Blog Archives
Repair-and-Recovery
Economic Problems in a Nonlinear World examines the economy as a complex adaptive system shaped by interconnected forces, inequality, and questions of resilience and justice. Why was this an important book for you to write?
Conventional equilibrium-based neoliberal economics has failed to promote freedom and human flourishing. Traditional economic analysis cannot explain income and wealth inequality, institutional capture, declining social mobility, and the extraordinary concentration of market power. Complexity economics is a relatively new school of thought (see J. Doyne Farmer and The Santa Fe Institute) that uses nonlinear dynamics to provide an analytical method to explain how these pernicious social problems, and a path to recovery that promotes broad-based prosperity and genuine freedom.
Who did you envision as your primary audience?
Professional economists, policymakers, and scholars.
How did you decide the order in which to introduce concepts and applications?
First, explain why equilibrium is a linear myth. Secondly, explain the concept of nonlinearity. Thirdly, explain complexity economics in the context of our highly interconnected economy and world. Fourthly, apply complexity and systems thinking to important social problems in a democratic market economy. Lastly, provide a repair-and-recovery intellectual framework for promoting a human-centric agenda for greater human flourishing, agency, and democratic freedom.
What do you hope economists, policymakers, and general readers take away from your work?
We created these problems. Therefore, we are not doomed to a static, sub-optimal lived experience. Strengthening the middle class, promoting unions, raising inheritance taxes, and making life’s essentials available (healthcare, education, reduced labor precarity, and social mobility) will reduce political polarization and social divisions for the betterment of us all.
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True Narcissists
The Ghost of Pickleball Past combines sports fiction, murder mystery, supernatural intrigue, and broad comedy as pickleball enthusiasts confront a new death, a Hollywood film about past crimes, and a ghostly spiritual mission. What did you most want to accomplish with this installment?
By providing Hollywood movie stars, humor, a ghost, a prison break, and murder, I am able to bring the world of pickleball into a more exciting light. Pickleball novels from other authors force upon the reader a boring, typical Sherlock Holmes feel, thrown in with a cheesy, forced romance. My novel introduces the reader to an unlimited pickleball world that combines adventure, mystery, and unconventional out-of-the-box methods to solve incredible problems. The ultimate protagonist, Ghost Elaine, guides the reader through this adventure as she haunts the man who previously murdered her, who is the ultimate antagonist – Peter Weatherford.
Did you want readers to sympathize with Peter, understand him, or simply witness his transformation?
Although it would be difficult for any sane person to sympathize with a serial killer, I do hope that the novel emphasizes the fact that there are very few true narcissists in the world who are completely incapable of developing a strong sense of morality. And yes, I do want the readers to witness his transformation. I am the director of the Larned State Hospital psycho-education program. Through education, role-playing activities, and classes that help the patients delve into the reasons they have committed horrendous crimes, over time most of our patients do change for the better. Some even go on to earn their freedom from this locked-down institution and develop into productive members of society.
How did you balance spiritual themes with the novel’s broad comedy?
I like this question because I do feel as though humor should be added to spirituality. I feel as though most churches push people away for not treating people as real individuals with real feelings. In many churches, God is portrayed as a serious person who loves you but is constantly warning you to follow a ton of unrealistic rules set by churches. The world I provide the reader expresses that people overall want to enjoy life without feeling confined to a set of rules that do not include sex, laughter, and fun. I view God as a funny being that not only loves us all but truly wants us to have a good time. Evidence of this is in the bible. Jesus chooses his first miracle to be turning water into wine at a massive days-long wedding celebration. Do you really think that people were simply drinking alcohol to quench their thirst?
If readers could take one idea from the novel into their own lives, what would you want it to be?
The idea I would like people to take to apply to their own lives is to know that no matter how bad their situation is, there is always a path to happiness. Enjoy life. Try your best not to hurt others, but if you do, there is always room for forgiveness and retribution.
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Meanwhile back in Wichita, Kansas, one of the greatest pickleball players in the world- Barrett Pineheart has fallen dead while playing against Keisha and Rusty in the Pondside Invitational. His sudden passing is attributed to heart problems that have been widely documented. But Randall Baines is not convinced of Barrett’s cause of death. Randall’s wild theory led to the capture of serial killer Peter Weatherford. Can Randall strike lightning twice with his insane idea that Barrett Pineheart was murdered? Will his adopted pickleball family, popularly known
as The Crew, entertain his supposition or ignore his plea for assistance?
TWO NOVELS INTERWOVEN AS ONE, CREATING FOR THE READER ONE WILD RIDE!!
Strong Women
Bootlegger’s Apprentice follows a young bootlegger through the violence and glamour of Prohibition-era Chicago as he discovers that escaping the criminal underworld may be the only way to protect his family. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I fostered an interest in Irish American organized crime from on-screen stories such as The Departed and Boardwalk Empire, through histories of Prohibition Chicago, and fiction such as Don Winslow’s City on Fire trilogy and Mary Miley’s Spirits and Smoke. My family is heavily influenced by my Irish American Grandma Margaret Miller (nee McCarthy), and I combined that with my own experience growing up Catholic (I am now Agnostic) surrounded by strong women to create Aiden McCarthy.
How did you balance real figures and events with Aiden’s fictional journey?
Figures like Louis Armstrong and Mezz Mezzrow, along with real clubs, allow me to really explore Aiden’s interaction with the jazz scene, intoxication, and the experience of African Americans. Much like my own growth from a predominantly white childhood to encountering folks of all different skin colors, Aiden finds beauty in those with different backgrounds. I wrote Aiden’s story to respect and be real about history and race. His friendship with William Crutchfield, Dean O’Banion’s actual porter, is written as a nod to my own experience. I aim to give the story more flavor.
Aiden grows from being bootlegging muscle to club negotiator to having to kill in self-defense. I textured his moral journey with actual events in Dean O’Banion’s history where O’Banion’s hubris eventually gets the best of him. Aiden comes to terms with life-and-death decisions as O’Banion makes a fatal mistake.
The novel writes O’Banion with a certain degree of charity, but he really was rather open-minded for his day on African Americans and homosexuals. “They can’t help how they are” is a direct quote from an O’Banion biography.
Al Capone, Johnny Torrio, and various politicians and police who encounter Aiden and O’Banion allow me to inject a certain amount of authenticity into how I imagine Jazz Age Chicago. I enjoy figures such as crusading journalist Robert St. John, who formed an uneasy defiance to Capone and is interesting to me because of my background in journalism. The corruption really existed as portrayed, but I did take quite a bit of liberty to make one of O’Banion’s antagonists into a juicy character.
The novel handles Al Capone as a human who cares for his family, his partially deaf son, and his older brother mainly. He is also a thug driven by an inability to cope with sorrow (no spoilers) and his place in the mob hierarchy.
At what point in developing the novel did you know that Aiden would spare Capone and bargain for his family’s safety instead?
Al Capone has to live, but I want Aiden to really challenge his morality when it comes to using lethal force. Aiden has a certain ethical code, sees the logic in his decisions, and is supported by strong women to make better choices. I don’t want to give away any spoilers.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I have started a prequel to my Ron & Carey series. The series is about an Army veteran, Ron McCallister, who charms adversaries and his lover alike while outmaneuvering crooked politicians and bloodthirsty thugs from 2008 to 2009. I want to explore Ron’s return from Iraq around 2005 and run-ins with the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club and corrupt authorities as he reconciles his new reality and eventual introduction to a stripper with a heart of gold. While Ron broods and kicks ass, his Aunt Peggy serves up homespun spitfire, much like my Grandma Margaret and Great Aunt Ethel.
I’ll maybe publish it in about five or so years. Good stories take time!
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Chicago, 1924. Prohibition has made criminals rich, politicians dangerous, and loyalty a currency all its own.
Aiden McCarthy is a young Irish American drawn toward a life far more dangerous than arranging bouquets.
Working under notorious gangster and florist Dean O’Banion, Aiden is drawn deeper into a world where bootleg whiskey, political corruption, and organized crime collide, and where men like Johnny Torrio and Al Capone are reshaping Chicago from the shadows.
Yet amid the violence and intrigue, Aiden has something worth protecting. His relationship with Sophia Golino offers the promise of a life separate from the dangerous men who increasingly depend upon him.
Around them, the clubs and speakeasies of Jazz Age Chicago pulse with music, temptation, and shifting social boundaries.
As rival gangs maneuver for power and a bitter political struggle threatens to turn deadly, Aiden must learn quickly whom to trust, when to fight, and just how much of himself he is willing to sacrifice to survive.
A richly imagined historical crime novel of gangsters, romance, jazz, family, faith, and ambition, set against one of Chicago’s most notorious eras.
Step into Prohibition-era Chicago, where love, loyalty, and one wrong choice can cost everything.
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.
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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.
Quirky Characters
Mancini Blue follows a grieving widower as he investigates a murder marked by his late wife’s signature blue paint, uncovering secrets in Savannah’s art world involving a missing painting, forged prescriptions, and suspicious shipments. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
This story world grew organically from real-life circumstances and my imagination. As it happens, I live in a rural community that has no bookstores in the entire county. However, several ladies dedicated to the arts got a sweet deal to restore our old jail to become an art center. One of my sisters, a quilter, got in on the ground floor. She arranged for me to do a talk for the art center, and from that moment on, my life was entangled and enriched by the Old Jail Art Center and beautiful art. In time, I became a member of the organization (and they stock my books!) and work one day a month in the art center, surrounded by beautiful art.
I also had a mother-in-law who was a very talented artist. One of the treasures I rescued as we were going through her things was her palette. I framed it and hung it with her other works in watercolor, pastels, and oils. The bold colors in her oils became the color scheme of all my décor.
When I reach the end of a series, I take time off before I start in a new direction. My muse often wanders in its own lane, and I knew I needed something different from my last work. In addition, I wanted to have several points of view, so I landed on third-person POV. I began with these characters: a misunderstood and flawed male protagonist, a female police chief with a chip on her shoulder, and a villain ruled by deceit, jealousy, revenge, and anger.
Then, before I decided anything about the story world, my muse let me know in no uncertain terms that we were writing in the art world about the death of a famous artist. By this time, I had many experiences in the art world with artists, their families, and patrons. Framing this story in the world of art suited me fine because when I ignored my muse in the past, the story never got anywhere. We were both on board for this odyssey.
Did the mystery or the character of Bob come to you first?
I have come to the story world process in many different ways. No matter which order the process happens, it is organic, with one element building on the other. Sometimes it can be as little as an overheard remark that sparks my creativity. To answer the question, Bob came first this time. Sometimes I am lucky, and a character comes to me fully hatched. Bob came to me in steady waves, like ocean breakers rolling into the shore. He was all Southern man despite his veneer of civility. He’d had every opportunity-the best education, money to start his own investment business, and a wife who adored him. His two sons were a credit to the family.
Then Bob’s world fell apart. His wife died. Suicide, the cops said, when there was no sign of foul play in her locked studio. No way, Bob said. He railed against everything, drank too much, and got in bar fights. Nothing could drag him out of his despair. His sons presented him with the option of a treatment center or jail time for his outrageous behavior.
Feeling he had no choice, Bob went with the therapy option, and he liked it so much that he dallied there a while, unready to face the world again. When he left the center, he didn’t want his old life, his family home on a downtown Savannah square, or his company. So he moved an hour south and set up an art gallery there. This is the starting point of Mancini Blue because his life is about to change again.
How did you balance emotional heaviness with the novel’s lighter moments?
One of the longstanding comments about my body of work is that I have quirky characters. That comes naturally to me because I’m a bit quirky myself. I know innately what it is like to be different from others, but I’ve never seen that as a hardship. In my author life, it has been a gold mine because I’m all about the lighter and tender moments. But giving characters darkness and having them stay in it is not something I want to write about. My lane is cozy mysteries, albeit I write on the darker side of cozies.
Showing Bob’s tenderness and care for his niece, her daughter, and Sophie’s ancient dog reveals that he’s not a bad guy. Bob has a caretaker personality, and when his wife died, he lost his tether to reality for a while. Grief takes many forms and varies in emotional depth and circumstance. Bob didn’t know how to process his grief, and being a Southern man, he lost himself in drinking and fighting for a while. All of that happened in the days and weeks following Sophie’s death. The book opens a year later, but his backstory helps everyone know that Bob has deep emotions, that he is more than a stock character. He can manage life now, but his heart is still bruised.
Getting back to the question, I’ve found that having lighter elements offset emotional heaviness makes for a great story. As both authors and readers know, conflict is the engine that drives a story. In addition, I used those moments to redeem Bob in the readers’ eyes. I always knew he was a complex, likeable guy who acted out only because no one would listen to him, let alone believe him when he said his beloved Sophie was murdered. Where the story begins is the moment of change for Bob. To shed his darkness, he must get justice for his late wife. So, he puts on the hat of an amateur sleuth.
If you could ask readers one question after they finish the book, what would it be?
I’d ask readers what their favorite part was. I’m always curious about responses to the world I’ve cobbled together, word by word. For other books I’ve written, readers have fallen in love with one of the characters, or one of the pets, and yet for others, it’s the laid-back vibe of a Southern small town where everyone knows everyone else. As a person raised this way and who moved back to their hometown later in life, I run into people all the time in the grocery store who know my family or me. It is very centering, and even though I am admittedly quirky, I belong here.
Thanks for your interest. I hope you’ll pick up Mancini Blue, and it will be your cup of tea!
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He is certain the cops got his wife’s means of death wrong. When he left her in the studio that fateful evening to paint overnight, her door locked behind him. She wouldn’t unlock her door for a stranger. To get justice for Sophie, Bob delves into her murder using his hidden ability to help find solid evidence.
When he unsuccessfully searches his old Savannah haunts for leads, he returns to St. James to discover a bizarre murder occurred near his shop. Despite his alibi, he is questioned by the local cops. He’s stunned when many aspects of this new case are identical to Sophie’s death. Thus, solving his wife’s murder will most likely shed light on the recent case.
Bob’s suspect list includes family members, neighbors, friends, and Sophie’s art associates. He discovers people are rarely what they seem and believes this deadly foe kills to protect secrets. Can he identify his wife’s murderer before the killer strikes again?
The Catchings Press
Robin McMillion’s The Catchings Press is a thoughtful historical fiction novel set in small-town Texas during the upheaval of the late 1960s. Fifteen-year-old Annette Calvert is uprooted from Houston when her father buys a semi-weekly newspaper in Catchings, a community where tradition carries real authority and everybody seems to know everybody else’s business. Annette quickly discovers that moving has dropped her into the middle of conflicts over school integration, race, gender expectations, the Vietnam War, and the limits adults place on young people. At the same time, her family is learning that owning a newspaper means much more than putting stories on a page. Reporting the truth can cost advertisers, friendships, and social standing. The result is a coming-of-age historical fiction story in which national tensions become intensely personal.
One of the book’s strongest elements is the way the Catchings Press itself becomes part of the story. McMillion gives readers the clatter of the Linotype, the smell of hot type, the financial pressure of keeping a local paper alive, and the constant question of how far a publisher should go when the truth threatens the bottom line. Sam and Marian Calvert gradually find themselves confronting school officials, closed meetings, discriminatory customs, and advertisers willing to use money as leverage. That gives this historical fiction novel about journalism an appealing tension between everyday family life and larger questions about civic responsibility. Annette watches all of it, and her growing understanding of what journalism can accomplish becomes just as important as anything she learns in school. The novel makes local news feel consequential because, in Catchings, it clearly is.
Annette also gives the book much of its warmth. She’s funny, observant, occasionally insecure, and still young enough to discover that her assumptions about other people don’t always survive contact with their experiences. Her friendship and attraction to Bobby Calhoun gradually expose the distance between her relatively privileged life and his experience as a Black student in a recently integrated school. Meanwhile, her brother Danny’s antiwar idealism, Manuel Ramirez’s treatment at school, Marian’s return to reporting, and the increasingly oppressive behavior of Superintendent Bic Harold and teacher Fred Frasier give the novel several overlapping sources of conflict. McMillion handles these threads as parts of the same 1960s coming-of-age story, showing how racism, sexism, bullying, political power, and family expectations can all spring from the desire to decide how somebody else should live. Annette’s fight against the school dress code eventually becomes less about hemlines than about recognizing who gets to make choices and who’s expected to obey.
What stayed with me most about The Catchings Press is its interest in small acts of resistance. Annette doesn’t become a different person overnight, and Catchings doesn’t suddenly transform into an ideal community. Change comes through reporting, uncomfortable conversations, public meetings, a student petition, a parent willing to speak up, and people deciding that fear has had enough influence over their choices. This historical coming-of-age novel has a satisfying sense of scale. The novel connects one Texas family’s turbulent year with the much larger struggles of the 1960s without losing sight of ordinary details, relationships, humor, and consequences. It’s a story about journalism, family, first love, civic courage, and the slow process of learning that speaking up can matter even when the battle seems small.
Not In This World
Not in This World, by Jane Scott Stuart with Elaine Flowers, is a sweeping historical fiction novel that begins in segregated 1930s Kentucky and follows Paul Carew, a young Black man whose gentleness, creativity, love of beautiful things, and complicated sense of identity set him on a path far beyond the community known as the Kingdom. Paul cooks, sews, sings, dances, tends flowers, and finds joy in dressing in women’s clothes, all while growing up under the frightening authority of his preacher father, Elijah. The novel establishes its emotional stakes early, then widens into a story about family, race, gender, friendship, survival, and the search for a place where a person can live more freely. The authors describe the book as fiction based on true accounts, and that connection to real experience gives this Southern historical fiction a particularly intimate quality.
Some of the book’s most affecting chapters belong to Paul and Moses, childhood friends whose bond feels as natural as breathing. Their lives also reveal how dangerous Jim Crow Kentucky can be, especially after Moses becomes entangled with Kenneth Baynor and is charged with his murder. The consequences are devastating, and Moses’s fate changes Paul permanently. From there, the story expands without losing its personal focus. Paul becomes part of the Jackson household and, eventually, the devoted caregiver to young Jane, who calls him Paw-Paw and attaches herself to him with complete trust. Their relationship grows into the heart of the novel. It’s a form of chosen family that crosses race, class, age, and social expectations, and the affection between them gives the heavier sections of this coming-of-age historical fiction real warmth. Moses’s death, meanwhile, remains present in Paul’s life instead of becoming a plot point he simply leaves behind.
The move across the Atlantic gives Not in This World another dimension. Paul travels with Jane and her family to England and Ireland, where everyday experiences force him to reconsider assumptions that American segregation had taught him were permanent. Later, with World War II underway, he joins the Royal Air Force and grows from a gifted domestic worker who has spent much of his life serving others into a confident serviceman whose courage earns recognition. These sections make the novel compelling World War II historical fiction, but Paul’s inner life remains just as important as military events. His attraction to men, his pleasure in feminine clothes and makeup, and his private negotiations with masculinity are woven throughout his journey, giving the book a place within LGBTQ+ historical fiction as well. The contrast becomes especially sharp when Paul returns to Kentucky in uniform after serving overseas and discovers that military achievement hasn’t erased the rules governing where a Black man can sit, eat, or watch a movie.
What I liked most is the way the novel brings Paul’s public and private selves together through Jane. In the final chapter, she discovers him in a yellow silk dress, makeup, earrings, and perfume, dancing before his mirror. Paul is terrified that the secret he’s guarded for years has finally been exposed. Jane’s response is immediate delight: she recognizes the person she already loves. It’s a beautifully chosen ending because it gathers so many of the novel’s threads into one small room: the frightened boy once brutalized for putting on a dress, the man who has survived racism and war, the caregiver who has given Jane unconditional love, and the child who returns that love without hesitation. That moment captures what makes Not in This World memorable as historical fiction, LGBTQ+ fiction, and a personal story of chosen family. It’s a novel about being seen fully by another person and discovering that love can make room for every part of you.
Pages: 376 | ISBN : 978-1736458334
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
