Books | Author Suzanne Adair

My Revolutionary Valentine

Posted on February 14, 2014 by suzanneadairFebruary 14, 2014

While writing the first draft of Regulated for Murder, I realized that the climax of the book, where stakes were highest for my main character, Michael Stoddard, fell on 14 February 1781. My first thought was, “Valentine’s Day!” My next thought was, “Would Michael and his contemporaries have linked Valentine’s Day with romantic love during the American Revolution?” If so, I wanted to use Valentine’s Day to impart a chilling, kinky twist on the climax of Regulated for Murder.

Research showed me that commercialization of the holiday didn’t happen until the 19th century, when mass-produced Valentines became available. But it’s amazing how long ago people celebrated Valentine’s Day in association with romantic love. Would you believe as far back as the Middle Ages and Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales)?

It turns out that on Valentine’s Day in Revolutionary America, lovers would have expressed their amorous feelings to each other—possibly with the help of gifts like flowers, sweets, or homemade Valentines. Gifts. Hmm. How fortunate for me and my twisted imagination.

Happy Valentine’s Day! If you celebrate the holiday, how will you do it today, and what will the highlights be for you?

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The Winners of The Executioner’s Heir

Posted on February 9, 2014 by suzanneadairFebruary 9, 2014

Lynn Demsky, Mary Ann, and M.E. Kemp have won copies of The Executioner’s Heir by Susanne Alleyn. Congrats to all!

Note: For a limited time, The Executioner’s Heir is available for only 99 cents. Look for it in Kindle format, or for other formats, use the code “YB49W” at Smashwords. Hurry. This offer expires within a few days!

Thanks to Susanne Alleyn for a look inside the souls of historical executioners. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History this week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.

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Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne’s free newsletter.

An Unsuitable Job for a Gentleman, Part 2

Posted on February 5, 2014 by suzanneadairFebruary 4, 2014

Read Part 1 of Susanne Alleyn’s post here.

*****

Carnage

In the midst of the Terror in 1794, why, consumed by guilt, didn’t executioner Charles-Henri Sanson simply quit his job and honorably retire, as he did do a year later, well after the Terror had ended?

The easy answer was that, as he himself seemed to believe, he had grown hardened to horrors by decades in the profession—or that if he had given up his title, he would have found no other work or income elsewhere. And during the Terror, the revolutionary government found it all too convenient to “forget” to pay a civil servant who had no choice but to stay in his job. If Sanson had quit, he would have had neither a job nor any hopes of reclaiming his back pay.

But I felt that the answer was not that easy. The honorable and conscientious Charles Sanson I had come to know through his diary and through others’ opinions of him—the Charles Sanson whose obvious shame and self-loathing during the worst of the Terror was making him physically ill—would have been guided by something far more than a desire to recover his back wages.

“The Gentleness Must Remain”

I had already often considered these issues when I read British hangman Albert Pierrepoint’s autobiography and discovered statements in it that explained his own attitude toward his role in the twentieth-century British system of capital punishment. The British prided themselves on making judicial hanging a decorous, humane, quite painless procedure, streamlined to reduce the duration of the actual process—from condemned cell to noose and drop—to no more than twenty seconds. Pierrepoint took this swift process to its height, usually managing to trim the time down to eight or ten seconds while offering a reassuring word or two, if necessary, to the prisoner. To Pierrepoint, his hangman’s craft was about professional detachment and expertise, always “getting it right” and getting it over with quickly so that the victim didn’t suffer mentally or physically—and this attitude, he stated, was always combined with respect toward the victim, even after death.

Albert Pierrepoint, probably 1950s

“As the executioner,” Pierrepoint wrote, “it has fallen to me to make the last confrontation with all the condemned. . . . And it is at that moment, with their eyes on mine . . . that I have known that any previous emotional involvement I may have had with them [from reading about the criminal case in the newspapers] is to be regretted. There is only a final relationship which matters: in Christianity this is my brother or sister to whom something dreadful must be done, and I have tried always to be gentle with them, and to give them what dignity I could in their death.”

Later in his autobiography he added: “I have gone on record and been many times quoted with apparent irony as saying that my job was sacred to me. That sanctity must be most apparent at the hour of death. A condemned prisoner is entrusted to me, after decisions have been made which I cannot alter. He is a man, she is a woman, who, the Church says, still merits some mercy. The supreme mercy I can extend to them is to give them and sustain in them their dignity in dying and in death. The gentleness must remain.”

Pierrepoint’s views on his “craft”—which clearly became very important to him as a task he could perform swiftly and expertly every time—exactly represented how I thought Charles Sanson had managed to cope with his always distasteful and sometimes horrible duties. During the ancien régime when criminal justice was often subjective and brutal, and even during the Terror, he must have relied on maintaining the same professional detachment, mingled with compassion, toward the condemned as Albert Pierrepoint would exhibit a century and a half later. And I came to the conclusion that Sanson, in the end, remained in his position as public executioner throughout the Terror because he, just like Pierrepoint, felt it was his duty—not to the law but to the victims, and even more so if they were the victims of injustice.

Pierre-Antoine Demachy, Une exécution capitale, place de la Révolution, detail (1793). The master executioner, respectably dressed in a cutaway coat, knee breeches, and white stockings—presumably Charles Sanson, or one of his brothers, who sometimes filled in for him—is at far right on the scaffold.

Sanson could not save the men and women—whether guilty or innocent—whom he was ordered to execute by both royal and revolutionary authorities, any more than Pierrepoint, by refusing to carry out an execution, could have saved a prisoner sentenced to death for a murder he or she might not have committed. Sanson knew that if he resigned his title, another of France’s many professional executioners would have swiftly taken his coveted place, and that the newcomer might not have been as considerate as he toward the dying. And because he could not save the victims, he must have felt strongly that it was, at the very least, his lifelong duty to offer them some final kindnesses: to carry out any last wishes; to be sure that the guillotine always worked without a hitch; to ensure that his assistants always treated the condemned with respect; to keep their last hours or moments from being any more dreadful than they had to be.

“I see [the condemned prisoner] as a person who has a fixed and stony path decreed before him from which I cannot divert him, and therefore all I can do is to help him tread it as gently as possible.”

The words are Pierrepoint’s, but they could just as easily have been Charles Sanson’s.

*****

A big thanks to Susanne Alleyn. Remember, she’ll give away three electronic copies of The Executioner’s Heir to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Saturday at 6 p.m. ET.

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Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne’s free newsletter.

An Unsuitable Job for a Gentleman, Part 1

Posted on February 4, 2014 by suzanneadairFebruary 5, 2014

Relevant History welcomes back Susanne Alleyn. The Executioner’s Heir, about Charles Sanson’s youth and early career, is Susanne’s latest novel. She is the author of the Aristide Ravel series of historical mysteries set in 1780s/90s Paris, in which some of the Sansons make guest appearances. She is currently working on a fifth Ravel novel, on the sequel to The Executioner’s Heir, and on a heavily annotated edition of A Tale of Two Cities. For more information, check out her web site.

*****

Throughout history, people have regarded the public executioner much as they regarded the undertaker. The undertaker’s job has always had an “ick” factor attached, originating from a superstitious dread of human corpses and people who dealt with them. But the person who, in a formal judicial process, deliberately transformed a living person into a corpse was far worse.

So who would willingly choose to become an executioner, and choose to remain in the job?

While writing The Executioner’s Heir, the first of two novels about eighteenth-century Parisian executioner Charles-Henri Sanson, I came across the autobiography of Albert Pierrepoint, the most famous British executioner of the 20th century. Pierrepoint’s attitude toward his “craft” uncannily matched the psychological makeup and motivations that I had already constructed, from my historical research, for my fictional portrayal of Charles Sanson.

Becoming a Hangman

There were, naturally, many surface differences between the two. Pierrepoint (1905-1992), like most British hangmen, came from a blue-collar background; “official executioner” was a part-time occupation, returning only a modest flat fee per engagement. Both his father and uncle were hangmen and young Albert evidently decided to follow in their footsteps because such a useful civil servant received a remarkable amount of respect from his neighbors.

Charles-Henri Sanson (1739-1806), on the other hand, was a fourth-generation executioner in a wealthy family that—like many others—passed its lucrative title down from father to son and considered itself practically aristocratic. In pre-revolutionary France, the master executioner of Paris was a high-ranking court officer, received a generous salary, and enjoyed a great deal of prestige among colleagues from lesser towns.

Notwithstanding the Sanson family’s pretensions to semi-nobility, most of the superstitious public still viewed the executioner and his household as the vilest and least desirable neighbors possible. The master executioner and his aides were responsible for all forms of public punishment, from shaming by exposure on the pillory to whipping and branding, from relatively humane hanging to the cruelest and most long-drawn-out forms of execution like breaking, burning, or quartering. For centuries throughout Europe, executioner’s sons had inevitably had to become executioners themselves because no one else would ever think of giving them a job, or even of socializing with them. Since the Middle Ages, the executioner’s touch had been considered unclean, contaminated by death, torture, and contact with corpses, and only the most broad-minded or desperate would choose to mingle with him.

“A Gentle, Friendly, Kindly Man”

Despite the public revulsion toward the Sansons and their occupation, the few surviving contemporary accounts of Charles Sanson suggest that, aside from the official duties he was obliged to carry out, he was a remarkably decent, conscientious, and compassionate human being. Well educated, he had studied anatomy and medicine—not to improve torture techniques, but, like his father and grandfather before him, in order to maintain a sort of free clinic in which, when not at work, he doctored the poor who were willing to endure contact with the executioner in order to get the treatment they couldn’t afford elsewhere. “His profession aside,” an acquaintance whom Sanson had cured of a mysterious illness wrote about him, “he was a gentle, friendly, kindly man.”

Execution by sword of the comte de Lally, May 9, 1766. Although probably not illustrated by an eyewitness, it does show the executioner as a young man (Sanson was 27 at the time).

The greatest irony of a life full of ironies was that, after three decades of officiating at often horrific punishments under the absolute monarchy, Sanson became the most famous public executioner of the French Revolution. The Revolution, of course, soon abolished such cruel traditional execution methods as breaking on the wheel and replaced them with the democratic, reliable, and humane guillotine. This and other legal reforms must have greatly relieved Sanson for a time—until the political cataclysm of the Terror obliged him to execute more people with the guillotine than he had ever had to hang, break, or behead by sword in all his career before the Revolution. During 1793 and 1794, the “gentle, friendly, kindly man” would be ordered to behead his king and queen, a few minor royals, many prominent revolutionaries, and several of his own former bosses in the Parisian law courts, among about three thousand people convicted of various crimes, both heinous and petty, under the severe emergency laws of the Terror.

So how did such a man keep his sanity, and justify his part in not only the savage cruelty of the pre-revolutionary legal system but also in the sheer number of executions of the Terror in Paris, and in the frequent injustices that took place both before and during the Revolution? How could Sanson bring himself to put someone to death when he strongly suspected that that person had not deserved such a punishment?

Christopher Lee as a middle-aged Charles Sanson in La Révolution Française (1989). Sanson was described as tall, strong, and good-looking in the family history published by his grandson Clément, but no contemporary portrait exists of him.

The swelling number of death sentences in Paris during the last weeks of the Terror appalled him. Guillotining a record fifty-four people in one day, including an eighteen-year-old servant girl who, he stated, looked about fourteen, drove him to a four-day mental breakdown. “I do not glorify myself with a sensitivity that cannot be mine,” Sanson wrote in his diary soon afterward; “I have seen the suffering and death of my fellow men too often and too closely to be moved easily. If what I feel is not pity, it must be the result of a malady of my nerves; perhaps it is the hand of God punishing me for my cowardly obedience to that which so little resembles the justice I was born to serve? I do not know; but for some time now, every day, when the hour [to collect condemned prisoners] comes, a vertigo seizes me that holds me in its grip and cruelly tortures me . . . I feel a redoubling of the fever that night and day devours me; it is like fire flowing under my skin.”

Why, in the midst of the carnage in 1794, consumed by guilt, didn’t Charles-Henri Sanson simply quit his job and honorably retire, as he did do a year later, well after the Terror had ended?

*****

Join us here tomorrow for the conclusion of Susanne Alleyn’s post. She’ll give away three electronic copies of The Executioner’s Heir to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Saturday at 6 p.m. ET.

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The Winner of Whispers of Vivaldi

Posted on January 26, 2014 by suzanneadairJanuary 26, 2014

Margaret Dean has won a copy of Whispers of Vivaldi by Beverle Graves Myers. Congrats to Margaret Dean!

Thanks to Beverle Graves Myers for a provocative look at castrati, Casanova, and gender-bender opera stars of 18th century Italy. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History this week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.

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The Curious Case of Teresa Lanti

Posted on January 21, 2014 by suzanneadairJanuary 20, 2014

Relevant History welcomes back historical mystery author Beverle Graves Myers, who combines a love of Italy, opera, and traditionally written mysteries in her Tito Amato novels featuring an 18th-century singer-sleuth. The latest title is Whispers of Vivaldi. Bev also writes short fiction that has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Spinetingler, and Crime City Central (audio). Her work has earned nominations for the Macavity, Kentucky Literary, and Derringer awards. Bev and husband Lawrence have recently relocated to south Florida. For more information, check her web site, and look for her on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.

*****

A portrait hangs in a dusty corner of the La Scala opera house in Milan. A woman in an 18th-century gown and towering, flower-bedecked wig sits at a harpsichord, staring into space. She appears distant, sullen, and not entirely comfortable in her elaborate dress. Known as Teresa Lanti, she was an accomplished soprano and the mistress, for a time, of the even more famous Giacomo Casanova.

I introduce you to Teresa Lanti because this pensive-looking woman inspired a character that came to mystify Tito Amato more than any other. Who was she really?

First a little about Casanova. The man whose name has come to define womanizing was a real person, actually a Venetian of Tito’s era. He was born in 1725, the first child of Zanetta Farussi, a comic actress who went by the stage name of La Buranella, and an actor-dancer named Gaetano Casanova. Or perhaps that’s only part of the truth. Casanova often claimed Venetian aristocrat Michele Grimani as his father, but where Casanova is concerned, truth is a slippery concept. History does record that young Giacomo refused to go along with his parents’ plan to make him a priest and was expelled from a seminary for immoral conduct. He proceeded to scheme his way through Europe, romancing a dazzling array of women (and several men) and running afoul of authorities at every turn. Though Casanova is famed for being a self-styled great lover, he was also a cabalist, spy, soldier, violinist, lottery administrator, and more. Near the end of his long life, he finally settled down to write a highly entertaining twelve-volume autobiography, which I often mine for eighteenth-century background and characters.

Which brings us to Teresa Lanti, one of Casanova’s more peculiar conquests. In Volume Two of his autobiography, our lovable rogue tells the tale of his compelling attraction to Bellino, a teenaged castrato traveling with his theatrical family. Castrato? Yes! If you’re unfamiliar with 18th-century fads, Europe had gone mad for Italian opera and its star singers. The castrati were men who had been gelded as pre-pubescent boys and were revered for their golden voices that held an uncanny combination of pitch and power. The effect was ethereal and haunting, causing women to swoon and bringing tears to hard men’s eyes—but I digress. When Casanova encountered Bellino at an inn in Ancona, he could scarcely believe that the beautiful creature was male, even though Bellino himself swore it was the truth. So intrigued was Casanova that he tried every trick of seduction to induce the singer to share his bed, even offering the boy’s mother a gold doubloon to view his genitals.

To make a long story short, Casanova eventually invaded Bellino’s breeches and discovered a false penis. He describes it thusly, “long, limp and as thick as one’s thumb, pale, and of very soft leather.” Bellino was indeed a female. Salimbeni, a valid castrato singer, had been her music master and helped develop her fine soprano voice. She blamed her unfortunate situation on her mother’s scheming. Two issues stood behind the disguise. As theaters within the Pope’s political domain banned females from the stage, castrati sang the prima donna roles in Rome and other cities within the Papal States, including Ancona where Casanova met Bellino. In Venice and other, more progressive musical centers, women took their rightful place as prima donna, but they were paid in woeful contrast to the reigning star castrati. Posing as a man, Bellino would have more opportunity to perform and earn a higher salary while doing so.

Casanova recounts that his affair with Teresa, who was sometimes called Angiola on opera bills, was fraught with uncertainty on his part. However, it lasted long enough for her to become pregnant with his son, Cesarino Lanti, whom she went on to raise as her brother. Eventually the couple parted. Casanova sent Teresa to Naples, stating that he could not bring himself to deny her the career she deserved, and he continued on his all-too-merry way. Teresa married Cirello Palesi, a young Roman, and traveled Italy singing prima donna roles in major opera houses. A few years later Teresa and Casanova met one more time, but the magic was gone.

And, at some point, she had her portrait painted.

Highly intrigued by Teresa’s story, I was determined to include a gender-bending character in Whispers of Vivaldi. In this final Tito Amato mystery, set in the dazzling, decadent world of baroque Venice, Tito spars with Angeletto, a young male soprano who has taken Milan by storm. Tito is depending on his star power to save the opera house from ruin, but is the heavenly singer all that he appears to be? Whispered rumors quickly fly through the taverns and coffee houses of Venice. Angeletto is too lovely to be a man—shouldn’t he be wearing skirts instead of breeches? Tito begins to suspect that he’s been tricked by a daring female impersonating a castrato. If the rumors are true, not only will Tito become the chief laughingstock of Venice, but the Senate is apt to withdraw its sponsorship of the opera house altogether. Like Tito, the reader can never be certain just who this amazing singer really is.

If you think this all sounds very Victor Victoria (the delicious 1982 musical comedy starring Julie Andrews) you’re not alone. I had to wonder if the screenwriters were familiar with Teresa Lanti, or, to repeat the old proverb, there’s really nothing new under the sun.

*****

A big thanks to Beverle Graves Myers. She’ll give away a signed hardcover copy of Whispers of Vivaldi to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Saturday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery is available within the continental United States only.

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The Winner of Voyage of Strangers

Posted on January 20, 2014 by suzanneadairJanuary 20, 2014

Sunny Frazier has won a copy of Voyage of Strangers by Elizabeth Zelvin plus a copy of the Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine issue that includes Zelvin’s Agatha award-nominated short story “The Green Cross.” Congrats to Sunny Frazier!

Thanks to Elizabeth Zelvin for showing us the dark underbelly of greed and ethnic cleansing that fueled Ferdinand and Isabella’s desire to claim and conquer the New World. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Zelvin’s Relevant History post. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.

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True Confessions of Ferdinand and Isabella

Posted on January 7, 2014 by suzanneadairJanuary 8, 2014

Relevant History welcomes back Elizabeth Zelvin, a New York City psychotherapist and mystery author best known for her series featuring recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler. Voyage of Strangers, her first historical novel, is the sequel to the Agatha-nominated short story “The Green Cross,” which first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and introduced the young marrano sailor Diego Mendoza and Admiral Columbus. Liz is a three-time Agatha Award nominee and a Derringer Award nominee for Best Short Story. She has also released a CD of original songs, Outrageous Older Woman. For more information, check her author web site and look for her on Facebook.

*****

Every American schoolboy and schoolgirl knows about King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. They’re the kindly couple who believed Columbus when he said the earth was round, and Queen Isabella sold her jewels so he could set sail to discover America. Right? Wrong!

By 1492, everyone knew the earth was round and that land lay on the other side of what they called the Ocean Sea. Columbus’s minority opinion was that those far-off lands lay a lot closer than everyone else thought they did. When he got to the Caribbean islands, he thought the mainland was bound to be just beyond them. He’d even prepared by bringing along a converso who spoke Hebrew, so he could converse with the Great Khan. Till the day he died, he believed he’d found the Indies.

Ferdinand of Aragon was 17 and Isabella of Castile was 18 when they married in 1469, uniting the two kingdoms. It was a political alliance, not a love match. While it eventually produced a nation called Spain, their realms remained separate entities. They moved their court around from city to city to maintain their dominion over a fragmented whole. The court was installed in Cordoba, which had been wrested from the Moors in 1236, when the monarchs finally agreed to back Columbus’s exploratory voyage in 1492 and in Barcelona, more than 500 miles away, when he came to report his success and lay his spoils at their feet in 1493.

Ferdinand and Isabella were exceptionally devout Christians by the standards of the day. They introduced the Inquisition in Castile in 1478 and were hand in glove with Pope Alexander VI—the Spaniard now remembered as the infamous Borgia Pope—from his accession in 1492. Ferdinand and Isabella’s mission was conquest, with the desire to increase the power of the crown and the prosperity of the realm inextricably intertwined with the determination to eradicate all that was not Christian, ie. Catholic, from the lands they ruled.

The monarchs totted up an impressive record for genocide and persecution. In 1492 alone they conquered Granada, the last Moorish stronghold, driving out or enslaving the remaining Muslims, and expelled the Jews on the very day that Columbus set sail.

They continued their predecessors’ conquest of the Canary Islands, whose indigenous people, the Guanche, ended up much like the Taino of the Caribbean, ie. close to extinction, their legacy reduced to fragments of a lost language and culture and the bit of DNA remaining in the modern population. They also persecuted the Roma, often called gypsies, whose peripatetic lifestyle was partly due to laws forbidding them to settle down in one place—much as medieval Jews acquired a reputation for expertise in banking by being forbidden to join any of the craft guilds that would have given them a broader choice of occupations.

Ferdinand and Isabella were quick to exploit the wealth of the Jews. Conversos, Jews who had expediently converted to Christianity, became their bankers. While they saw the Jews’ expulsion as a holy mission, it’s no coincidence that the Jews were required to leave their considerable wealth behind—and that their loans not only to the sovereigns, but to the Spanish aristocracy in general, were canceled by their departure. One of the modern arguments for the possibility that Columbus was Jewish is that his voyage was financed not by Isabella but by converso bankers. I don’t believe it happened that way at all. I can imagine Isabella saying: “I’d like to give this crazy man a shot. If he finds the Indies, the profits will be enormous. Portugal dominates trade around the coast of Africa, but a passage to the Indies to the west would be all ours. It costs me nothing to say I’ll pledge my jewels if need be. I’ll order the converso bankers to cover the cost. They won’t dare refuse. And when they see what happens to the Jews who cling to their heretical faith, they won’t dare ask for repayment.”

Several other arguments for Columbus being Jewish fail to convince. One early proponent of the theory was a Spanish Fascist who wrote in 1940 that Columbus’s greed for gold suggested he had “Jewish blood.” Anyone but a neo-Nazi would laugh that off today. Ferdinand and Isabella, not to mention all the Spaniards who accompanied Columbus on his voyages, had a greater lust for gold than Columbus himself, whose greatest wish was to bring an abundant return on their investment to the King and Queen. When gold proved to be in shorter supply in Hispaniola than expected, he made up the shortfall by taking Taino slaves and transporting them across the sea in conditions as appalling as those in the slaving ships of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Some modern Jewish scholars claim that Columbus was seeking a Jewish homeland, a New World Israel. This is a fashionable idea today. But first, it was the Christians, not the Jews, who longed to expel the Muslims from Jerusalem in the later Middle Ages—hence the Crusades. Second, Columbus expected to find existing civilizations open to trade with Europe, not empty lands. And third, the King and Queen made it perfectly clear when they agreed to sponsor the second voyage that all lands claimed and gold mined or collected became the property of the Crown. The sailors, soldiers, and settlers who crossed the sea in 1493 were not entitled to seize these riches for themselves. I doubt that any of them took this stricture seriously—except Columbus himself, whose own words in his logs and letters reveal him as a deeply devout Christian and devoted champion of his King and Queen.

*****

A big thanks to Elizabeth Zelvin. She’ll give away two prizes to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week: an electronic copy of Voyage of Strangers in .mobi (Kindle) or .pdf format, and a copy of the Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine issue that includes her Agatha award-nominated short story “The Green Cross.” I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET. Make sure you leave your email address.

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Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne’s free newsletter.

The Fussy Librarian Spotlights Regulated for Murder

Posted on January 6, 2014 by suzanneadairJanuary 6, 2014

The first book of Michael Stoddard’s series, Regulated for Murder, is spotlighted in today’s book recommendations over at The Fussy Librarian. Regulated for Murder, on Suspense Magazine‘s “Best of 2011” list, continues to receive outstanding reviews. The latest reader to post a five-star review for the book on Amazon wrote, “When a book makes me stay up late at night to get to the end and have it solved it has to be a good read.” Regulated for Murder is available for Kindle, Nook, iTunes, and Kobo and in trade paperback format.

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The Winner of The Hell Screen

Posted on December 22, 2013 by suzanneadairDecember 21, 2013

Ashley McConnell has won a copy of The Hell Screen by I. J. Parker. The author also sent Ashley an ARC of Death of a Doll Maker. Congrats to Ashley McConnell!

Thanks to I. J. Parker for showing us what Japan was like before “Shogun.” Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on her Relevant History post back in November. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.

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