THE WITCH'S ORCHARD, very promising authorial and series debut...with reservations

THE WITCH'S ORCHARD
ARCHER SULLIVAN
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A ninth generation Appalachian herself, Archer Sullivan brings the mountains of North Carolina to life in The Witch’s Orchard, a wonderfully atmospheric novel that introduces private investigator Annie Gore.

Former Air Force Special Investigator Annie Gore joined the military right after high school to escape the fraught homelife of her childhood. Now, she’s getting by as a private investigator and her latest case takes her to an Appalachian holler not unlike the one where she grew up.

Ten years ago, three little girls went missing from their tiny mountain town. While one was returned, the others were never seen again. After all this time without answers, the brother of one of the girls wants to hire an outsider, and he wants Annie. While she may not be from his town, she gets mountain towns. Mountain people. Driving back into the hills for a case this old—it might be a fool’s errand. But Annie needs to put money in the bank and she can’t turn down a case. Not even one that dredges up her own painful past.

In the shadow of the Blue Ridge, Annie begins to track the truth, navigating a decade’s worth of secrets, folklore of witches and crows, and a whole town that prefers to forget. But while the case may have been buried, echoes of the past linger. And Annie’s arrival stirs someone into action.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I about blew a gasket when applehead dolls and a Datsun 260Z appeared in the first fifteen pages. I was sure as sure can be that here was a five-star read.

But then. Let me explain.

I love stories about Appalachia that do't dump on the people like certain political scumbags did. I love strong and capable women investigators who don't have any truck with men telling 'em no, and bonus points to one with male friends not lovers. I love women who write books with accurate car names, and include their woman protagonists in this. All present and accounted for.

Then we play the mother card. We see crimes against little girls. Not, I stress, sexual ones, or this would've been Pearl-Ruled. The wrap-up was, as I feared, mother-related. I am not a Cult of Mother believer, my own mother was awful. Reading the resolution to this story was horrifying on multiple levels. I'm glad the Cult of Mother does not come out of the story unscathed, but it's extremely unpleasant to read another crimes-against-girl story no matter the resolution. I'd be frothingly furious if the girls in question had been treated as so many in crime fiction are.

Mystery and thriller writers need not to use girls-in-jeopardy as a plot engagement device. It is a cultural message that is toxic both to girls (who are, in adolescence, beginning to consume adult-oriented mystery series where their culturally pervasive role is victimhood) and to men, offering implicit targets in the existence of women as prey in entertainment every-damn-where.

So I love the book's execution, its solid plot-bones kept me reading, and the first-time author has an excellent touch with her side characters. I want this to be a series...I'll read Brimstone Hollow in 2026, if y'all want me to...I'm not able to overlook, however, the serious-to-me issue of using crimes against girls for entertainment value.

That is insupportable.

THE HEIRESS, enjoyable mildly thrilling novel inciting you to eat the rich

THE HEIRESS
RACHEL HAWKINS
St. Martin's Press
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: THERE'S NOTHING AS GOOD AS THE RICH GONE BAD.

When Ruby McTavish Callahan Woodward Miller Kenmore dies, she’s not only North Carolina’s richest woman, she’s also its most notorious. The victim of a famous kidnapping as a child and a widow four times over, Ruby ruled the tiny town of Tavistock from Ashby House, her family’s estate high in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

But in the aftermath of her death, her adopted son, Camden, wants little to do with the house or the money—and even less to do with the surviving McTavishes. Instead, he rejects his inheritance, settling into a normal life as an English teacher in Colorado and marrying Jules, a woman just as eager to escape her own messy past.

Ten years later, his uncle’s death pulls Cam and Jules back into the family fold at Ashby House. Its views are just as stunning as ever, its rooms just as elegant, but the legacy of Ruby is inescapable.

And as Ashby House tightens its grip on Jules and Camden, questions about the infamous heiress come to light. Was there any truth to the persistent rumors following her disappearance as a girl? What really happened to those four husbands, who all died under mysterious circumstances? And why did she adopt Cam in the first place? Soon, Jules and Cam realize that an inheritance can entail far more than what’s written in a will—and that the bonds of family stretch far beyond the grave.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: This book should have a subtitle: "Schadenfreude Unbound" feels about right. Soapy, sudsy storytelling that plunges nasty, unkind, entitled rich idiots into a decades-long feud à la Succession, fighting over money, fighting dirty, being hateful to each other and everyone around them...the poor bastard who actually inherits the family estate and fortune had my complete sympathy for running away. I'd've done the same.

My introduction to Author Hawkins was her largely unloved-by-fans (most I know gave it about three stars to my four) novel THE VILLA (which review is linked). I liked it fine. Like this book, it was escapist suds with a mote of social commentary. This was handled in a way that it could be text or subtext, depending on the reader, and the mood.

The family-secrets trope is evergreen. I can always get behind a good story of how awful families are to each other! The more money is involved...and there is an ocean of money in this one...the more awful behavior there is. Cam, our heir-apparent, is the victim of bullying by his cousin-of-sorts Ben as they are growing up...and yet it is Ben who contacts Cam when the disrepair of Ashby House (modeled on Biltmore, the Vanderbilt mansion outside Asheville, North Carolina) becomes too much for the Southern-Gothic, heavily derivative "family" he's left in possession of it to handle on their own resources...they are far too Refined to earn their own money, do you not see? As he's the heir to all the money, and the property, but won't take them into his possession, no one can do anything without his say-so and he won't say so.

I got a frisson when I thought about how much that email must've hurt babbitty, bullying Ben.

Cam and his wife Jules, who tell the story in alternating chapters, are to all appearances a happy-enough suburban couple. They set out to assess the situation in person. The trip is from Colorado; not a minor jaunt. They arrive, and while Jules had until now had no real idea of the scope of Cam's background's wealth (a thing that set my BS filter into fine-mesh mode...no particles allowed through), she has a crash course now. Her impoverished childhood, and the sheer opulence of Cam's adoptive family's digs, sets off a major lust in Jules to stop being a hardscrabble never-was and settle in to being utterly secure.

Financially, anyway.

The adoption of a nobody by the heiress whose fortune is being fought over is unsurprisingly very unpopular with her family. The third PoV in the novel is letters sent by the dead Ruby to an unknown recipient that go a long way to explain her thinking...there are good reasons for it...and the book uses them effectively as spikes to hang the twists and turns of the plot onto. I do not particularly think that the ending was a natural outgrowth of the set-up. I was not convinced that Jules and Cam were happily married at the beginning, given the amount of uncommunicated stuff in their relationship. That this money exists and is legally her husband's money is bound to give her some Feelings. That his wife is seduced by the trappings of wealth that he saw through and rejected is bound to give Cam some Feelings. They were not ignored, these factors, but they got less oomph than I thought was their due.

I can only get up to three and a half stars because these factors kept me from getting to the ending with the author. A very entertaining book, a good commentary on the fragility of relationships, a brutal take-down of the superrich and their appalling sense of entitlement...all yes, and all positives. The ending being of a piece with the set-up...well, not for this reader.

Go into it with a heart full of malice for rich people, and enjoy the hell out of it on that level.

DEAD LETTERS FROM PARADISE, lesbian sleuth in 1960s North Carolina & MY POLICEMAN, well-matched book and film...you can find both at Amazon!

DEAD LETTERS FROM PARADISE
ANN McMAN
Bywater Books
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: April 1960.

Gunsmoke is the most popular show on TV. Elvis Presley tops the Billboard charts. A charismatic young senator named John F. Kennedy is running for president. And, in North Carolina, four young Black men sit down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter and demand service. Enter Esther Jane (EJ) Cloud, a forty-something spinster who manages the Dead Letter Office at the Winston-Salem post office. EJ leads a quiet life in her Old Salem ancestral home and spends her free time volunteering in the town’s 18th-century hortus medicus.

One sunny Spring morning, EJ’s simple life is turned upside down when the town’s master gardener unceremoniously hands her a packet of handwritten letters that have all been addressed to a nonexistent person at the garden and expects EJ to “tend to them.” This simple act sets in motion a chain of events that will lead EJ on a life-altering quest to uncover the identity of the mysterious letter writer—and into a surprising head-on confrontation with the harsh realities of the racial injustice that is as deeply rooted in the life of her community as the ancient herbs cultivated in the Moravian garden.

When EJ is forced to read the letters to look for clues about the anonymous sender, what she discovers are lyrical tales of a forbidden passion that threaten to unravel the simple contours of her unexamined life. EJ’s official quest soon morphs into a journey of self-discovery as she becomes more deeply enmeshed in the fate of the mysterious letter writer, “Dorothea.” Her surprising accomplice in solving the mystery of the letters becomes one, Harrie Hart: a savvy, street smart ten-year-old, wielding an eye patch and a limitless supply of aphorisms. Together, Harrie and EJ make seminal pilgrimages to the tiny town of Paradise to try and uncover the identity of the mercurial sender and, ultimately, learn a better way to navigate the changing world around them.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I love Ann McMan's way of approaching a story. I understood I was reading about a closeted-even-from-herself lesbian instantly, from the moment EJ was introduced to me. I had a lesbian couple as "grandmothers" of a sort, best friends of my mother's for decades. They were Southern ladies, they were clearly a couple, and it...just didn't matter. They came to our house for Thanksgiving. They were constantly in our conversations about family, and had one name between them: "Sara-Lucy" since their names were Sara and Lucy; we just didn't need to say "and" because they were always a unit to all of us.

EJ and her friends were the kind of people, then, that I grew up knowing and loving. I strongly suspect Author McMan had someone(s) similar to my belovèd Sara-Lucy in her young queer life. She loves EJ as much as the child Harrie, EJ's shadow-cum-sidekick, does. Fay Marian is my nominee for that treasured role...the Moravian Herb Garden is such a perfectly chosen project for a group of lesbians to choose as a social hub.

What made the story itself, the dead letters that EJ receives to unite with their intended recipient or reunite with their sender (both unknown at the start), so beautifully chosen was the way Author McMan used these artifacts of thwarted love and strangled passion to bring EJ into a fuller understanding of Life as she *could* live it. She is living, no really she's just spending her one life unsatisfyingly, incompletely, almost entirely in the Dead Letter Office. As great a contrast as you can imagine is the child Harrie, so curious and open, so wise and still so innocent. She is a character I simply wanted to hug every time she came on the page.

I'd've rated the book a full five stars had I not felt that the period-appropriate race relations issues been less integral to the story than it was used as a grace note within the story. The issue isn't meant to be foregrounded...so the smart money says don't use it. In the present moment, the in-between handling of it comes across more as a detraction from than a point in favor of the read.

Still leads me straight (!) to Ann McMan's extensive backlist. I want more and I mean to have it. Thanks to my dear old reading buddy whose nudge pointed me in this direction. You're the best, Sister Woman.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

MY POLICEMAN
BETHAN ROBERTS
Penguin Books
$17.00 trade paper, if Mr. Styles's face from the film being on the book is an added bonus

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Now a motion picture starring Harry Styles and Emma Corrin, an exquisitely told, tragic tale of thwarted love.

It is in 1950's Brighton that Marion first catches sight of Tom. He teaches her to swim, gently guiding her through the water in the shadow of the city's famous pier and Marion is smitten—determined her love alone will be enough for them both. A few years later near the Brighton Museum, Patrick meets Tom. Patrick is besotted, and opens Tom's eyes to a glamorous, sophisticated new world of art, travel, and beauty. Tom is their policeman, and in this age it is safer for him to marry Marion and meet Patrick in secret. The two lovers must share him, until one of them breaks and three lives are destroyed.

In this evocative portrait of midcentury England, Bethan Roberts reimagines the real life relationship the novelist E. M. Forster had with a policeman, Bob Buckingham, and his wife. My Policeman is a deeply heartfelt story of love's passionate endurance, and the devastation wrought by a repressive society.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE LIBRARY. USE THEM OFTEN, THEY LIVE AND DIE ON OUR PATRONAGE.

My Review: This is a fictionalized version of the actual lived life of EM Forster, his policeman lover Robert Buckingham, and his lover's wife May.

This is also gay trauma porn, a film starring a straight(ish) actor in a gay(ish) role AGAIN, and an accurate presentation of the ways and means used by gay men in the past to muddle through this rough thing we call Life. I had a gay uncle in Buckingham's generation, so I've heard the stories firsthand.

I'm not going to tiptoe around the fact that this book was written more than a decade ago, which means the cultural landscape was quite different. This true story, only lightly fictionalized, has lost none of its power to move someone whose desire is to be let in on the hard, terrible work of loving someone more than they love you back, and the horrible, disfiguring things that jealousy can lead a person to do. I was appalled by Marion's actions in the book, which were NOT the actions of May Buckingham. I truly understand why Author Roberts chose to make this shift, though. The story's drama would've been more literary fiction-lite without it. As it is, this read is much more like sudsy, beautiful Ethan Frome in its impact.

I'm also not going to tiptoe around the fact that Mr. Styles, whose public presentation of self leads me to think this story's lineaments resonated on a deeply personal level with him, is still publicly straight and playing a role where the character's only assuming the mask of straightness where his heart and his cock are engaged elsewhere. Same old, same old...but let me say this now: He does a damned fine job of playing Tom, and he deserves credit for doing the job at all. We're sliding into another darker age for QUILTBAG people, it seems, after some modest gains were made. Mr. Styles's metrosexual-shading-into-heteroflexible persona is very risky, and he doesn't seem to shy away from it as hard as, say, Tom Hanks did after Philadelphia thirty years ago.

The book will be overshadowed by the film for many reasons. Not the least of them is that the film has pretty people who enacted simulated sex for our collective titillation. (Something Mr. Styles does with, erm, style and verve.) That is not, to be blunt, a terrible loss. This book is nicely written, tells an involving story, but it disappeared for most of a decade without leaving a ripple...for a reason.

Because when you're in love with someone for the first time, their name is enough. Just seeing my hand form Tom's name was enough. Almost.

–and–

In those days it was rare, wasn't it, Patrick, for Tom's voice to become what you might call serious; there was always a lot of up-and-down in it, a delicacy, almost a musicality (no doubt that's how you heard it), as thought you couldn't quite believe anything he said. Over the years, his voice lost some of its musicality, partly, I think, in reaction to what happened to you; but even now, occasionally, it's like there's a laugh behind his words, just waiting to sneak out.

–and–

I'd almost forgotten the joy of waking up and, before you've even opened your eyes, knowing by the shape of the mattress beneath you, by the warmth of the sheets, that he's still there.

Nice lines, precise observations, a deft touch in siting them within the storyverse. Nothing at all wrong, or even clumsy, in any of it; take my word for it, were Bethan Roberts to have dropped a clanger I'd've gleefully snipped it out and plopped it here, dripping venom and blood, for your (oh okay, my) delectation. I'm a grouchy old curmudgeon who wanted to dislike this book, and couldn't. I also wanted to dislike Mr. Styles playing Tom, and couldn't. I'm in the nasty, frustrating position of needing to praise, however grudgingly, the film and the book, the actor and the characters, that I wanted to bash.

The film, out on 4 November 2022 via Prime Video, is very much worth your time. The book is as well...buy it if the Kindle edition is on sale, or borrow it from your library if not. Reading the book first will not damage your appreciation for the film nor will seeing the film first make you wonder where the hell they dug that story out of the book from in the first place.

I just wanted excellent, not very good, so I'm out of sorts. That is, however, my issue and not the book or its film's problem.

CAROLINA BUILT, fictionalized story of a superbly determined woman's battles

CAROLINA BUILT
KIANNA ALEXANDER
Gallery Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 ebook edition, available now


Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This “exuberant celebration of Black women’s joy as well as their achievements” (Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author) novelizes the life of real estate magnate Josephine N. Leary in a previously untold story of passion, perseverance, and building a legacy after emancipation in North Carolina.

Josephine N. Leary is determined to build a life of her own and a future for her family. When she moves to Edenton, North Carolina from the plantation where she was born, she is free, newly married, and ready to follow her dreams.

As the demands of life pull Josephine’s attention away, it becomes increasingly difficult for her to pursue her real estate aspirations. She finds herself immersed in deepening her marriage, mothering her daughters, and being a dutiful daughter and granddaughter. Still, she manages to teach herself to be a businesswoman, to manage her finances, and to make smart investments in the local real estate market. But with each passing year, it grows more and more difficult to focus on building her legacy from the ground up.

“Filled with passion and perseverance, Josephine Leary is frankly a woman that everyone should know” (Sadeqa Johnson, author of Yellow Wife) and her story speaks to the part of us that dares to dream bigger, tear down whatever stands in our way, and build something better for the loved ones we leave behind.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It's always been hard to be a woman. In the US, it's always been hard to be Black. Now put the two disadvantages together...that's what Josephine Leary is up against. She's equal to any task, though; the novel begins in 1870, during the last days of Reconstruction. Having lived her childhood as a slave, Josephine knows that every single act she takes in this life has to have as its aim the increase of freedom and the assurance of security for herself, her husband, and their two daughters, as each addition to her life is made.

Her slaveowner was also her father, and that piece of "good luck" played out in her favor. She was able to buy the barbershop she and her husband ran together from him. And from there forward, it was all Mrs. Leary and all the way up Sweety, her husband, backed her.

Until her success threatened his Manhood.

It's a testament to the author's ability to pace a story that I didn't just quietly close the book and ignore it at that point. I know it happened; I am told it still happens. But it makes for dull reading, the expected flaw in the expected place. But to her credit, Author Alexander dwells on it not...it's not like it's played down but it's not protracted either.

What made me so dad-blamed mad that I screamed at my Kindle (for which I apologize to my roommate, he was sleeping and was utterly terrified as I shouted "NO SHE DID NOT!!" into the dark) came close to the end of the book when there's a fire that deprives Mrs. Leary of her (uninsured, of course, she was a Black woman, who'd write that policy in the 1890s?!) hard-earned gains! But...and this is where I almost cheered but was too shy to wake the grouch up again...she still owned the land. And she chose to rebuild, to build back better.

Unlike certain scumbag politicians with "R"s after their names.

Well, that all sounds very five-starry, doesn't it? But there's a four up there...and I feel generous giving it. The fact is that this is a very dialogue-heavy novel and there's not much vigor in the dialogue. It's not awful but it doesn't lend itself to quoting the quotable quotes. There's not any.

"The only thing that truly frightens me is the idea that I might not take full advantage of the gift of freedom. I refuse to let that happen."

And that is as snappy as it gets. I'm in total agreement with the sentiment. I just wish it had more oomph behind it.

But in the end, this is an historical novel and it's a lot better served by thinking of it as a novelized biography. Josephine Leary very much deserves to be remembered for her indomitable will, her savvy, and her sheer cussèd determination to overcome every obstacle the world shoves in front of her. Reading the story is a good, and a worthy, way to honor the memory of such a remarkable person.