This week Coming Attractions spotlights several authors and DorothyL members who are heading to Bouchercon in November. Attendees come from all over, and so do their novels!
This third anthology of the New York Tri-State Chapter of Sisters-in-Crime contains established authors alongside the up-and-coming. The spirit of New York and its ethnicities, a dichotomy where many immigrants want to blend into American culture while some hold fast to old traditions, is captured in a collection that highlights the darkest facets of family life. Domestic abuse is exposed and wielded in all its forms; by spouses, siblings, offspring, and parents.
A skillful writer can smoothly educate and insert immense amounts of research into a mystery without overwhelming the reader or distracting from the main plot. Stein has mastered this craft in her second mystery featuring “historian-in-training” Erica Donato, a Ph.D. student working on her dissertation on urban history and the effects of immigration and gentrification.
Of course we were all little pint-size patriots in those days. We had a small gang there on North Indiana Avenue when it teemed with the post-war baby explosion. There were four of us, just from our end of the block, all in the same room in elementary school, and we were all red-blooded Americans; after all, every one of our fathers had fought in the war!
It doesn’t snow here anymore, not the way it used to. Oh, I remember walking on the sidewalks and the snow banks towering over my head. I remember the tall metal poles at every fire hydrant, painted yellow at the top so firemen could find the hydrants if they were buried–and they were buried for months and months. I remember waking up early, when it was still dark, to the sound of snow shovels scraping the sidewalk and fumbling for the radio knob, listening breathlessly to the ‘school closing’ announcements.
When Erica Donavan was summoned home by a hysterical phone call from her fifteen year-old daughter Chris, Erica assumed that it stemmed from any of a myriad of teenaged, hormone-driven reasons. What she definitely didn't expect was for Chris and their contractor to have discovered the body of a young woman literally holed into their Park Slope brownstone's wall.
