The Companion to the Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes, an Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart's Blood

by Diana Gabaldon

  Here’s a brief excerpt from A City Stained Red. (Another excerpt is available on Sam’s website: www.samsykes.com.)1

  Right. Deep breaths. Try not to look crazy.

  Lenk pulled himself out of line and began to walk past people toward the gate. Head down, eyes forward, wearing a face he hoped looked at least a little intimidating. The only way this was going to work was if this no-necked guard believed Lenk was mean enough to not be worth stopping.

  “Ah.” A gloved hand went up before Lenk’s face. “Stop right there.”

  Of course, he sighed inwardly.

  “I didn’t specifically say ‘no mercs,’ I know.” The surly-looking guard angled his voice down condescendingly. “But I did say no unstable types, didn’t I?”

  Lenk’s hand was up before either of them knew it, slapping the captain’s hand away.

  “Marshal your words with greater care, friend,” he whispered threateningly, voice low and sharp like a knife in the dark. “Or I shall hasten to incite you to greater discipline.”

  What the hell was that?

  The guardsman blinked. Once. Slowly.

  “What?”

  Well, don’t change now. He’ll know something’s up.

  “Was I too soft in my verbiage?” Lenk asked. “Did you not feel the chill of death in my words?”

  “Look,” the guard captain sighed, rubbing his eyes. “I’ll tell you what I told the tulwar: no oids, no adventurers, no…whatever the hell you are.”

  The captain looked him over with a glare that Lenk recognized. Usually, he saw it only a moment before swords were drawn. But the captain’s stare was slow, methodical. He was sizing Lenk up, wondering just how much trouble this was going to be worth.

  Lenk decided to give him a hint. He slid into a tense stance, making sure to roll his shoulders enough to send the mail under his shirt clinking and show just how easily he wore the sword on his back.

  “I don’t see any colors on your shirt,” the captain muttered. “I don’t see any badge at your breast. I don’t see coin at your belt. Which means you’re not someone I want in my city.”

  “You’re wise to be wary,” Lenk said. “And I advise you to listen to that wariness and cut a path for me, lest I show you why my name in the old tongues means ‘bane of death.’ ”

  The captain stared and repeated flatly, “Bane of death.”

  “That’s right.”

  He blinked. “You’re serious.”

  Lenk cleared his throat. “I am.”

  “No.” The captain clutched his head as if in pain. “Just…just no. Back to the harbor, bane of death. No room for your kind here.”

  “What kind?” Lenk’s face screwed up in offense. “A person of my…uh…distinct verbotanage must not be denied righteous passage into—”

  “Boy, I wouldn’t be impressed by this routine even if you weren’t only as tall as my youngest.”

  “Look, I don’t see what the problem is.” The bravado slipped from Lenk’s voice in a weary sigh as he rubbed his eyes. “I’ve got business in the city. In fact, my employer got in shortly before I got here. His name is Miron Evenhands. We both came off the ship Riptide. If you’ll just let me find him, he’ll—”

  “Here’s the problem,” the guard interrupted. “You’ve got no colors and no affiliation, but you’ve got a sword. So you’ve got the means to kill people, but not the means to be held responsible.” He sniffed. “Parents?”

  “What?”

  “Any parents?”

  “Both dead.”

  “Hometown?”

  “Burned to the ground.”

  “Allies? Compatriots? Friends?”

  “Just the ones I find on the road. And in a tavern. And, this one time, hunched over a human corpse, but—”

  “And that’s the problem. You’re an adventurer.” He spat the word. “Too cowardly to be a mercenary, too greedy to be a soldier, too dense to be a thief. Your profession is wedged neatly between whores and grave robbers in terms of respectability, your trade is death and carnage, and your main asset is that you’re completely expendable.”

  He leaned down to the young man and forced the next words through his teeth.

  “I keep this city clean. And you, boy, are garbage.”

  The young man didn’t flinch. His eyes never wavered, not to the captain’s guards reaching for their swords, not to the captain’s gauntlets clenched into fists. That blue didn’t so much as blink as he looked the captain straight in the eye, smiled through a split lip, and spoke.

  “Human garbage.”

  For more information on The City Stained Red:

  http://www.samsykes.com/books/the-city-stained-red.

  God-Thing: And Other Weird & Worrisome Tales, by Amy Dupire

  As the title suggests, Amy Dupire’s God-Thing: And Other Weird & Worrisome Tales is a collection of short stories, ranging from the evocatively sinister to the outright creepy. Not exactly horror…but you can feel a cool breeze blowing on the back of your neck as you read.

  I am Deeply Impressed by anybody who can tell a decent story in fewer than 300,000 words, as that’s a skill I don’t personally possess. I first encountered Amy Dupire’s work some years ago, in the course of judging entries for the Surrey International Writers’ Conference Storyteller’s Award.

  I support the storyteller’s prize along with my good friend (and wonderful historical novelist) Jack Whyte. All the entries are screened by the conference organizers, and Jack and I judge the dozen or so finalists, which are all sent to us as blind manuscripts—i.e., no author’s name attached. So it isn’t until the banquet at which all the writing awards are announced that we find out who actually wrote the winning story.

  …and the winner is…!

  Well, for several years, Amy’s stories were either the winner or the runner-up, and I got used to hearing her name read out during the banquet.

  Which in turn led to an interest in what else she might be writing…and ultimately to the welcome publication of God-Thing, her first collection (her first novel, All Kinds of Hell, is likewise available on Amazon.com).

  The stories here are written with delicacy, humor, and a healthy dose of uneasiness. And they are…well, you know…short. Whether you’re in need of a literary appetizer or dessert, immersion or distraction—you might just find what you’re looking for in this collection of Weird & Worrisome Tales.

  The Long Way Home, by Louise Penny

  The September 8, 2014, edition of People magazine2 outraged me by referring to Louise Penny’s new book (The Long Way Home) as “a cozy, croissant-filled mystery.” Granted, the blurblets People uses allow no room for subtlety, but using such a dismissive phrase for Penny’s books is like calling the Bible “a random collection of Jewish history.”

  You can indeed smell the croissants in Penny’s books. You can smell the snow and feel the touch of wind and water on your face, the sun-warmed firmness of the wooden bench you’re sitting on. You can stand on a precipice over the great St. Lawrence River and feel the awe of the first person ever to see it. Her books will suck you in effortlessly, and you’ll wake up from their trance blinking and wondering where you’ve been for the last several hours.

  Her books have a living pulse, but her talent for immersive description is the least of it. Most of the books are set in the remote, mysterious, and somewhat magical (in a non-gimmicky way; no werewolves roam the woods) village of Three Pines. Founded by United Empire settlers (the American colonists who fought on the side of King George III and then fled the war to a safer refuge in Canada), Three Pines continues to be a place of refuge.

  One of the people drawn to it is Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, former head of Quebec Sûreté’s homicide unit. It is, of course, murder that draws him—for even a peaceful place like Three Pines has human beings whose personalities or histories drive them to violence. Three Pines also has one of the most charming assemblages of complex, engaging characters I’ve ever encountered.

  Not a
ll warm fuzzies, by any means—but all so deeply human that you feel the conflict in the heart of even the most (apparently) wicked.

  And it’s that sense of deep humanity—perceptive but always compassionate—that makes Penny’s books so remarkable. The plotting is good, the setting magnetic, the characters engaging (and frequently hilarious)—but what Penny does is different from any other author I’ve met. She addresses the deep emotions of the human heart with amazing directness and simplicity. You not only feel for the characters; after closing one of her books, you feel that you’ve touched truth.

  Now, it is a long-running series: The Long Way Home is the tenth book, and the series evolves beautifully from the first, the slightly offbeat Still Life, to the truly stunning latest.

  I had the pleasure of meeting Louise for the first time recently; she was in town to do a signing for The Long Way Home at the Poisoned Pen. So should any of you be wanting to check out a new author/series—I can tell you where to get autographed books.

  (In fact, you can get autographed books by many of the authors listed here—certainly almost all of the crime writers, as well as my books and those of Sam Sykes. The Poisoned Pen is my local independent bookstore, and I go by every other week or so to sign their waiting orders. They’ll ship anywhere in the world.)

  You can also check out Louise Penny’s official home page at:

  http://www.louisepenny.com.

  Good Crime Fiction by a Couple of Roberts that I Know: Rob Byrnes and Robert Dugoni

  I was amused, but pleased, to have my novella “Lord John and the Plague of Zombies” nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America, for “Best Short Mystery Story” of 2011. Given that that particular story is not exactly a mystery, and certainly isn’t short, I didn’t really expect to win (which was a good thing, since I didn’t) but certainly was flattered to be nominated.

  And I did have a tax-deductible reason to go to New York (for the awards dinner), where I had the double pleasure of seeing my husband in his tux (he wears it about once every three years) and of meeting a number of mystery-writing friends that I see too rarely. Among these was the talented Rob Byrnes, who writes gay crime caper novels (there’s a niche market for you…). I’ve known Rob for years and have read and enjoyed several of his books (I’m not sure, but I think I appear as a mention in one of the early ones—I was in the first draft, at least…). Think Donald Westlake with good dress sense. His latest is Holy Rollers, in which the Gang That Can’t Do Anything Straight sets out to steal seven million dollars from the Virginia Cathedral of Love.

  AND there’s my good friend Robert Dugoni, whose bestselling Murder One joins his other bestselling thrillers. Bob writes prose as taut as a trampoline and has plots like an octopus running an obstacle course. If thrillers are your thing, I strongly recommend him.

  The Secrets of Pain, by Phil Rickman

  I wallowed in this book for several days when I got it. Rickman is one of my favorites; he has the sort of characters you know and treasure, who have reality and depth and get deeper as they go along. To say nothing of flat-out wonderful, evocative writing, terrific plots, and a marvelously creepy strand of the supernatural twining like smoke through the story.

  The Secrets of Pain is the latest in his Merrily Watkins mysteries series. The Reverend Watkins is an Anglican priest, widowed, with an unpredictable teenaged daughter—and is the official exorcist (though the Church now prefers to refer to her discreetly as a “deliverance consultant”) for the Diocese of Hereford. Merrily smokes like a chimney, is having an affair with the emotionally damaged rock musician across the road, and wrestles constantly with the knowledge that most of the world thinks what she does is irrelevant at best and at worst insane.

  The Secrets of Pain involves—as one might expect—secrets of various kinds. The official kind—Hereford is the home base for the SAS, one of the most elite and secretive regiments in Her Majesty’s armed forces—the political kind, wherein the forces of commercialism and modernity threaten the increasingly fragile tradition and history of a very old part of the country; and the supernatural kind, where “men with birds’ heads walk out of the river mist” and a very old and bloody religion proves not to be quite gone.

  Besides the wonderful characters and storytelling, what I like best about Phil’s work is the ongoing conversation throughout the series between religion and secular society, the subtle questions about the nature (and power) of belief. These are beautifully layered books that can be reread periodically—and the release of a new one is always a great excuse to go back and start all over with the first volume, The Wine of Angels.

  Three Favorite Books

  The Knife Man, by Wendy Moore

  This immensely entertaining and well-researched biography is the story of John Hunter, one of the founders of modern medicine and a first-class nut. Renowned as a genius and reviled as a body-snatcher, Doctor Hunter was one of the most colorful characters of the eighteenth century—a time not lacking in such people.

  Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez

  Magic realism, long river voyages, prose you can sink into like an inner tube and drift downstream. One of the less likely but most appealing romances you’re likely to encounter.

  Haunting Bombay, by Shilpa Agarwal

  A book that exists on multiple levels, inviting you into death and mystery, into the heart of a family, and into the tantalizing, aromatic swirl of another culture. Beautiful, lyrical, and genuinely haunting.

  The Children’s Book, by A. S. Byatt

  I love A. S. Byatt’s work. She writes “literary fiction”—this being on one hand a catchall phrase for any book that doesn’t fit conveniently into a genre designation, and on the other a term that generally implies particularly good writing, often accompanied by unique insight and acute perception. Byatt’s got all of this, in spades. Some of you might remember her earlier book, Possession: A Romance. (One British friend told me he’d picked up a copy of this in the library, to find that an earlier reader had penciled a helpful message on the title page: They finally do it on this page. I mention this in case you, too, might find it helpful.)

  She also writes books in which terrifically interesting things happen—not always a hallmark of literary fiction. The Children’s Book is a wonderful creation, set during the transition between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, which encompasses the flowering romanticism of the Arts and Crafts movement in England (I found this part particularly fascinating, as my great-great-grandfather was an artist who was part of this movement), the political upheavals of suffragism, socialism, and anarchy, and the onrush of the First World War.

  Now, whatever the theme, setting, and plot of a book, the really important thing is the character or characters who carry it out. And I tell you what: few people do better characters than Byatt does. Her people are remarkably multifaceted, complex, interesting, and real. She knows what artists are like and captures a range of them—the central egotism and ruthlessness of character that makes a good one, the helplessness of a failed artist, the mutual jealousy between the commercially successful and the unsuccessful but “pure” artist.

  The story—or stories; there are many of them—centers on an unorthodox family and its friends. Olive Wellwood is a writer—a very successful writer, whose huge family provides her with both impetus and material. The “children’s book” of the title refers not to a single book but to the private stories—one for each child—that she maintains in notebooks, adding to each one as inspiration comes. The way in which love works—supportive, exploitative, pragmatic, idealistic, romantic, familial, jealous, selfless, in free love or marriage—is at the core of the novel (as it is at the core of most great books).

  At the same time, it’s a wonderful exploration and dissection of a society—the British middle class—in a time of intellectual ferment and unprecedented political change. AND written with an exquisite eye for detail and tremendous lyrical energy. Here’s a
brief excerpt of the text:

  Hedda lay in the long grass, with her skirt rucked up above her knickers, and her lengthening brown legs stretched out. She was fortunate not to have hay fever, as Phyllis did. She was not exactly reading The Golden Age. I am a snake in the grass, she thought, a secret snake. Violet was sitting on the roughly mown grass in the orchard, at some distance, in a low wicker armchair, sewing. Hedda spent a lot of time spying on Violet, as a revenge for the fact that Violet spied on her, going through her private drawers and notebooks. Hedda, like Phyllis, was perpetually agitated by being left out of the group of older children, Tom and Dorothy, Charles and Griselda, and now Geraint. But whereas Phyllis was plaintive, Hedda was enraged. She was the traitor in all tales of chivalry and in myths. She was Vivien, she was Morgan Le Fay, she was Loki. She despised the cow-eyed and the gentle, Elaine the lily maid, faithful Psyche, Baldur’s weeping wife, Nanna. She was a detective, who saw through appearances. No one was as nice as they seemed, was her rule of judging characters.

  Much as I love series, with the possibilities of ever-evolving characters and the charm of renewed acquaintance, I love one-of-a-kind treasures like this just as much. Highly engrossing, highly recommended!

  The Kate Shugak Series, by Dana Stabenow

  For those who like series, mysteries, books with rich, idiosyncratic settings, engaging characters, Strong Women (which, frankly, I think is getting to be something of a cliché—not the women themselves, of course, but the mention of them as a talking point for a book. I mean, who recommends a book by saying, “The heroine is a weak, whiny, wilted piece of toast—but it’s a great book!”), and reasonably hot sex on occasion…let me recommend Dana Stabenow.

  Dana is one of those amazing people who actually produce a book a year (I gasp in envy), and she develops her characters and plots beautifully as the series progresses, though each book is a complete standalone mystery. The personal lives of the characters—particularly the main character, Kate Shugak—definitely would repay the effort of starting from the beginning, with A Cold Day for Murder.