Dublin, 1930s - political unrest between Republicans and the De Valera Government. An art exhibition takes place and contains an unusual painting entitled "The Wishing Boy". Catrin Kilpatrick, the daughter of a well-known business man, admires the unique painting and wants to buy it, but Devlin O'Farell the artist refuses to sell it. Determined to have her way, she travels to Galway where he lives, and plans to make the purchase. Little does she know, Devlin worked for Flan Maguire, the most powerful man in Galway, and Commander of the Galway IRA Brigade. She has walked into the Lion's Den, and will find herself in great danger.
“The Wishing Boy” ISBN 9781784550653 by Emma Maxwell McCone was released on 3/31/2015 and is is available to buy from Amazon and all good booksellers.
Ken Scott, who writes under his mother’s name, was born Glasgow, Scotland in 1929.
He married in 1954 to Rhona after decades of service to the Woollen Industry, and they have raised one son and two daughters who have long since flown the nest. For the past 22 years they have resided in Swansea where they enjoy an active life covering sporting and musical activities. Ken started his first published work at the age of 14, supplying the local newspaper with reports on soccer activities, and during his adult career in textiles had over 50 articles published in textile magazines with international circulation.
Title: “Ruins of War”
Author: John A. Connell
Release date: May 5, 2015
Publisher: Berkley/Penguin Books
ISBN: 978-0425278956
Winter 1945. Seven months after the Nazi defeat, Munich is in ruins. Mason Collins—a former Chicago homicide detective, U.S. soldier, and prisoner of war—is now a U.S. Army criminal investigator in the American Zone of Occupation. It’s his job to enforce the law in a place where order has been obliterated. And his job just became much more dangerous.
A killer is stalking the devastated city—one who has knowledge of human anatomy, enacts mysterious rituals with his prey, and seems to pick victims at random. Relying on his wits and instincts, Mason must venture places where his own life is put at risk: from interrogation rooms with unrepentant Nazi war criminals to penetrating the U.S. Army’s own black market.
What Mason doesn’t know is that the killer he’s chasing is stalking him, too.
Praise for the book
“Compelling debut.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A thrilling hunt...gripping and gruesome.”
—James Becker, bestselling author of The Lost Testament
“John Connell's RUINS OF WAR is the best historical crime novel I've read all year. As vivid a sense of time and place as anything by Alan Furst, a killer as horrifying as any in Thomas Harris, and a central character I'm sure we'll be reading about for years to come.”
—Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest and Hop Alley
“RUINS OF WAR is a well-crafted, classic police tale set in postwar 1945 Munich, a city that could double as the living room of hell. Mason Collins, a military cop, actually asked to be transferred there, and immediately has to find a killer who is preying on the citizens, adding terror to abject misery. Mason's pursuit of the madman takes him though a ruined landscape, filled with inhabitants as shattered as the city they live in."
—Larry Bond, author of Red Phoenix and Shattered Trident
John was born in Atlanta, Ga., then spent his childhood in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, NYC, and D.C. before moving back to Atlanta at the age of 13. While at Georgia State University his fascination with human thought drove him to study Psychology, and when that didn’t satisfy his curiosity about the human spirit, he turned to Anthropology, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and a minor in Psychology. During that time and after graduation he was a keyboardist and singer in rock and jazz bands, while simultaneously dabbling in writing short stories. To work his way through college and beyond, he stumbled upon some rather unique jobs: stock boy in a brassiere factory, courier for the Georgia State Health Department delivering gonorrhea and syphilis cultures from OB-GYN offices, a repairer of newspaper vending machines, a stint as an apprentice machinist, and a printing press operator.
John’s love of storytelling is what compelled him to switch to a career in film, even though he knew nothing about film and no one in the business. He “logically” chose camera work (not knowing anything about film cameras either) as a way into the business. He started in the film business in Atlanta and then moved to Los Angeles and worked his way up the ranks in the camera department to become a camera operator for both movies and TV. He also worked as an assistant aerial cinematographer using helicopters that took him all over the world. He kept at the writing, frequently expressing his deep desire to fulfill that dream. And then someone finally said, “shut-up, sit down and write.” And so he did. Between film projects or during lighting setups, he studied the craft of writing and produced mostly action/adventure screenplays. He then toyed with the idea of making two of his screenplays into YA novels. That’s when he discovered the rich potential for storytelling that novels provide, and with it his true passion.
During this time he met and married a French woman in Los Angeles. While he was working on a hit TV show as a camera operator, his wife was offered an excellent opportunity in Paris, France. They jumped at the chance, though they’d just bought their dream house two months earlier, and John had the French language proficiency of a two-year-old! He’d always wanted to live in Europe, particularly Paris, and it provided him the opportunity to devote full time to writing. He still takes occasional film jobs in the US. He now speaks French moderately well, though hardly a day goes by when his wife doesn’t roll on the floor with laughter at his attempts.
Currently, his wife and he live in Versailles, France, trying suburban living for a while, but they miss the energy of Paris and plan to move back there next year.
Family. Home. Memories. Lillie Voith holds these values most dear.
When the cherished daughter, wife, and mother of nine is bedridden after a fall, her memories tug at threads woven through a century, as the fabric of her family frays around her.
“A living portrait of a loving family”, Up The Hill sketches four generations of the Miller/Beck/Voith clan from pre-Civil War to Depression era Washington DC.
Jenny Yacovissi grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, just a bit farther up the hill from Washington, D.C. Her debut novel, Up the Hill to Home, is a fictionalized account of her mother's family in the same region.
In addition to writing historical and contemporary literary fiction, Jenny is a reviewer for Washington Independent Review of Books and Historical Novel Society. She owns a small project management and engineering consulting firm, and enjoys gardening and being on the water. Jenny lives with her husband Jim in Crownsville, Maryland.
To learn more about the families in Up the Hill to Home and see photos and artifacts from their lives, visit
Please leave a comment below with your email address to enter to win an eBook copy of this book -- open internationally! Giveaway ends on Wednesday, May 27 at 11:59pm CST.
My name is Stephen F Clegg, I am retired, and I have never been busier!
I have always had an active and fertile imagination, and I have told my children and grandchildren stories all of their lives; indeed, to this day I have never been allowed to read anything to them, I’ve always had to make up stories on the spot. And it was this situation that prompted me to leave adult tales for them to read when I am no longer here, allied to a hope that they will recall those endless, happy days with my loving wife Jay, and me.
My first published novel was named Maria’s Papers, and it was based upon true events that happened to my great great Aunt Maria Clegg in the 1800’s.
She had been a diminutive, single, lady with limited means, tasked by her father to reclaim what they believed was a family-owned estate at the end of a long tenure, from a wealthy and ruthless family who insisted that they’d purchased it, and not leased it. But her tiny stature utterly belied her grit and steely determination. She fought a battle of attrition with them for seventeen years, until in 1870; she was incarcerated in a lunatic asylum for having ‘Delusions of Exaltation’.
I have never seen anything as ambiguous and open for translation as that outrageous charge, and after obtaining her pitiful and scandalous medical records in 2010, I, like others in my family, believe that somebody had paid to have her locked-up.
In recording these events in a fictional tale, I had to have an authentic feel of the 1800’s. It was necessary to carry out abundant amounts of historical research, and I grew to love it. It was fascinating, instructive, and I soon realised that it was rich in all sorts of story-telling possibilities.
My enjoyment in penning the first, led me to writing subsequent novels, all containing the same central protagonists in a series of stand-alone thrillers. My second outing was named The Matthew Chance Legacy; that was followed by The Emergence of Malaterre, and then my latest, The Fire of Mars. It was released in January 2015, and is a split-storyline historical fiction set in Charleston, South Carolina. It is centred on the real-life events of the SS Georgiana which sank off The Bay of Palms near Charleston Harbour, containing confederate gold, during the American Civil War.
I have been lucky enough to have three prize nominations for my work, and I’m proud to say that I was a finalist in The People’s Book Prize 2014.
I am now at the editing and proof-reading stage of my fifth novel, The Hallenbeck Echo, and I’m sixty-thousand words into writing my sixth, The Monkshead Conspiracy. They are all split-storylines, and all involving historical fact, and/or, fiction.
It is a genre I find irresistible. Not only does it afford me the opportunity to let my mind run riot with events of the past, it also gives me a real insight into how life was back then, and it makes me realise how lucky and privileged I am to be living in these times.
If you’d like to learn more about me or my novels, or if I can, in any small way, help anybody else interested in historical fiction, please feel free to contact me via my website www.stephenfclegg.com and I’ll do whatever I can.
Thank you for reading my post.
About the book
At the latter end of 2006, a well-respected, married, church Deacon discovers the possible hiding place of a huge and valuable ruby named ‘The Fire of Mars'. He becomes obsessed by it, and dreams about finding it to be able to fund a new and exciting life with his secret lover. But when he becomes involved in a hit and run scam, everything changes - he needs it to escape his dilemma. Thereafter his life and his actions begin to spiral down to depths he never thought possible.
In November of the same year, historic researcher Naomi Wilkes and her husband Carlton, arrive at St Andrew's church in Charleston, South Carolina, in pursuit of the same stone. And none of them have any idea of the scale of horrors they will unearth...
“The Fire of Mars” ISBN 9781784551889 by Stephen F. Clegg is available to buy from Amazon and all good booksellers from 30/01/2015.
Stephen Clegg was born in Stockport in 1947. He is retired and happily living on the south coast of England with his wife, children and grandchildren. In 2012 his first novel ‘Maria's Papers' was released. His second, ‘The Matthew Chance Legacy' became a finalist in ‘The People's Book Prize 2013/14', and his third ‘The Emergence of Malaterre' was released in April 2014. This is his fourth outing, with more to follow.
The paintings of Bernardo Strozzi greatly inspired me when it came to creating the characters in my book, The Saffron Crocus. Strozzi was a painter who fled Genoa because he no longer wanted to live as a Capuchin monk. He ended up in Venice where he produced many portraits, including one of Claudio Monteverdi, until his death in 1644.
In addition to his portraits he painted many allegorical paintings, images of saints, and scenes of daily life. He painted pictures of St. Cecilia several times, images such as this one:
St. Cecilia's had several traditional features: the transported expression, the musical instrument, the modest dress among them.
Then Strozzi painted the image of "Woman with a Viola da Gamba."
The painting has some of the elements that match it to a St. Cecilia: the musical instrument, the pose of a young woman visible to the waist. But there all resemblance to a picture of saint ends. This young woman is not transported, she looks at the viewer directly, with a worldly and somewhat bored gaze. She is not modest at all; in fact, her cleavage is so low that one breast is completely bared.
The bared breast and the fact that there is a violin in the image, along with her viola da gamba, and the music is for a duet suggests that she is waiting for a partner to come and "make music" with her. In other words, that she is a courtesan.
For example, some have argued that the portrait is an allegorical image, of Flora, similar to Titian's:
Courtesans in Venice did bare their breasts, as a way of marketing their goods, and tinted their nipples red. Or they stood on their roofs, bleaching their hair to achieve a blond color, wearing nothing but a shimmery shift that also revealed their breasts to any passerby.
But it's hard to say that the bare breast in this image indicates the woman is a courtesan. Strozzi used bare-breasted women in many images, usually allegorical ones, such as his allegory of the arts:
Scholars David Rosand and Ellen Rosand have argued that the picture of the viola da gamba player picture is actually a portrait of Barbara Strozzi (no relation to Bernardo). They have various reasons for this attribution, mainly, that events we know about her life match the depiction in the image. Specifically, they refer to the fact that Barbara Strozzi was the "mistress of ceremonies" of the Accademia degli Unisoni, a salon for philosophical and artistic discussion organized by her adoptive (her perhaps natural) father, Giulio Strozzi. The Rosands mention a particular event that might have led to the pose and costume in the portrait in which Barbara sang and handed out flowers as prizes to the one who wrote the most impressive argument on whether tears or song was the most potent weapon in love.
As I read about this attribution I became eager to know more about Barbara Strozzi. Not whether she was a courtesan (there is evidence that she partnered with one man most of her life, as she had three children with him) but as a musician.
She wasn't the first musician to have her music published. That honor goes to Maddalena Cassulana whose first work, a collection of four madrigals, was published in Florence in 1566. But Strozzi published voluminously, more than any other composer of her time. She is credited with creating the cantata. And she did all this without the patronage of a noble or the church. She spent her life trying to find such patronage and did not succeed.
She did have her father's support, though. At least one scholar claims Giulio Strozzi created the Accademia degli Unisoni to encourage her work. Though her association with the Unisoni is also what led to outsiders claiming she had sold her virtue.
It seems sad to me that what most people might know about Strozzi is these allegations that she was a courtesan. That bared breast is all we see when we look at that image. I encourage my readers to listen to her music instead. Here's a lovely performance of her aria "Che si può fare":
About the book
Publication Date: December 13, 2014
Black Opal Books
eBook; 306p
Genre: Young Adult/Historical Mystery/Romance
Winner of the 2014 Rosemary Award for Best Historical for Young Adults.
Venice, 1643. Isabella, fifteen, longs to sing in Monteverdi’s Choir, but only boys (and castrati) can do that. Her singing teacher, Margherita, introduces her to a new wonder: opera! Then Isabella finds Margherita murdered. Now people keep trying to kill Margherita’s handsome rogue of a son, Rafaele.
Was Margherita killed so someone could steal her saffron business? Or was it a disgruntled lover, as Margherita—unbeknownst to Isabella—was one of Venice’s wealthiest courtesans?
Or will Isabella and Rafaele find the answer deep in Margherita’s past, buried in the Jewish Ghetto?
Isabella has to solve the mystery of the Saffron Crocus before Rafaele hangs for a murder he didn’t commit, though she fears the truth will drive her and the man she loves irrevocably apart.
Excerpt
Who knew a singing career would be this much trouble?
“Rafaele!” She flew into the garret. “Piero, it was so wonderful, wait until I tell you!”
The stool next to the bed was knocked over. The tray with the genepy bottle was on the floor, one of the cups broken. The fat candle that had been burning next to Rafaele’s bed had been flung to the other side of the room.. Canvases were strewn all over the floor, some of them slashed, and many of Master Strozzi’s jars of paint elements were broken.
Did Piero and Rafaele have a fight? She quickly suppressed the thought. Who would get into a fight with a man who was already injured?
Something else must have happened.
She walked across the garret. “Piero? Rafaele, are you here?”
Rafaele was not in the bed. The sheets and blankets she had piled on top of him were strewn everywher. Blood-stained sheets spilled over the edge of the pallet. There was a pile of clothes on the floor.
She walked around to get a closer look.
Not clothes. It was Piero. Face down, one arm stretched out before him, as if in supplication.
A puddle of blood under him.
Dead.
Praise for The Saffron Crocus
“I adored this beautifully written, passionate book. The Saffron Crocus is a glittering, thrilling opera of a novel that plucked my heartstrings and kept me reading at fever pitch. Brava, Alison McMahan! Encore!” -Nancy Holder, New York Times Bestselling Author of the Wicked Saga
Alison McMahan chased footage for her documentaries through jungles in Honduras and Cambodia, favelas in Brazil and racetracks in the U.S. She brings the same sense of adventure to her award-winning books of historical mystery and romantic adventure for teens and adults. Her latest publication is The Saffron Crocus, a historical mystery for young. Murder, Mystery & Music in 17th Century Venice.
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