As you’re probably aware, #RAtR is a blogging project I am doing with a few friends who also write LGBTQIA romance. You can find everyone by clicking here or on the image to the right.
This month we are, obviously, writing about our favourite creepy or Halloween story. This is a dead easy post for me to write, as I have an outstanding all-time-favourite Halloween story–The House on Druid Lake by Isabelle Adler.
It’s kind of a cosy mystery as well as a Halloween story, which should be counter-intuitive but turns out not to be at all.
The House on Druid Lake
Oliver’s a bit of a mess–his last relationship was abusive and he’s moved from Florida to Baltimore for a new job and a fresh start. He moves into a flat in an interesting old house, sight unseen except for the photos in the listing on the internet. The very attractive landlord is a bit odd as are the rest of the tenants. It was such a set-up…creaky old house, mysterious tenants…I loved it and immediately began working out what particular kind of entity each person was.
The house turns out to be the target of an unscrupulous developer and Oliver and his new landlord have to outwit them. Nym, the landlord, has his own secrets and hang-ups and I found their relationship development satisfying and well-rounded. There are some pleasingly inexplicable little bits…I don’t like my magic systems to be spoon-fed to me and there were little loose threads independent of the main story that gave me things to ponder once I’d finished. It’s a very happy Halloween book and I love it!
I’m jumping on the #SampleSunday hashtag on twitter this week, with an excerpt from The Quid Pro Quo for you…
The Quid Pro Quo is a romantic historical paranormal murder-mystery set in 1920s rural England where nearly everyone is queer and the main couple is m/transm. Think Agatha Christie, but queer! With monsters! It’s the sequel to The Fog of War, but it works as a standalone set in the Border Magic universe.
Simon pressed the heel of his hand down onto the place the pain was radiating from. That usually helped. He sometimes wondered if there was anything still left in there. He should probably get it looked at. X-rayed, they called it, didn’t they? The hospital in Taunton had a machine, he knew.
He sighed. “Look, I didn’t just come up to show off my weaknesses to you.”
Kennett made a harrumphing sound that could have been a laugh.
“I came to ask about two things. Her alibi. And the way she describes what happened at the seance.”
“Look,” Kennett drew a breath and said in a firm voice, “she didn’t do it.”
Simon glared up at him, not quite ready to get up off the bench and fall over into the other man’s arms again. “That’s all very well. But you can’t just say that and then tell me you can’t say why you know!”
Kennett screwed up his face. “I just can’t, Mr Frost. And that’s all there is to it.”
Simon managed to stand. For all Kennett was small, he was intimidating. He scowled furiously up at Simon, face creased with anger. There was no trace of the sardonic wit about him now.
“Was she with you that night?” Simon asked quietly. It seemed unlikely, a girl like Miss Hall-Bridges and Kennett, who was a good twenty years older than her if he was a day and a lowly ex-soldier to boot. But he’d seen stranger relationships.
Kennett choked. “Bloody hell, no!” he said, almost with a shudder. “Absolutely definitely the wrong tree, Detective Frost!” There! He did return Simon’s interest, else Simon was a Dutchman.
Simon took another wobbling step forward and Kennett stepped back. Simon finally felt as if he was getting somewhere. There was something there. Why were they all protecting the woman? It was clear she was the best suspect—on paper, she had reason. But it was also clear that despite the evidence, nobody thought she’d done it. Including Simon.
Not that a lot of other people didn’t have reason to dislike the victim as well by the sound of it. His take-away from speaking to people who knew her painted a picture of the deceased as an entitled, arrogant woman who expected people to jump to her tune. He stopped that train of thought. There was never a reason to kill anyone. Never. Just because most of the people he knew had spent the last few years seeing that as the solution to all their problems didn’t mean it was right.
He drew a breath. “Then point me toward the right tree for goodness sake! If you have evidence that it wasn’t her, you’re morally obliged to let me have it!” he said, finally after a moment of silence.
Kennett shook his head again. “No, Detective Frost. I can’t. It’s not my place.”
Simon eyed him narrowly. He was backed up against the wall of the hallway, calm and not at all intimidated by Simon’s greater height.
“Do you know who killed her?” Simon asked him.
Kennett’s eyes flicked away and back again. He shook his head. “No. I don’t.” He knew something though. He finally sighed and stepped forward, putting him chest to chest with Simon and Simon had no alternative but to step to one side and let him past unless he wanted to make something of it. And he didn’t. He really didn’t. He moved aside.
Simon was left looking after him as he went down the hall to the kitchen, the door propped open against the building heat of the day. He followed him into the room, watching him fill the kettle and put it on, helplessly standing there with his hands fisted in frustration at his sides, hot with irritation in the warmth of the morning and the lit range.
“We’re done here,” Kennett said, sliding the kettle onto the hotplate and turning to face him. “You should leave, before Dr Marks gets home.”
“What, so you can sort out an alibi for Miss Hall-Bridges between you?” Simon said snarkily.
There was quite a long pause and then, from behind him, Dr Marks’ voice, deep and calm and very, very flat said, “No need, Detective Frost. Lucy and I share a bed. She didn’t go anywhere, all night.”
The silence was as absolute as if a shell had gone off and deafened him.
`
This week I’m all about the gay. A contemporary MM, To Take a Quiet Breath by Fearne Hill, a fantasy YA with a queer background romance (or is it NA? I’m never sure, I am neither and it was right in my ballpark, regardless) Fragile Remedy by Maria Ingrande Mora and a fantasy MM with dragon shifters, The Dragon Hunter’s Son by Hanna Dare.
I have a secret yen for books with ex-cons-gone-straight MCs and this fulfilled it perfectly. Guillaume killed a man who was abusing his younger sister and has done his time. He is befriended by Marcel, a high-up in the government department responsible for prisons, when Marcel meets him on an information-gathering exercise. Marcel is a chronic asthmatic and this is so well represented in this book. Stories with good disabled rep are another not-so-secret yen of mine. Disabled people are entitled to happy endings too.
This is perfectly realised in this story–the author doesn’t paper over the difficulties and challenges Marcel faces, but they don’t rule out his desire for (and right to!) love and intimacy. It’s book three of a series and I haven’t read the others yet, but I’m going to. I really enjoyed this.
This is a YA dystopian. The main character is Nate, who is sixteen. He’s also genetically engineered and needs the eponymous ‘remedy’ at regular intervals to prevent his body breaking down. This is hard to get hold of, as he lives in the lawless slum he escaped to as a young child to avoid being harvested for his organs.
This has everything you want from your dystopian read. Brilliant characterisation, a gritty plot and an interesting social set-up. The cast is a racially diverse queer found family with good trans rep. It’s plot-heavy with a background romance that chugs along nicely. Highly recommend!
I’m a Hannah Dare fan from her Mind-Metal-Machine series, so I was predisposed to like this one from the start. It’s about Philip, who is the son of Jaxon the dragon hunter. Jaxon is, quite frankly, a jerk. I hated him. We’re supposed to hate him, so that’s okay–the author has done a brilliant job making that possible! Philip is kind and a bit bewildered by life, but toddles along behind his father because that’s what his dying mother asked him to do. He falls for Ejoler when they stop at a town Jaxon rid of a dragon decades ago. Ejoler is, of course, a dragon.
This was such a lovely take on the shifter trope. It’s a sweet low-heat romance and I thought Ejoler was wonderful, particularly his take on gathering jewels and precious things. It’s a lovely low-drama comfort read and I recommend it.
Today is the official release day of London Calling, the box set of my 1920s London Border Magic series! It comprises Lost in Time, Shadows on the Border & The Hunted and the Hind.
To celebrate I have a giveaway! Roll up, roll up! And read all about it!
Queer British Lovecraftian historical romantic suspense set in 1920s London.
Lew Tyler is dragged from 2016 to 1920 by an accident with border magic whilst he’s searching for his missing friend. He’s struggling to get to grips with life a century before he was born. Detective Alec Carter is trying to solve gruesome murders in his patch of London, weighed down with exhaustion and a jaded attitude to most of his fellow humans after four years of war. In the middle of a murder investigation that involves wild magic, mysterious creatures and illegal sexual desire, will Alec and Lew work out who is safe to trust?
Sergeant Will Grant, Alec’s right-hand man, is drawn to the mysterious Fenn. Is Fenn a man or a woman? Does Will care? And Fenn…Fenn has a secret. They live beyond the border between 1920s London and the magical Outlands and they need to get home. Are they prepared to achieve that by double crossing Alec, Will and Lew?
Two couples hold the fabric of reality in their hands. Will it make them or break them?
Carter on his doorstep when he got home again was just taking the piss. All Lew wanted to do was climb into his bed and sleep and pretend he was in his comfortable flat-share in 2016 and could wake up and listen to his iPod.
He didn’t even bother to greet Carter this time, just wordlessly locked up the bike and opened the door into the flat so he could come inside. He was glowering again. Lew wished he could say it didn’t suit him. “Come in. Glowering doesn’t suit you.”
Carter grunted wordlessly and suddenly Lew had had enough of it.
“No, honestly. It makes your face all scrunched up—” he demonstrated, “—and I’m sure it’s bad for you. Wrinkles or something.” He couldn’t seem to shut up. Poking a bear would probably have been safer. He wanted to get through to him, though, he wanted to make him growl. The other day and being punched in the face had at least proved Carter had some emotion in there somewhere; he couldn’t feel anything from him, most of the time. He chucked his biking goggles onto the small settee and turned to the kitchen cupboard. “Do you want a drink? I’m having a drink. I’ve had a shit day so far...a shit week, in fact.” He paused, considering, “...maybe even a shitty two years. And so, I’m going to have a drink. You’re welcome to join me.”
He clattered the bottle and a couple of glasses out of the cupboard and smashed them unsteadily down on the counter top. He felt unsteady all over, actually, as if he’d already drunk too much. Adrenaline, and lack of sleep, probably.
He pulled the cork out of the bottle and started to slop spirit into the glasses. Then, all of a sudden, Carter moved to stand close behind him, still not speaking. He hadn’t been expecting it and it made him even more mentally off balance.
He could feel the warmth of the other man’s body through the back of his shirt, although they weren’t touching. He was boxed in by his arms, either side of him, hands flat on the counter. It was shockingly intimate, although Lew didn’t think Carter meant it to be. He meant it to be intimidating. The otherman said, softly, “Tell me. Tell me. Tell me what’s going on. Why have I got more dead men turning up with the same wounds as your friend Fornham?”
Bloody hell. More of them. That was very, very bad. “Get off me.” Lew spoke equally quietly.
There was a pause for a second. “No,” said Carter.
“You don’t know what you’re messing with. Get off me.” Again, that pause.
“No.” His voice was rougher this time.
Lew noticed Carter’s knuckles were white where he was holding the countertop either side of the whisky bottle and the glasses. He shivered.
Suddenly he could feel things coming off Carter after all: the want and the fear and the desperate sense of disgust at himself. The anger and the confusion he felt toward Lew because he wanted Lew and yet he didn’t trust him, with this or with anything, and it was all against his better judgement. The emotions hit him like a wall coming up out of the dark all at once and completely floored him; and he gasped.
Slowly, he pushed the bottle away from him—always with the drink when Carter was around, he absently thought—and turned around, careful not to touch him. They were nearly of a height—he didn’t have to tilt his head much to see that Carter’s eyes were green. Lashes long and dark. He didn’t pull back. It was mid-afternoon and his beard was coming through.
Lew swallowed. “I don’t want to lie to you.”
It came out rougher than he had intended and Carter’s eyes dropped to his mouth.
“Then don’t!” He pulled back angrily and turned away, hands shoving fiercely through his hair. “Tell me what’s going on!”
“Carter...Alistair...” He couldn’t bear the wave of confused anger and emotion coming off the man and he stepped forward and put his hand on his arm, turning him back toward him.
“Alec...”
Carter jerked back as if he’d been burned.
Buy London Calling
The Quid Pro Quo is the second in the Bradfield trilogy, although it will stand alone. It’s set a few months after the end of The Fog of War and stars Sylvia’s friend Walter Kennett, and Simon Frost, a detective who comes to Bradfield to investigate a murder. It’s a gay, historical, paranormal, romantic murder-mystery with a m/transm couple set in rural England in 1920.
One of the things I researched when I was beginning to think about Walter’s background was exactly what training he’d have had as a nurse (or an orderly) in the British army. The answer to that question was ‘not a great deal’ in that Victorian army nurses seemed to have been expected to pick things up as they went along. Before the advent of Florence Nightingale and her cohort during the Crimean War in the mid-nineteenth century, nurses had all been men and they had been attached to individual regiments.
Outrage at the terrible conditions in the Crimea led to the development of a Medical Staff Corps in 1855, which recruited ‘Men able to read and write, of regular steady habits and good temper and of a kindly disposition’. This was renamed the Army Hospital Corps in 1857 and reverted back to being the Medical Staff Corps again in 1884*. Confusingly, the medical officers were known as the Medical Staff…and in 1898, the Medical Staff Corps and the Medical Staff were combined into Royal Army Medical Corps.
This is where Walter comes in.
In my head, he joins up as the two organisations are being merged together and he sort of slips through the gaps, staying hidden as a trans man with the help of the doctor who did his medical when he recruited him and possibly with a bit of a blind eye being turned by his army mates. He serves in the Boer War in South Africa and subsequently all over the British Empire before ending up at Sylvia’s hospital in France in World War One. By the time we meet him 1920, he’s forty and had served in the army for twenty-one years.
That brings me to a really interesting blog post about male nurses in the 1920s I found at This Intrepid Band-a blog dedicated to the history of military nursing. Nursing regulation was pretty slapdash until the end of the First World War. Hospitals trained nurses for between one and three years and gave them a certificate. But…anyone could call themselves a nurse even without that training.
After 1919, that changed. I won’t replicate all the qualifying criteria here, you can read it at This Intrepid Band if you want to…but Walter would have fallen under the ‘three years military experience’ criteria. However, as a man, he would have been singularly alone. Even in 1928, although there were forty thousand women on the new register, there were only two hundred men.
I don’t know whether there were any male nurses working at village practices in the early twenties; but I suspect it’s very unlikely. Most of the nurses in 1928 were in prisons or mental hospitals, presumably dealing with men who were considered dangerous and perhaps unsafe for women nurses to care for. Walter’s like Sylvia though, in that he feels that he’s done his bit keeping other people safe and looking after strangers. He wants to be part of a community and part of family as much as he can. So a small village, with his friends, suits him fine.
I hope you like his story!
The Quid Pro Quo
Village nurse Walter Kennett is content with his makeshift found family in tiny Bradfield. However, when a body is found floating in the village duck pond one midsummer morning, danger arrives too.
Between his attraction to detective Simon Frost, concealing Sylvia and Lucy’s relationship and not knowing how much to reveal about the paranormal possibilities of the murder, Walter is torn all ways.
The Quid Pro Quo is a 50,000 word romantic historical paranormal murder-mystery set in 1920s rural England where nearly everyone is queer and the main couple is m/transm.
