An engaging historical crime yarn set in a minefield of intolerance.
Gay couples battle the Ku Klux Klan and a predatory gangster in this period thriller set in the Roaring ’20s.
The concluding novel in Stookey’s Medicine for the Blues Trilogy finds piano player Jimmy Harper returning to Portland, Oregon, in shock after seeing his musician lover get gunned down by mobster Danny Felton in Chicago. There to catch him is previous lover Carl Holman, a surgeon whose renewed live-in relationship with Jimmy complicates life in a Portland dominated by a homophobic Ku Klux Klan. Rumored to be a gay man—he announced a fake engagement with his lesbian friend Gwen Cook to quiet the gossip—Carl also runs afoul of Klan taboos by performing surgeries at St. Mary’s Catholic Hospital and prescribing birth control to women. Friction with the Invisible Empire increases when Carl discovers that a Klansman who runs a bootlegging operation had been molesting his 12-year-old son before the boy died of appendicitis. Then Carl’s boss, another Klansman, pressures him to join the group and marry Gwen in a Klan mass wedding. As if that weren’t enough, Danny arrives in Portland and tries to blackmail Carl into giving him drugs, and the surgeon gets on the wrong side of vice cop (and Klansman) Steve Bateson when he investigates the bigot’s savage beating of a gay suspect. On the bright side, a solution to Carl’s relationship conundrum materializes: He marries Gwen and Jimmy weds her lover, Charlene, and the two ostensibly straight pairs reside in neighboring houses, which allows them to surreptitiously live as gay couples. But will that keep them off the Klan’s radar?
Stookey’s tale throws together elements from his Acquaintance (2017) and Chicago Blues (2018) in a frenetically busy, often overstuffed narrative. The romantic reveries—and graphic sex—of the previous novels are muted here. Jimmy doesn’t have much to do besides lick his wounds after his Chicago misadventure, and Carl remains preoccupied with sleuthing and strategizing his way through a maze of threats and murders. The author succeeds in conjuring a pressure-cooker atmosphere with a sinister noir vibe as Carl probes the seamy underbelly of placid Portland. Danny is a charismatic figure of insinuating malignancy. Bateson is a vicious, violent man, and Carl has to maneuver carefully around him. In one scene, barbershop customers subtly rally to protect Carl when Bateson menacingly gay-baits him; in another, the surgeon elicits enough nuance and residual conscience from the cop to reach a rapprochement that serves both men’s purposes. In Carl’s first-person voice, Stookey’s prose shows flashes of poetic imagery. (“Cawing overhead caught my ear and I looked up to see a flock of ragged black shapes flapping above me. I rested a moment, leaning against the wooden handle of the shovel while the crows circled once and flew on.”) Too often though, Carl’s sensibility sounds stolidly clinical—“During these weeks, Jimmy continued to come into my office for his periodic Wassermanns, and I kept an eye out for penile and anal warts”—or moralistic (“There are a lot of things in this world that are more unnatural than my friendship with Jimmy Harper. And one of those things is bigotry”). Still, there’s enough tension and drama in Carl’s claustrophobic predicament to keep readers turning pages.
An engaging historical crime yarn set in a minefield of intolerance.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73260-362-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pictograph Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A top-notch, spooky Regency page-turner.
Two lady novelists are haunted—and not just by thoughts of each other.
Lady Georgiana Cleeve has had enough. She and her mother gave up everything to escape her abusive father, and her writing career keeps them afloat, but lately every time she writes a novel, it's plagiarized before it’s even published by someone calling herself Lady Darling. When, after staking out Belvoir’s Library one morning at dawn, she discovers to her horror that Lady Darling is none other than Catriona Lacey, the daughter of her family’s butler, with whom she was once “hopelessly infatuated.” It turns out that Cat—shocked to see the aristocratic girl she used to pine for—also depends on writing Gothic romances to support her family. Unfortunately, after they part ways in the worst of tempers, they almost immediately see each other again at their publisher’s office, and then at a haunted churchyard, and then, somehow, at a haunted house in Wiltshire where both expected to find inspiration for their next novel. They agree to stay out of each other’s way, but in just a few days, their chemistry has fully reignited. Their first kiss is the “most erotic” experience either has had, but after their second kiss, they find a dead body in the probably haunted garden—and things only get stranger from there. And despite the supernatural happenings and growing danger, they can’t keep their hands off each other, leading both to wonder if a future together might be possible. The third story in the Belvoir’s Library series starts in the bookstore and then, as the women face being haunted by both the paranormal and their pasts, comes alive against the eerie setting. Georgie and Cat are tempted into plenty of scorching-hot moments no matter where they are, and they forge a gripping emotional connection as well. The satisfying ending is topped only by the excellent author’s note, in which readers will be delighted to learn how much of the story was drawn from the historical record.
A top-notch, spooky Regency page-turner.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781250910981
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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