Blog Archives
Breakfast at Bernie’s: Waffles and Wisdom
D. L. Norris’s Breakfast at Bernie’s is a novel about friendship, aging, and the stories that shape a community’s understanding of itself. Set in Columbus, Wisconsin, it begins at a café where four longtime regulars gather over coffee, breakfast, and familiar disagreements. Ed’s enthusiasm for storytelling, Bill’s stubborn confidence, Grant’s quieter grief, and Leo’s pastoral patience establish a lively social rhythm. The arrival of Myra Davis, a composed newcomer with a notebook and an interest in local history, introduces questions that reach beyond the breakfast table. Norris builds the story through conversation and observation, allowing the café’s daily rituals to acquire greater significance as personal loyalties meet the demands of truth.
The ensemble’s appeal rests on the way humor and vulnerability occupy the same conversations. These men tease one another about birthdays, physical ailments, and romantic prospects, while their exchanges reveal the uncertainty of life after bereavement. Norris gives their desire for companionship dignity, along with room for vanity, defensiveness, and mistaken judgment. Lou Dyer, the café’s experienced waitress, brings particular energy to the narrative. Her quick replies keep the regulars in check, and her watchfulness gives the novel an emotionally complicated perspective on safety and trust. Her observation that “Most people in this town consider privacy a temporary inconvenience” neatly captures the mixture of intimacy and intrusion that defines Columbus. Through Lou, familiarity becomes both a source of comfort and a responsibility requiring self-examination.
The book’s central interests deepen as it considers who gets included in a community’s account of its past. Family memory, religious authority, and civic pride all influence how people understand belonging, and Norris asks readers to consider the human consequences of those influences. Leo’s conviction that “An ounce of kindness is worth a pound of religion” expresses the novel’s ethical emphasis with useful economy. Care takes practical forms here: noticing an absence, offering work, listening carefully, or helping someone face an unwelcome task. The story also examines how protective impulses can become entangled with fear and personal need. That tension gives its warmth substance. The characters’ affection for one another carries obligations, including the willingness to question assumptions they’ve lived with comfortably for years.
Norris’s descriptive writing makes Bernie’s easy to imagine through the clatter of dishes, the smell of bacon, worn furnishings, and the changing Wisconsin weather beyond the windows. Dialogue supplies much of the book’s movement, with Lou and Ed providing especially effective comic timing. The prose turns toward reflective commentary, spelling out the emotional meaning of gestures and conversations. Repeated images of shelter, silence, and coffee create cohesion, though their frequency sometimes slows the pace. The novel is most persuasive when a small action carries the feeling, particularly in the exchanges between people who know how difficult receiving kindness can be. Breakfast at Bernie’s will appeal to readers who enjoy a patient, character-centered story with a strong attachment to place. Its lasting interest lies in the everyday effort of making room for other people and accepting the changes their presence asks of us.
Pages: 262 | ASIN : B0HJ14HMLJ
Movie Stars and Moguls
A Good, Hard Slap is a historical Hollywood mystery about seven women determined to hide what they know about a movie star’s suspicious death. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’ve heard many stories over the years about how studios back in the Jazz Age were able to hide the bad behavior of their stars. There have also been some unsolved murders, which makes me wonder if they went unsolved due to studio interference. It’s a great subject for noir. I love noir, and now that I’ve finished the book, I see that I was keeping two noir tropes running through the plot of A Good, Hard Slap. The first is the story of basically decent people who devise a hair-brained plan to cover up a secret, and the second is the futility of trying to outsmart a powerful, corrupt system. My favorite example of the first is the film A Simple Plan (1998), based on the book of the same name by Scott Smith. That plot stayed with me for a long time, as did my favorite example of my second trope, Chinatown (1974), which is probably my favorite movie of all time. Chinatown influenced A Good, Hard Slap in many ways, including theme, plot, and the 1930s Los Angeles setting.
I was also influenced by Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, which famously begins with “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” It’s the aftermath of the crime (or death) that most intrigues me, so I proceeded from a moment that I could build upon, increasing the tension on the characters who knew what had happened. When I studied screenwriting many moons ago, this was called “the propitious moment.” The backstory can be filled in as needed.
How did the murder mystery emerge from the historical setting?
The movie business is, of course, famous for the abuse of women, both the sexual kind and the power-wielding kind, which continues right up to the present day. More than a few powerful people (mostly men) have, since the early days of the industry, taken advantage of their power, and it was routinely unreported or covered up until the #MeToo movement went viral a decade ago. I like to call the time before that the “NotMe” era. Women went to great lengths to appear virtuous, hiding abuse that they knew would besmirch their reputations more than the reputations of their abusers. And, as the industry grew, the studios themselves got into the business of hiding the abuses of their most valuable assets – movie stars and moguls. Add to that the sexual mores of the time, which were still semi-Victorian – even in the Jazz Age, most middle-class women still wanted to be thought of as virgins before marriage. I wanted to explore how the convergence of movie-business abuse with the morality standards of the time could lead to murder. It wasn’t hard to imagine.
What sources were especially valuable during your research?
I guess I should begin with my personal experience. I was a steno myself at MGM in the 1970s. I worked for a variety of writers and producers who came to the lot during that time. I imagined the steno office and quiet room at Kaplan Talking Pictures to be like the ones in the Thalberg Building on the MGM lot. The biggest difference between Kaplan and MGM is that at MGM, even though all the stenos were women, our supervisor was a man!
Among the books that provided fodder for A Good, Hard Slap were The Fixers by E.J. Fleming, Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince by Budd Schulberg, and Day of the Locust by Nathanael West. The Fixers was especially eye-opening about the magnitude of the outrageous behavior of some of the most revered stars of the past. It was clear that the studios were in complete control of their stars’ images.
There were several movies and actors of the Jazz Age (and recent depictions of the Jazz Age) that helped me visualize Gracie’s world. Here are some that have invaded and colonized my mind over the years: Myrna Loy and William Powell in The Thin Man series, Betty Compson in The Docks of New York, Liv Lisa Fries in Babylon Berlin, Greta Garbo in just about anything, John Gilbert in A Woman of Affairs, Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong in Shanghai Express, the inimitable Buster Keaton in any of his silent films, and Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
What do you hope readers understand about the women who worked behind Hollywood’s stars?
One thing I tried to portray in the women of Kaplan Talking Pictures is the toughness they had to find in themselves to survive in a man’s world. It took moxie to keep going in an atmosphere where they were seen only as helpers to the “creative types.” On top of that indignity, they were also expected to endure sexual harassment as if it were something that could not be helped.
But even more importantly, I tried to explore their reasons for keeping secrets from each other. Sisterhood, in those days, did not necessarily involve honesty. There was so much shame involved in even the slightest slip in the morality of the time (even as the victim of abuse) that women kept their lips sealed for fear of being ostracized.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
Gracie Perkins and six other stenographers at Kaplan Talking Pictures know the film company’s most popular star has been murdered, something the moviegoing public will never know. The studio will tell the district attorney what to believe, and the district attorney will tell the LAPD and the newspapers what to believe. That’s the way it works. As the official story about the “unexpected” death comes out, the seven women don’t know if the studio has any idea what really happened, they only know they have to protect one of their own. They have a plan. But plans have a way of unraveling.
The plan is simple, and it seems to be working at first because Gracie can lie as believably as the studio’s publicity department. She hasn’t been honest about anything for a long time―she can’t be if she wants to keep her pals in the steno pool. They’re the only friends she has in this hard-luck life. She knows from experience that the truth can get you into a world of trouble. But Gracie’s talent for deception doesn’t fly with Detective Nick Zingarelli, who not only gets the real story out of the conflicted Miss Perkins, but eventually opens her eyes to the truth about love.
“A Good, Hard Slap” dives deep into the complicated relationships among the women of Kaplan Talking Pictures as they navigate the stormy seas of their hidden pasts and thwarted ambitions.
A Rich Inner Life
Somewhere Else follows a history professor who experiences the past through artifacts, becoming addicted to these encounters while awakening a sinister force. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?
Honestly, it came out of my own classroom. I’ve spent years teaching history, and the thing I always try to get students to do is feel their way into a moment, not just memorize dates. There’s actually a term for that: temporal empathy. One day I found myself thinking, what if that wasn’t just a mental exercise? What if the right object, in the right hands, could actually pull someone back into the moment it came from? I was also chewing on Einstein’s block universe theory, the idea that the past isn’t really gone; it’s still out there, somewhere else. Put those two things together, and you get Joe: a man whose gift for empathizing with history becomes a door he can’t stop walking through. And once you have a door like that, it’s not much of a stretch to wonder what dark forces might be waiting on the other side.
Why was it important that Joe knowingly makes choices that hurt the people closest to him?
Because I didn’t want to let him off the hook, and I didn’t want readers to either. Joe isn’t sleepwalking into this. He knows what it’s costing him with Margaret and with his own life, and he does it anyway. That’s what addiction actually looks like most of the time; it’s not blindness, it’s a kind of willful looking away. There’s also an irony I kept coming back to while writing: Joe has this huge well of empathy for people who have been dead for centuries, soldiers at Valley Forge, an artist in his final days, and almost none left over for the people sitting across the table from him. That gap felt like the real heart of the book.
How did you decide where historical fact should end, and imagination should begin?
I tried to be upfront about that instead of blurring it, which is part of why I wrote an Author’s Note that gets into it directly. The physics is real; the block universe theory is a genuine, debated idea in modern physics, not something I made up to make the plot work. Temporal empathy as a term is real too; it’s how historians talk about teaching people to feel the past rather than just study it. What I invented is the jump from those two real ideas to a person physically stepping into history. I also use a metaphor, a hallway of doors, when I explain the concept in interviews or marketing copy. That’s purely explanatory; it doesn’t literally appear anywhere in the book. My rule was simple: ground the premise in something true enough that readers trust it, then take the one leap the science itself will not take.
What do you hope readers take away from Joe and Margaret’s very different relationships with time?
Joe treats time like something to enter and collect, one door after another. Margaret is a visual artist, and she’s rooted in the present in a way Joe has completely lost; she’s making things with her hands while he’s disappearing into the past. I wanted that contrast to sit with readers a little uncomfortably. Is a rich inner life spent somewhere else worth more than actually being present in the life you already have? I purposely don’t answer that cleanly, and the ending won’t let you off easy either. But if someone closes the book thinking harder about where their own attention lives, that’s really all I was hoping for.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
At sixty-six, history professor Joe Patterson discovers he can touch an artifact and step inside the moment it came from: Valley Forge, the fevered hours in Van Gogh’s room at Arles, the cramped cabin of Apollo 11 as it broke from Earth’s orbit. It feels like a miracle. It’s a trap.
The visions escalate, and the hunger for them becomes its own kind of addiction, one that costs Joe his marriage, his son’s trust, and, piece by piece, his grip on which century he’s actually standing in. Something on the other side of history has been feeding on minds like his for a very long time; it isn’t finished with Joe yet.
Somewhere Else is a literary novel with a horror pulse: a story about obsession, erasure, and the price of touching the past.
A Good, Hard Slap
A Good, Hard Slap, by Catherine Bator, drops readers into 1930 Hollywood at exactly the right moment for trouble. Talking pictures are changing the industry, studio publicity departments are manufacturing reality, and movie star Garland Westover is dead. Seven women connected to the studio stenography pool know more about his death than anyone should, and they’re determined to keep that knowledge buried. At the center is Gracie Perkins, a sharp, ambitious stenographer who wants to write movies and has a much more complicated relationship with Garland than her friends realize. Bator uses that setup to create an engaging blend of historical fiction, mystery, and early Hollywood fiction, with suspense driven by secrets, loyalty, and the frightening ease with which a powerful studio can decide what the public will believe.
Gracie and her supervisor, Madeleine Singer, give the novel its emotional backbone. Both women are intelligent and capable, but they’ve learned different ways to survive a workplace where men hold nearly all the authority. Madeleine has spent years teaching her stenographers to remain professional, make no waves, and deliver a “good, hard slap” when a man crosses the line. Gracie, meanwhile, prides herself on being modern, independent, and harder to fool than everyone around her. Watching those beliefs unravel gives this women’s historical fiction story much of its force. As buried experiences finally get talked about, Gracie begins reconsidering what she thought she knew about Garland, while Madeleine confronts the cost of treating silence as protection. The book handles those realizations gradually, allowing the characters to recognize uncomfortable truths at the same pace the reader sees the larger pattern taking shape.
The Hollywood setting is also a major pleasure. Bator fills the story with studio lots, stenography offices, costume departments, publicity schemes, Prohibition-era restaurants, jazz clubs, movie premieres, temperamental writers, ambitious actresses, and the chaotic shift from silent pictures to talkies. The details make Kaplan Talking Pictures feel like an actual workplace. There’s plenty of humor in the daily absurdities, particularly when Gracie finds herself doing much of the real writing while highly paid men argue over who deserves the credit. That wit keeps the darker material from flattening the novel into a single mood. The early Hollywood historical mystery elements are strongest because they’re rooted in this working world, where a murder cover-up feels disturbingly compatible with an industry already accustomed to transforming scandals into carefully polished publicity stories.
What stayed with me most about A Good, Hard Slap is its interest in the stories people tell, both publicly and privately, and what happens when those stories stop being believable. Gracie’s dream of becoming a writer turns out to be especially fitting because she spends much of the novel sorting through competing versions of her own past before she’s ready to write one for herself. Her relationship with Detective Nick Zingarelli adds warmth and provides another way for her to reconsider ideas she’s treated as settled facts, while the final chapters give her choices about work, love, honesty, and ambition room to feel earned. As historical fiction set in Old Hollywood, the novel has glamour, crime, studio intrigue, and period detail, but its strongest current comes from the women behind the stars, the ones typing the scripts, keeping the secrets, and eventually deciding which stories deserve to be told.
Pages: 281 | ASIN : B0H7T3BNQ6
Somewhere Else
Alan McKee’s Somewhere Else is a literary speculative novel with the steady pull of psychological horror. Joe Patterson, a sixty-six-year-old history professor, discovers that touching certain artifacts lets him enter the experiences attached to them. He witnesses Jefferson and Franklin shaping the Declaration of Independence, Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon, Van Gogh painting The Starry Night, and the Wright brothers taking flight. These encounters feel intensely physical, complete with smells, emotions, and borrowed memories. They also awaken a dark figure that seems to feed on moments of human transcendence. What begins as a historian’s dream soon develops the rhythm of an addiction, with every extraordinary encounter making Joe’s present life seem a little dimmer.
The historical sequences are the book’s showpieces, and McKee writes them with warmth and sensory detail. His version of Van Gogh experiences color as sound and feeling, while Edison’s successful light bulb matters because it will allow an imagined child to finish reading after dark. These scenes reveal the novel’s generous view of achievement: history is made by vulnerable people who don’t yet know how their work will endure. McKee occasionally repeats phrases about consciousness, infinity, and transcendence more often than their meaning requires, but the recurring language also reflects Joe’s narrowing mind. His intellectual curiosity gradually hardens into a private creed, one that can justify each new deception and disappearance.
The novel becomes especially affecting when it returns to Margaret, Joe’s wife of forty-five years. Her chapters give ordinary life its own weight through coffee, paintings, family dinners, missed calls, and the familiar sounds of another person moving through the house. She understands Joe’s behavior as a wife watching a husband become less honest, less reachable, and less interested in the life they built. That perspective keeps the supernatural plot emotionally credible. Joe’s transformation isn’t treated as a simple fall from grace. He recognizes the value of Margaret, their son, and their granddaughter, then knowingly chooses something else. The ending lands because it preserves that uncomfortable truth, while the epilogue follows Margaret toward a hard-earned freedom from carrying his choice forever.
Readers of Stephen King’s 11/22/63 will recognize the fascination with entering history and the conflict between a monumental mission and an intimate human life. Both books treat the past as a seductive place that can rearrange a person’s loyalties, though McKee approaches that idea through concentrated visions. His strongest contribution is the question beneath Joe’s obsession: if transcendence asks us to surrender the relationships that make us human, what exactly have we transcended? Somewhere Else answers through Margaret’s paintings and memories, finding vast meaning inside finite moments. It’s a haunting first novel about history, compulsion, and the danger of valuing cosmic significance more than the person sitting beside you at breakfast.
Pages: 177 | ASIN : B0HCDR75Q2
Gelding Rock
K. E. Thompson’s Gelding Rock, the second novel in the Stewart’s Camp series, is an ambitious work of historical and contemporary fiction built around buried crimes, damaged people, and the uneasy relationship between guilt and redemption. The novel moves primarily between 1997 and 2010, with earlier episodes reaching back into the history of Stewart’s Camp and the nearly abandoned community of Gelding Rock. At its center is the improbable relationship between Adelyn O’Malley, an elderly woman who has lived alone for years, and Hartford Daniels, a predatory and deeply troubled man who arrives at her home after becoming stranded during a storm. Thirteen years later, young friends Jacob Moses and Ruthie begin uncovering the physical remains and secrets left by an earlier mudslide, while retired detective Harold Capps revives his interest in Hartford’s long-unsolved disappearance. These strands gradually converge into a story in which the excavation of old objects becomes inseparable from the excavation of memory.
The novel’s greatest strength is its treatment of character, particularly Adelyn and Hartford. Thompson gives neither of them a simple moral identity. Adelyn is vulnerable, funny, traumatized, lonely, nurturing, and capable of alarming decisions. Hartford enters the novel with a clear awareness of his own cruelty, yet years of isolation, physical suffering, work, and companionship alter the way he understands himself and other people. His development is deliberately uncomfortable because the book never requires the reader to erase what he has done in order to recognize what he later becomes. Adelyn’s history provides a parallel examination of how violence can remain active in a person decades after the event itself. Near the end, the narrator observes of her past, “It wasn’t so easy to escape one’s self.” That sentence captures much of the novel’s psychological argument: time can change a life profoundly, but it doesn’t automatically dissolve memory, responsibility, or injury.
Thompson balances this darker material with an unusually broad ensemble and a distinctive vein of humor. Jacob Moses and Ruthie give the 2010 sections curiosity and momentum as their amateur investigation moves from artifacts in the mud to family history, hidden documents, and finally Gelding Rock itself. Their friendship also provides an emotional counterweight to the adult characters, whose relationships have often been shaped by secrecy, regret, and avoidance. The book’s shifts in viewpoint allow the same events to acquire different meanings depending on who is watching, and its references to Crime and Punishment reinforce its interest in confession, punishment, conscience, and the burden of concealed wrongdoing. The historical material involving Harriet Stewart deepens that inquiry further. Her attempt to protect the young Adelyn becomes another morally complicated act whose consequences reach across generations, connecting the novel’s mystery structure to its larger questions about whether violence can ever be cleanly divided into victims, perpetrators, protectors, and bystanders.
What makes Gelding Rock especially affecting for me is that its mysteries serve a story about human connection. The resolution of Hartford’s disappearance matters, as do the buried histories of Stewart’s Camp, but the book’s emotional culmination belongs to Adelyn, Ruthie, and Hartford as the past and present finally occupy the same room. Ruthie’s willingness to become, for a dying woman, the long-lost Harriet she needs is one of the novel’s most moving developments. In Adelyn’s final consciousness comes the simple realization, “And if she was loved, everything was alright.” The novel earns that sentiment by placing it beside decades of fear, shame, violence, loneliness, and compromised choices. Gelding Rock is therefore both a mystery and a character-driven meditation on conscience, trauma, forgiveness, and the forms of grace people sometimes extend to one another. Thompson’s combination of dark subject matter, eccentric humor, historical layering, and compassionate characterization gives the novel a strong identity and an ending that brings its many timelines together with considerable emotional force.
Pages: 298 | ASIN : B0GLKBSHYM
Everyone’s Always Performing
Hypnotized follows an Army veteran, a missing teen, an aspiring actress, and a retired detective who become entangled in a decades-old disappearance. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Hampton’s character grew out of a short story I wrote back in the late 60s about draft dodgers. He was hanging out in a pool hall when he met a Whittier woman named Margo who attempted to convince him to burn his draft card. Also, legends about Hell’s Gate and Turnbull Canyon Road are numerous, and I wanted to use them to provide an atmosphere that would hopefully intrigue my readers.
Nick’s reflective narration gives the novel a distinctive personality. Why did you choose him as the primary voice rather than the detective?
Detective Roach was introduced in my previous book, Surf and Sand, The Girl in the Seaside Hotel, wherein he’s seen considering his upcoming retirement in Whittier. See, I was already thinking about Hypnotized then. But when I actually started writing it Nick was the first character that came to me, and I soon realized I wanted to tell most of the story from a first-person perspective and let the novel become a kind of memoir. I’d just reread Charles Portis’s novel, True Grit, and was inspired by the narration of his character, Mattie Ross. She’s an elderly woman looking back on something that happened to her when she was young. I wanted to try and capture that feeling. (And by the way, everyone’s seen the films, but if you haven’t heard Donna Tartt‘s narration of the audio book, well, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!)
Identity, performance, and self-deception appear repeatedly throughout the novel. Why do those ideas interest you?
Identity is kind of a big deal these days, but I wasn’t trying to make any statements about that, I just want my characters to live in other people’s heads besides my own. I worked on this book for about 7 years, on and off. Eventually the characters take over and can even become kind of demanding. And when we look at real life, people are always performing, aren’t they? Trying to do their best, or to be as good as someone they admire, or to be “like” someone they look up to. Self-deception too, is common, just look at my not so healthy diet! But performance is something else when it’s used to deceive others.
Without giving anything away, what do you think continues to haunt Turnbull Canyon long after the final page?
Memories. Wishes. Hopes. Desires. And a few deadly curves!
Author Links: GoodReads | Website
Hypnotized: A Turnbull Canyon Mystery
W. B. Edwards’s Hypnotized: A Turnbull Canyon Mystery is a historical mystery novel set in Whittier, California, during the summer of 1969. The story opens with an ominous encounter near Turnbull Canyon, then moves among several characters whose lives become connected through attraction, deception, buried family history, and the unsettling possibility of hypnosis. Nick O’Brien, a drifting Army veteran, remembers that summer as the end of an era and a season filled with unexpected turns. With its Southern California setting and late-sixties atmosphere, the novel blends historical fiction, crime fiction, psychological suspense, and supernatural mystery.
Rather than following a single investigator, the book builds its mystery through multiple viewpoints. Nick’s conversational narration gives the story much of its personality, while Hampton Masters III brings vulnerability and growing confusion to the psychological suspense plot. Retired detective Harry Roach supplies the traditional cold-case mystery element as he investigates the 1943 disappearance of fourteen-year-old Margaret “Margo” Stewart near the abandoned property known as Hell’s Gate. Imelda’s story adds another layer involving identity, performance, ambition, and a strange ability that becomes increasingly important as the characters’ paths cross.
The novel’s strongest quality is its lived-in sense of time and place. Pool halls, drive-ins, hot rods, stereo equipment, cigarette smoke, smoggy sunsets, and Whittier Boulevard cruising give the historical fiction setting real texture. Edwards lets conversations wander and relationships develop gradually, so the characters feel like people caught up in an increasingly bizarre situation. That unhurried approach also suits Nick’s reflective voice, which often circles around the uncertain nature of memory. The result is a mystery novel where personal regrets and half-remembered experiences matter as much as physical clues.
As the separate storylines come together, Hypnotized grows into an offbeat Turnbull Canyon mystery about manipulation, obsession, desire, and the stories people tell themselves. Its crime-fiction plot reaches a satisfying confrontation, but the supernatural questions remain slippery enough to keep the ending in your mind. The book’s final reflections on memories, dreams, and possible spells fit its hazy 1969 world especially well. Readers who enjoy character-driven historical mysteries, California noir, psychological suspense novels, and supernatural crime fiction will find plenty to discuss here.
Pages: 270 | ISBN : 9798235560857
