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:

After devouring Philip Miller’s The Goldenacre I am reading The Hollow Tree, the second book of his Shona Sandison Investigation series which takes place in Scotland, Miller’s home. Shona, a journalist whose newspaper has folded, attends a wedding where a guest commits. Shona wants to know why and investigates. The story is gripping but what adds to the pleasure of reading Miller is the strength of his writing. He immerses me in his world, let’s me see and feel the characters and paints their surroundings with his poet’s eye. I am there with Shona. The third one in the Shona series is coming out soon. I will read that one as soon as I finish The Hollow Tree.

Visit Camilla Trinchieri's website.

Q&A with Camilla Trinchieri.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in Pitigliano.

Writers Read: Camilla Trinchieri (July 2025).

--Marshal Zeringue

Vicki Delany

Vicki Delany is one of Canada’s most prolific and varied crime writers and a national bestseller in the U.S. She has written more than forty books: clever cozies to Gothic thrillers to gritty police procedurals, to historical fiction and novellas for adult literacy. She is currently writing four cozy mystery series: the Tea by the Sea mysteries for Kensington, the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series for Crooked Lane Books, the Catskill Resort mysteries for Penguin Random House, and the Lighthouse Library series (as Eva Gates) for Crooked Lane.

Delany is a past president of the Crime Writers of Canada and co-founder and organizer of the Women Killing It Crime Writing Festival. Her work has been nominated for the Derringer, the Bony Blithe, the Ontario Library Association Golden Oak, and the Arthur Ellis Awards. She is the recipient of the 2019 Derrick Murdoch Award for contributions to Canadian crime writing. Delany lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

Tea with Jam & Dread is her newest Tea by the Sea mystery.

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

I’m a summertime reader. I get far more reading done in the summer than any other time of year, except when I’m on vacation. I love nothing more than sitting in the sun by the pool, reading reading reading. And my house looks it, but I can tidy it in September.

What have I been enjoying this summer?

Shipwrecked Souls by Barbara Fradkin. Full disclaimer here, Barbara is a very close friend of mine. But that shouldn’t prevent me from enjoying her books and I do. This is the 12th of her popular Inspector Green series, set in Canada’s capital city of Ottawa. The books are gritty and tough, with difficult themes handled sensitively and well. In Shipwrecked Souls, the death of a woman recently arrived from Ukraine unravels secrets stretching back to the Holocaust.

A completely different read is In Winter I get up at Night by Jane Urquhart. Not a mystery or crime novel, but the memoires of a Saskatchewan woman stretching from her family’s arrival in the 20s as settlers on the northern Great Plains, the one-room schoolhouse she was educated in, the entire year of her girlhood she spent in hospital, her teaching career, and the long, long secret affair she had with a famous man in the 1950s and 60s. Throw in some Dukaboors, Jewish radical socialists, medical procedures, rabid racists when the object of racism was people from Eastern Europe, and wonderful evocative descriptions of Saskatchewan. The book is a novel, but a beautiful rendition of one woman’s life in times not so far from our own.

For sheer fun, nothing beats the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books by Laurie R. King. I’ve been reading this series since the first book, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice came out thirty years ago, and still love them. As I reader I wasn’t entirely happy when Sherlock Holmes married a woman something like 40 years younger than him, but I’m coming around to enjoying their relationship. Particularly, as Russell (as he calls her) is Holmes (as she calls him) equal (or better?) in every way. The most recent book is Knave of Diamonds. Russell’s long lost uncle appears, and he might have something to do with the disappearance of some famous jewels many years ago.

Visit Vicki Delany's website, and follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

The Page 69 Test: Rest Ye Murdered Gentlemen.

The Page 69 Test: A Scandal in Scarlet.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in a Teacup.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (September 2021).

The Page 69 Test: Deadly Summer Nights.

The Page 69 Test: The Game is a Footnote.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (January 2023).

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (January 2024).

The Page 69 Test: The Sign of Four Spirits.

The Page 69 Test: A Slay Ride Together With You.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (December 2024).

The Page 69 Test: The Incident of the Book in the Nighttime.

--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 Novels of W.H. Hudson:

Ford Madox Ford, who knew every great writer of his time, and helped more than one of them with his writing, thought W.H. Hudson, not Henry James, or D.H. Lawrence, or Thomas Hardy, or even his close friend Joseph Conrad, “the greatest prose writer of his day.” Ford was not alone in this judgment. In London, before the Great War, the First World War, the war that changed everything, including, Ford would have argued, the way the world, especially the English speaking world, looked upon literature and those who spent their lives trying to make a serious contribution to what was worth reading, there was a “French restaurant called the Mont Blanc where, on Tuesdays, the elect of the city’s intelligentsia lunched and discussed with grave sobriety the social problems of the day.” Ford was there, of course; and so also were Joseph Conrad, John Galsworthy, Hilaire Belloc and W.B. Yeats.

The conversation followed a predictable pattern: talk about “Flaubert and Maupassant and Huysman and Mendes and Monet and Maeterlinck and Turgenev. And if Belloc came bustling in and Conrad was there, the noise would grow to exceed the noise of Irish fairs when shillelaghs were in use.” And that because “Belloc with his rich brogue and burr would loudly assert that his ambition was to make by writing four thousand pounds a year and to order a monthly ten dozen of Clos Vougeot or Chateau Brane Cantenac…and this to Conrad who would go rigid with fury if you suggested that anyone, not merely himself, but any writer of position, could possibly write for money.”

And then, suddenly, Hudson would walk in and the room would go silent, the immediate tribute of those who understood the nature, and the extent, of his achievement, “the greatest prose writer of his day.” Hudson would try to deny it, insisting that, “I’m not one of you damned writers: I’m a naturalist from LaPlata.” And then he would laugh, because he did not really mind at all that they held him in such high regard. It had taken him long enough to earn it.

Hudson was born in Argentina of American parents in 1841, and until he moved to London when he was forty had never, other than a few visits to Buenos Aires, been off the pampas. He never spent a day in a forest, or an hour in a jungle, and had never so much as stepped on the soil of Venezuela, but Green Mansions, one of the two great novels he wrote, is set in the jungle, and the other one, The Purple Land, is set in and around Venezuela. If Hudson was the “greatest living writer of English,” it was, at least in part, because the world he described was the world he invented, the world he watched form and reform inside his mind. It must have been this, or something like it, that drew the attention, and earned the respect, of the other great writers of his time.

“He was, at any rate in England, a writer’s writer,” Ford insisted. “I never heard a lay person speak of Hudson in London, at least with any enthusiasm. I never heard a writer speak of him with anything but a reverence that was given to no other human being. For as a writer he was a magician.” Green Mansions and The Purple Land are not just two great novels. All the writers Ford Madox Ford writes about in his Portraits From Life, including especially Conrad, believed that The Purple Land “is the supreme - is the only - rendering of Romance in the English language,” while Green Mansions “is Anglo-Saxondom’s only rendering of hopeless, of aching passion.”

Whatever else it is, The Purple Land is a marvelous tale of consecutive impossibilities, the chronicled adventures of Richard Lamb who marries a girl against her father’s wishes and then, as they try to escape his wrath, he is separated from her as gets caught up in one of the country’s frequent civil conflicts. The leader of the rebellion, the hero Santa Coloma, known for “his dauntless courage and patience in defeat,” is saved from death when Lamb, quite by accident, helps him escape from prison. Then, later, when Lamb is taken prisoner by the revolutionaries and brought before their general to decide his punishment, which means in fact the method of his execution, the general turns out to be Coloma, who recognizes him as the man who had saved his life and, instead of a sentence of death, sets him free.

This is only the beginning of a series of adventures that mark Lamb’s struggle to get back to the young wife he has left waiting for him in Montevideo, a struggle that bears a certain resemblance to that Greek classic, The Odyssey. The resemblance seems acknowledged when we are told that Montevideo is called Modern Troy. Among the other things that happen to him, Lamb encounters an old man, insane with grief, his only son killed in the war, who thinks his new visitor is his son returned to life. Then he saves a woman who lost her father and her brothers in the war and is being forced to marry a feckless fraud who has taken her father’s place and wants to take her home. Every woman Lamb meets - and he meets a lot of them - is a different kind of problem. A young woman only six months married, but already bored with her husband, tries to tempt him, but without success. Another woman, Dolores, is more successful. She intoxicates him with a kiss, and with that kiss becomes intoxicated herself. Forced to admit that he is already married, she calls him a disgrace, but because “they love each other madly,” they spend their last few hours together, sitting hand in hand, waiting for the dawn, when he must leave, thinking, as only a true romantic could do, that their “separation would be an eternal one.” Like Odysseus, Lamb finally reaches home, and not only finds his wife still waiting, but, an even greater miracle, manages one last time to help Santa Coloma, the hero of the failed revolution, make his escape so he can, with the patience he has so often been taught by defeat, begin again the always difficult preparation for the next rebellion.

Lamb’s adventures are the surface of the story, the story told by countless authors since it was first told by Homer. Beneath the surface, however, the reader discovers more than a gifted storyteller, a rare intelligence that leads us to places we had not known existed. How many other writers could declare, without the slightest reservation, that civilization is a mistake, with its “million conventions…vain education…striving after comforts that bring no comfort to the heart.” We had happiness once, but “we went away from it in search of another grander kind of happiness which some dreamer - a Bacon or another - assured us we should find. We had only to conquer Nature, find out her secrets, make her our obedient slave, then the earth would be Eden, and every man Adam and every woman Eve. We are still marching bravely on, conquering Nature, but how weary and sad we are getting ! The old joy in life and gaiety of heart have vanished….”

It is another, if perhaps a stranger, indication of Hudson’s ability to see into the nature of things, that he could write a line that, a generation later, would be written by another writer born and raised in Argentina, Jorge Borges, who may have remembered when he wrote it a line he once wrote about a mathematical theory he did not understand but hoped one day to plagiarize: “I have often begun the study of metaphysics, but have always been interrupted by happiness.” Hudson, nearly half a century earlier, had written: “I have not read many books of philosophy, because when I tried to be a philosopher ‘happiness was always breaking in,’ as someone says….”

The Purple Land sold almost no copies when it was first published in l885; Green Mansions became an enormous commercial success when it was published in America near the end of Hudson’s long life in 1922. The story is told by Abel who, “a young man of unblemished character, not a soldier by profession…allowed myself to be drawn very readily by friends and family into a conspiracy to overthrow the government of the moment, to the object of replacing it by more worthy me - ourselves, to wit.” The attempt failed, and Abel has to flee for his life. He goes to the Orinoco because “to visit this primitive wilderness had been a cherished dream.”

From his boyhood on the Argentine pampas, Hudson loved nothing so much as the study of birds. They were God’s perfect creatures, their movements and their voices more graceful, more rhythmic, than any other living thing. Rima, the girl in Green Mansions, is the most birdlike creature in all of English literature. Abel meets Rima, or rather they gradually discover each other, as he becomes aware of her presence, the music he hears among the trees, the sense that someone, or something, is following him, watching from a distance during his long walks through the thick green forest. Rima becomes everything to him, “Because nothing so exquisite had ever been created. All the separate and fragmentary beauty and melody are graceful motion found scattered throughout nature were concentrated and harmoniously combined in her.” She spoke a language “without words, suggesting more than word to the soul.”

Rima lives in the forest, that part of it where the natives never go because they think her a demon there to bring them death and destruction. They find their courage and burn her to death in a gigantic tree where she tried to hide. Abel swears vengeance. In Heart of Darkness, which some would argue is the finest work of ninety pages in the English language, Joseph Conrad describes how Kurtz, a European sent to Africa to bring civilization to the natives, becomes more savage than any native ever was. In Green Mansions, Hudson’s character, Abel, becomes just like Kurtz, the only difference that Abel is driven, not by a failed idea, but by a lost love.

It is all quite deliberate, each step planned carefully in advance. After Rima is killed, he goes to a tribe the enemy of the tribe that killed her. His mind is clear; he knows precisely what he wants to do. It is a rebellion against God, his hatred a rebellion against all morality: “there was nothing evil, nothing cruel and contrary to nature, that I would not be guilty of, glorying in my guilt.” Nor was this the temper of a few days: “I remained for close upon two months at Managa’s village, never repenting nor desisting in my efforts to induce the Indians to join me in that barbarous adventure on which my heart was set.” Everyone does what they are supposed to do: everyone is killed “who had lighted the fire round that great green tree on which Rima had taken refuge, who’d danced around the blaze, shouting ‘Burn! burn!’”

When he leaves, making his way out of the forest, Abel has a vision of being with Rima again. “No longer the old vexing doubt now! ‘You are you and I am I - why is it?’ - the question asked when our souls were near together, like two raindrops side by side, drawing irresistibly nearer, ever nearer: for now they had touched and were not two, but one inseparable drop, crystallized beyond change, not to be disintegrated by time, nor shattered by death’s blow, nor resolved by alchemy.”

W.H. Hudson draws the reader as close to what he has written as Abel was drawn to Rima, that strange being in whom everything beautiful and wonderful were combined in a way never seen before. No one had written anything like The Purple Land and Green Mansions before Hudson; and no one will ever write anything like them again. They stand apart, equal and alone, something Hudson, and only Hudson, could do.

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; Edmund Burke.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kashana Cauley

Kashana Cauley is the author of the newly released The Payback, a student loan industry heist novel.

She is also the author of The Survivalists, which was published in January 2023 and named a best book of 2023 by the BBC, the Today Show, Vogue, and many other outlets. She’s a TV writer who has written for The Great North, Pod Save America on HBO, and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and a former contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She has also written for The Atlantic, Esquire, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone, among other publications.

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

I just finished Great Black Hope, by Rob Franklin, and loved it. It’s paced how the most relaxing part of summer feels, languid as our narrator drifts into more and more situations that cause him trouble. I also loved the book because it asks the fundamental question of how Black people deal with the fact that our Americanness is often conditional, and dependent on how much we subsume ourselves into the dominant culture, and how unsatisfying it can be to shoehorn ourselves into the sort of respectability politics that we think might save us, but really don’t.

Visit Kashana Cauley's website.

Q&A with Kashana Cauley.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alie Dumas-Heidt

Alie Dumas-Heidt lives in the Puget Sound with her husband, adult kids, and two Goldendoodles – Astrid and Torvi. Growing up she wanted to be a detective and a writer and spent a few years working as a police dispatcher. Now, working is writing in her home office with the dogs at her feet. When she’s not writing she enjoys being in the forest, creating glass art, yarn crafts, and watching baseball.

Dumas-Heidt's new novel is The Myth Maker.

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

I am currently reading two very different books right now, which I do to myself often. I have an older cozy mystery called The Quiche of Death by M.C. Beaton, and Evil Eye by Etaf Rum.

The Quiche of Death is the first in the Agatha Raisin cozy series that started in the 90's. I jumped into the books after watching the show on the BBC. It's a fun read with a spirited leading lady, Agatha Raisin, who leaves a successful PR career and unwittingly becomes a super sleuth in the Cotswolds. It is a little sassier than other cozy reads, but the sass feels true to the characters. I love how the side characters and the town itself add to the story and it's been my escape place before bed.

Evil Eye by Etaf Rum is one I just bought and it was because of my mom's recent obsession with the image of the evil eye. The cover art caught me from across the bookstore and then I got pulled in by the details of the story. The writing is so clean and easy to fall into. Right now I'm getting to know the main character, Yara Murad, and feel the suffocation she's enduring from a life that isn't quite her own. I'm only few chapters in but I'm invested in Yara and I'm pretty sure she will eventually make me cry.

Visit Alie Dumas-Heidt's website.

Q&A with Alie Dumas-Heidt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Turner Gable Kahn

Turner Gable Kahn is the author of the debut novel The Dirty Version, a feminist contemporary romance about a novelist and an intimacy coordinator who are forced to collaborate on new steamy scenes for the TV adaptation of her book. Set between South Florida and Hollywood, it’s a slow-burn love story that explores power, creative control, and emotional intimacy.

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

One of the books I keep returning to—mentally and emotionally—is Everything’s Fine by Cecilia Rabess. On the surface, it’s a workplace romance between two people on opposite ends of the political spectrum: Jess, a young Black analyst starting out at a finance firm, and Josh, her smug, conservative coworker. But of course, it’s not really a romance in the traditional sense. It’s a razor-sharp exploration of power, identity, race, and the emotional gymnastics involved in navigating proximity to someone who can’t—or won’t—see the world the way you do.

What struck me most is how Rabess lets the emotional tension simmer under the surface of everyday interactions. The love story feels both impossible and deeply believable, which is what makes the book so haunting. She writes the desperation between them so well—the push and pull, the longing, the ache of two people who can’t seem to stay away. It reminded me of the magnetic attraction between the two main characters in Sally Rooney’s Normal People, but filtered through a lens of cultural tension and emotional realism that’s entirely Rabess’s own.

I admire how unflinching it is—how it refuses to resolve itself neatly. It reminded me that the most provocative fiction doesn’t always shout; sometimes it just sits with the discomfort and lets you feel it long after you’ve turned the last page.

Visit Turner Gable Kahn's website.

Q&A with Turner Gable Kahn.

My Book, The Movie: The Dirty Version.

--Marshal Zeringue

Miriam Gershow

Miriam Gershow is the author of Closer, Survival Tips: Stories and The Local News. Her writing is featured in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. She is the recipient of a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Oregon Literary Fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Gershow is the organizer of “100 Notable Small Press Books,” a curated list of the year’s recommended books from independent publishers.

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

I found a copy of Gin Phillip’s Fierce Kingdom at the library book sale this year. I’d been interested when this first came out eight years ago, but I was too early into parenting to be able to stomach the story of a woman trapped with her four-year-old son at the zoo during an active shooter situation. I’m so glad I came back to it: it was harrowing, propulsive, and so well-rendered up to the very last note. It’s a story of motherhood at its most desperate, though the writing is so sharp and lively, you’re never entirely cowed by the desperation. Phillip’s keeps the story aloft in unimaginable circumstances.

I’m also in the middle of spearheading 100 Notable Small Press Books 2025, a project of 50+ volunteer reviewers reading and recommending titles across genres and presses. The final list will be published in LitHub in November. In the meantime, I’m on a small press reading kick. Currently I’m rereading Scott Nadelson’s Trust Me (Forest Avenue Press) for an event we’re doing together on how we imagine Oregon in our work. Scott’s version of Oregon is so tender and mossy and mushroom-capped, you can see it and smell it in every page. His work makes you want to snug your fleece cap tighter around your head and pull up your smart wool socks. It’s pretty close to the opposite of how I write about place - I mostly approach it through the people and the sociological updrafts and winds.

And finally I’m reading my friend Heather Ryan’s essay collection in progress. Bookmark Heather’s name; her essay, "Ballistic Trajectory," which anchors her collection, is one of the most affecting essays I’ve read in years: unflinching and heartbreaking about so many things, including institutional failures of academia, the limits of teaching, and how, years later, the progress of MeToo is no progress at all. It’s going to blow everyone’s ears back when it’s published.

Visit Miriam Gershow's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Local News.

Q&A with Miriam Gershow.

--Marshal Zeringue

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. Liberty 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