at-a-time reader.

Ursula K. Le Guin's Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching, because I have one of those minds that never stops, and that's not always a good thing. The Tao Te Ching doesn't help me achieve mental stillness, because nothing has done that yet, but it nudges me in the right direction. So does Le Guin's incandescent prose.

Stuart Turton's The Last Murder at the End of the World, because I'm leading a meeting of a local (Valley Cottage, New York) book group that's reading it. It's Agatha Christie-esque, and anybody who knows me will know that I'm predisposed to like that, but it also has a speculative dystopian vibe, and that combination is really fun.

James Sallis' Drive, because I'm leading a online book group for The Center for Fiction that will discuss it in this fall. I read it when it came out and have taught it more than once, but it's a challenging text, so I'm brushing up on it. It's a short, intense read that reads like a bloody and violent poem. It's also a master class in the use of point of view, Just to keep readers on their toes, Sallis sliced up the text and rearranged it, which is disorienting in a delicious way.

Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon," also because I'm leading a Center for Fiction book group that's reading it. (Join us!) I chose this short story because it, too, exploits the possibilities of a narrator who is unreliable but, in this case, is unintentionally so.

Learn more about the author and her work at Mary Anna Evans's website.

The Page 69 Test: Floodgates.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (October 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Strangers.

My Book, The Movie: Strangers.

The Page 69 Test: Plunder.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (November 2013).

The Page 69 Test: Rituals.

Q&A with Mary Anna Evans.

My Book, The Movie: The Physicists' Daughter.

The Page 69 Test: The Physicists' Daughter.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (June 2023).

The Page 69 Test: The Traitor Beside Her.

My Book, The Movie: The Traitor Beside Her.

The Page 69 Test: The Dark Library.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on The Remarkable Edmund Burke:

It is a mark of how much has changed, how words have changed their meaning, that Edmund Burke who, more than anyone else in the 18th century, defined what conservatism meant, has next to nothing in common with those who call themselves conservatives today. Today’s conservatives think government the enemy of liberty, and public spending at best a necessary evil; Burke thought liberty impossible without government, and public spending better than the expenditures of private wealth. When government spends on public projects, “The poorest man feels his own importance and dignity in it.” When the rich spend on themselves, it “makes the man of humbler rank and fortune sensible of his inferiority and degrades and vilifies his condition.”

This may seem to suggest that Burke wanted to narrow, if not eliminate, the difference between rich and poor. That was the last thing he wanted. Give everyone an equal share in the wealth of the country, you might end up with a reasonably prosperous middle-class, but you would not have the landed aristocracy of 18th century England, the kind of “gentlemen” able to run a country. If this sounds decidedly undemocratic, it is; and Burke makes no apologies. Liberty requires more than individual rights and majority rule. Libery without wisdom and without virtue “is the greatest of all possible evils, for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.” Liberty requires order, and order depends upon the existence of what both Burke and Thomas Jefferson called the “natural aristocracy.” Without this aristocracy, “there is no nation.” But what, exactly, beyond the wealth of the the landed aristocracy of England, makes one a member of this “natural aristocracy?” Burke tells us, tells us in a single sentence, a single sentence that would shock to the limits, which I confess are not very great, of every law school teacher teaching legal writing who fails to understand that brevity of expression reflects, too often, only the paucity of thought; a single sentence that fills up all but two lines of a full page of Burke’s twelve volume Collected Works:

To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy; to be taught to respect one’s self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to make a large view of the wide-spread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw the court and attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found; to be habituated in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honor and duty; to be formed to the greatest degree of vigilance, foresight, and circumspection, in a state of things in which no fault is committed with impunity and the slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous consequences; to be led to a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense that your are considered as an instructor of your fellow-citizens in their highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God and man; to be employed as an administrator of law and justice, and to be thereby amongst the first benefactors to mankind; to be a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenuous art; to be amongst rich traders, who from their success are presumed to have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to possess the virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to commutative justice: these are the circumstances of men that form what I should call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.

Who, today, writes like this? Who, today, wants to? Who, today, taught first by radio and television, taught now by social media on electronic devices - and soon to be taught by artificial intelligence that, though we had not thought very much before, we will not have to think at all - would even think it worth the effort to try? And still, despite that, we cannot quite rid ourselves of the sense, the suspicion, that we are missing something, that the world has become a poorer place; that if, by some miracle, someone would once again write, and speak, like Edmund Burke, there would be reason to hope that the future might be better than what we are forced to hear in the dismal rhetoric of the present. It is not impossible, precisely because Burke was not impossible. He was not, himself, the product of the kind of background he described in that magnificent single endless sentence that manages somehow to seem too short. Edmund Burke was not the titled heir of an English aristocrat; Edmund Burke was the son of an Irish lawyer.

Biographies have been written about Burke; British and European histories are filled with his name. But perhaps the most interesting, and most incisive, thing written about him is the article on his life in the once famous 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the edition that brought together the greatest scholars of the age to write about what, some of them, had studied all their lives. John Morley, who had led some of the most prestigious literary reviews in London when literary reviews were read by everyone in public life; who had, in 1904, written the definitive biography of William Gladstone, and who had himself served in Parliament, describes Burke’s life, especially his early life, in a way only someone can who has led a life with something like the same experience.

Burke graduated from Trinity College in Ireland, but, Morley writes, “His knowledge of Greek and Latin was never thorough…. He could quote Homer and Pindar, and he had read Aristotle. Like others going through the conventional course of instruction, he kept a place in his memory for the various charms of Virgil and Horace, of Tacitus and Ovid, but the master whose page by night and day he turned with devout hand was…Cicero.” Burke left college, “with no great stock of well-ordered knowledge.”

The reader can decide for himself the comparative merits of what Burke learned and what is taught in a university today. If, as Morley suggests, Burke had something less that what might have been expected from his Trinity education, this was not a misfortune: “He neither received the benefits nor suffered the drawbacks of systematic intellectual discipline.” He had the same freedom from the limitations of formal training when he studied law. “Like a great many other youths with an eminent destiny before them, Burke conceived a strong distaste for the profession of the law.”

Burke’s political career began in 1765 when he became private secretary to Lord Rockingham, the British prime minister. A year later, he became a member of the House of Commons, and gave his first speech the same day that the great William Pitt gave his last. The House of Commons, Thomas Macaulay would later write, “was in doubt to which of them the palm of eloquence should be assigned. It was indeed a splendid sunset and a splendid dawn.” What did Burke do, besides give a maiden speech no one who heard it ever forgot? “The first session I was in Parliament, I found it necessary to analyze the whole commercial, financial, constitutional, and foreign interest of Great Britain and its empire.” Just what we today expect from a newly elected member of Congress, or the United States Senate.

Burke could talk, Burke could write. He was considered, Macaulay reports, “as the only match in conversation for Dr. Johnson.” His speeches on America, speeches in which he defended the right of Americans to insist that only they could tax themselves, “will last as long as the English language.” Everyone who heard him speak, everyone who read what he wrote, agreed that there was no one like him. Morley called him “one of the greatest names in political literature,” whose “writing is magnificent, because he knew so much, thought so comprehensively, and felt so strongly.” Everyone agreed that Edmund Burke was a very great man; and everyone who said that, insisted that when it came to the French Revolution, Edmund Burke simply had no idea what he was talking about.

We think of the French Revolution as a great event, the end of king’s tyranny and the beginning of the ‘rights of man,’ the belief that everyone, every citizen, has the equal right to decide who should govern, and the terms and conditions under which those who govern will be allowed to act. What seems to us a commonplace, the foundation of political liberty, was, for Burke, the beginning of the end, the false doctrine of those who know nothing of what liberty requires. Everything, “our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles, and were, indeed, the result of both combined: I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion.” They “kept learning in existence,” learning that “enlarged their ideas and furnished their minds,” and this learning kept liberty alive.

The French Revolution meant that, “the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisticators, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.” There is nothing left of tradition, nothing left of the feeling of obligation one generation owes to another; laws, instead of honored because handed down from one age to the next, “are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests.” With the French Revolution, the country will become a “nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time poor and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing hereafter.”

What produced this demand that everyone have an equal right to govern themselves? “A false philosophy passed from academies into courts; and the great themselves were infected with the theories which conducted to their ruin. Knowledge, which in the last two centuries either did not exist at all, or existed solidly on right principles and in chosen hands, was now diffused, weakened, and perverted.” In other words, the Enlightenment, with its promise that everyone, if taught properly, could learn to think for themselves, and the philosophy of Rousseau, with its insistence that “man is born free, but is everywhere in chains,” and that the only legitimate government is one people construct for themselves. Burke insists that nothing like this is possible.

We are not born free; we do not choose our country, any more than we choose our parents. We learn the ways of the world in the place, the nation, in which we come into existence; we learn our morals before we have the use of reason. The real social contract is not an agreement about who should rule and who should obey; the real social contract is a partnership “in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfections;” a partnership, moreover, “not only between those who are living, but those who are dead, and those are to be born.” Those who speak of new beginnings, who insist that the past has nothing to teach, that it is nothing but a regrettable record of irrational prejudice and violent oppression, understand nothing of the real nature of things: that instead of progress, there has been a decline; that instead of greater freedom, there is now, because of the French Revolution, the greater slavery of lowered horizons and regimented minds.

Everyone agrees that Burke was wrong about the French Revolution, wrong when he insisted that it was “the deepest, the most craftily devised, the best combined and the most extensive design that was ever carried on, since the beginning of the world, against all property, all order, all religion, all law, and all real freedom.” Still, it might give us pause to remember that John Morley, after declaring at the beginning of his article on Burke that he was wrong to insist that the Revolution was not necessary, that reform had been possible, writes at the end of that same article that events in France confirmed “Burke’s sagacity and foresight.” And it might give us reason to wonder whether this, or any other, republic, can survive without a class of men and women educated in the best of what the past has to teach: ancient philosophy and both ancient and modern history - the liberal arts education that formed the natural aristocracy that both Thomas Jefferson and Edmund Burke thought essential to the preservation of freedom, and to which the works of Edmund Burke have become such a valuable addition.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot.

--Marshal Zeringue

Liz Alterman

Liz Alterman lives in New Jersey with her husband, three sons, and two cats. She spends most days repeatedly microwaving the same cup of coffee and looking up synonyms.

Alterman's new novel is Claire Casey's Had Enough.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

This past month I’ve been focusing on non-fiction. I was very fortunate to receive an advance reader copy of Rebecca Bloom’s insightful When Women Get Sick: An Empowering Approach for Getting the Support You Need, which is a fantastic resource for anyone navigating the complexities of our healthcare system. Filled with practical strategies, hard-won wisdom, and eye-opening anecdotes, this is a must-read for those with an illness and anyone who supports them.

I listened to Happy to Help by Amy Wilson. As someone who has a difficult time saying “no,” I found this relatable and empowering. A trained actor, Wilson does a wonderful job bringing “characters” to life in this essay collection which also explores the way women are frequently dismissed when seeking a proper diagnosis, underscoring the need for Bloom’s When Women Get Sick.

Whenever I’m between books, I return to Ann Patchett. This month, I listened to Truth & Beauty, which offers a heartbreaking and diary-like look at Patchett’s friendship with author and poet Lucy Grealy, who wrote the critically-acclaimed memoir Autobiography of a Face. Grealy undergoes countless surgeries to restore her jaw after losing part of it to cancer as a child. Without intending to, I've been immersed in stories that illuminate how truly flawed our healthcare system is. (Again, see Bloom's book.) As devastating as Truth & Beauty is, it also brims with love and a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how two writers approach their craft very differently.

I recommend all of these.

Visit Liz Alterman's website.

Q&A with Liz Alterman.

My Book, The Movie: The Perfect Neighborhood.

The Page 69 Test: The Perfect Neighborhood.

The Page 69 Test: The House on Cold Creek Lane.

My Book, The Movie: The House on Cold Creek Lane.

Writers Read: Liz Alterman (August 2024).

My Book, The Movie: Claire Casey's Had Enough.

The Page 69 Test: Claire Casey's Had Enough.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Stevens

The son of two librarians, Mark Stevens was raised in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and has worked as a reporter, as a national television news producer, and in public relations. The Fireballer (2023) was named Best Baseball Novel by Twin Bill literary magazine and named a Best Baseball Book of the Year by Spitball Magazine. His novel Antler Dust was a Denver Post bestseller in 2007 and 2009. Buried by the Roan, Trapline, and Lake of Fire were all finalists for the Colorado Book Award (2012, 2015, and 2016, respectively), which Trapline won. Trapline also won the Colorado Authors League Award for Best Genre Fiction.

Stevens’s short stories have been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, and Denver Noir. In both 2016 and 2023, Stevens was named Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Writer of the Year. He hosts a regular podcast for Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and has served as president of the Rocky Mountain chapter for Mystery Writers of America.

His new novel is No Lie Lasts Forever.

Recently I asked Stevens about what he was reading. The author's reply:

Deep Fury by David Freed

The latest entry in the Cordell Logan series is smooth, witty, and a joy to read. Logan is a former government assassin turned flight instructor. He’s a wannabe Buddha. His student pilots learn in a Cessna 172 called the Ruptured Duck. He’s a burrito aficionado. He lives in a converted garage apartment in a seaside California town called Rancho Bonito. with his “orange blimp” of a cat named Kiddiot. The case here involves a dead guy who literally fell out of the sky. It’s Logan’s old wingman from his U.S. Air Force days. The plot moves from the obvious (drug cartels) into something more interesting and a tad more complex about government and military technology. What you get with Cordell Logan is a jaded but-still-willing-to-help worldview and, in Deep Fury, a story engine that purrs like the Ruptured Duck’s engine, thrumming along with “nary a hiccup.”

Better to Beg by Kristi MacKenzie

You won’t soon forget Viv and Hux. Or their fights as their band The Deserters makes its way cross-country on an epic journey to, well, one of the best endings you’ll come across. This is the story of a rowdy rock band. There will be a drugs. It’s the voices that drive Better to Beg. Back and forth from Hux to Viv we go and it’s rarely convivial. Viv is the grown-up (and that’s a relative term) and Hux is the delinquent subadult. Hux isn’t good with time or money. Viv tries to lay down the law after a show in Boston. Sitting in an alley after dumpster-diving for some scraps, Hux doesn’t care too much that the band is broke. He wants to cultivate a “myth” like Ziggy Stardust or Captain Beefheart. “All art must be the presence of craft, not the reminder of labor,” he tries to explain to Viv. “They only want the finished product.” Viv wants a record deal. Hux wants to work on his rowdy, drug-fueled reputation. What can I say about the ending other than it’s one of the most well-earned, perfect moments I’ve read in a long time. Art, myth, identity … and the power of story. Despite themselves and because of who they are, Hux and Viv are legends. So it starts, so it goes.

Lou Reed: The King of New York by Will Hermes

This highly detailed biography, told with a calm style, follows Reed step by step through high school and college as he endures electroshock therapy, absorbs the poetry of Delmore Schwartz, forms bands, listens to jazz, listens to doo-wop, explores the avant-garde arts community, and befriends Andy Warhol. “Aesthetically,” writes Hermes, “Warhol surely confirmed, and likely amplified, Reed’s notions about finding beauty in the ugly, banal, reviled, and despised, just as he mirrored Reed’s taste for repetition, noise, distortion, cultural provocation, and periodic arcs toward transcendence.”

Reed turned himself inside out for art and music. And he frequently did it for cultural provocation. He struggled with commercialism, but commercialism ultimately bailed him out. He struggled with professional jealousy and envy, but was ultimately revered. A terrific portrait of an inimitable artistic force.

Visit Mark Stevens's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Fireballer.

Q&A with Mark Stevens.

My Book, The Movie: The Fireballer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nev March

Author Nev March is the first Indian-born writer to win Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America’s Award for Best First Crime Fiction. Her debut novel Murder in Old Bombay was an Edgar and Anthony finalist.

March’s books deal with issues of identity, race and moral boundaries. Her sequel, Peril at the Exposition is set at the 1893 World’s Fair, during a time of conflict that planted the seeds of today’s red-blue political divide. In Captain Jim and Lady Diana’s third adventure The Spanish Diplomat’s Secret they face a strange, otherworldly foe who causes Jim to question the nature of justice. In the newly released The Silversmith’s Puzzle, Captain Jim and Diana race back to colonial India to rescue Diana’s beloved brother Adi, who is accused of murder.

Recently I asked March about what she was reading. The author's reply:

The Kidnapping of Mark Twain: A Bombay Mystery by Anuradha Kumar

I picked up this book because of the premise. I knew Mark Twain had visited Bombay in the 1890s, since that’s the period I write about. This was a charming romp through Bombay with fun and unexpected characters! Young American Consul Henry Baker and his trusty manservant Abdul meet a bewildering array of Indian and English characters. When the famous writer Mark Twain goes missing, Henry must rely on Maya, a green eyed Anglo Indian woman, and a strange magician, to investigate and rescue the great man. In enjoyed this unexpectedly fun tale with lovely atmospheric detail. Felt like I was there, back in the narrow gullies watching hawkers and tamashas of roving actors on the streets. It had some nice surprises, and a couple of poignant moments set in a splendid backdrop.

In Search of Amrit Kaur: A Lost Princess and Her Vanished World by Livia Manera Sambuy, Todd Portnowitz (Translator)

Did Amrit Kaur sell her priceless emerald necklace to save a Jewish family from the holocaust? This was a poignant story of a lost princess and early feminist. This book was part of my research for my next novel and held enormous fascination. The interwoven investigative and historical passages are painful and engrossing. Add to this an emotional layer: parallel stories of two daughters estranged from their mothers, and the ways we come to terms with the tears in our hearts. I had no idea that the Sikh Raja, Amrit Kaur’s father was such a Francophile! His palace in Pumjab is a mini Versailles! It was an eye opener to know that this early feminist had her heart broken when her husband took a second wife (Raja’s often did). She was so disappointed she went to Europe and when it was time to return, she absconded with a pair of American friends! The passages of her deprivations in a Paris prison during WW2 brought me to tears.

Beast and Man in India A Popular Sketch of Indian Animals in their Relations with the People by John Lockwood Kipling

Published in 1904, by the father of Rudyard Kipling, this little book contains more than the details of horse breeds and the often-comical sayings about animals. These sayings reveal a great deal about the late nineteenth century in India under the British Raj. It also inadvertently describes the bigotry and attitudes of the British administrative class towards Indians (Orientals, as they are called in the book.) In part funny, engaging and cringy, this honest little book was written to amuse members of the British public who were curious about their largest colony, India. While it shows a keen interest in the animals and customs of Indians, sadly, now, it reflects far more than the author ever intended, his own arrogance and disdain for Indians.

Next on my list: Canary in the Coal Mine by Charles Salzberg

Why did I pick it up? I attended CrimeConn, the crimewriters conference recently and met Charles Salzberg. He moderated a brilliant panel devoted to the justice system—it included folks that worked within it, some that help inmates reintegrate into society, and some that were impacted by the justice system (read, lived through imprisonment). The book is a hardboiled mystery, and I like to mix up my reading, so will take this on the plane when I travel next week. The premise intrigued me: A NY city PI who suffers from anger management issues and insomnia is hired by a beautiful woman to find her husband, dead or alive.

Visit Nev March's website.

Q&A with Nev March.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in Old Bombay.

My Book, The Movie: Murder in Old Bombay.

Writers Read: Nev March (October 2022).

The Page 69 Test: The Silversmith's Puzzle.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shirley Russak Wachtel

Shirley Russak Wachtel is the author of A Castle in Brooklyn. She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Wachtel holds a doctor of letters degree from Drew University and for the past thirty-five years has taught English literature at Middlesex College in Edison, New Jersey. Her podcast, EXTRAordinary People, features inspiring individuals who have overcome obstacles to make a difference. The mother of three grown sons and grandmother to three precocious granddaughters, she currently resides in East Brunswick, New Jersey, with her husband, Arthur.

Wachtel's new novel is The Baker of Lost Memories.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I have been an avid reader since I was eight years old. Whether I’m sitting in my backyard, waiting in a doctor’s office, or just before drifting off to sleep, I always have a book in hand. Like the stories I write, I am drawn to tales about people and relationships. My love for books goes beyond the stories so that I never borrow books but buy each book so that it occupies a coveted space in my library. Every few weeks, I rotate the genres, moving from classics to nonfiction and popular fiction.

I recently reread Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a play about a small town in New England which takes us through the lives of ordinary people as they raise their families, find love, and endure loss. This play touched me as it showed that there is beauty in even the mundane. I made sure to see the latest rendition of this play on Broadway shortly after I read it.

The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon sheds light on individuals in American history who made significant contributions to our country, but whose names we may not know. One woman, Clara Brown, comes to mind. As a slave, Clara was separated from her young daughter and searched for her in the ensuing years. Once emancipated, Clara worked for others, then established her own cooking and laundering business before becoming a millionaire and philanthropist in Colorado. At age 82, she and her daughter were finally reunited. Each of the vignettes in McMahon’s book are just as compelling and inspiring as this one.

As soon as Lynda Cohen Loigman’s The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern came out, I knew I had to read it. I have been a fan of her work since The Two-Family House, for she writes of the people I know, the Jews of Brooklyn who face struggles as they build their lives. In her latest book, we meet a retired pharmacist who relocates to a senior community in Florida where she is shocked to meet the man who deserted her sixty years earlier. We learn what happened through a series of flashbacks. Adding extra spice to the story is magical realism, a technique I use in my latest book.

Visit Shirley Wachtel's website.

The Page 69 Test: A Castle in Brooklyn.

My Book, The Movie: A Castle in Brooklyn.

Q&A with Shirley Russak Wachtel.

My Book, The Movie: The Baker of Lost Memories.

--Marshal Zeringue