Cover Reveal: The Strange Case of the Pharaoh's Heart

 

     Okay…here it is, the cover reveal for The Strange Case of the Pharaoh’s Heart. 

Sherlock Holmes travels to Egypt to take on the curse of Tutankhamun, along with the indefatigable Dr. Watson and the mysterious medium Estelle Roberts. 

Releasing March 19th from Seventh Street Books. Available for pre-order Amazon and a host of other places now.

Cover by the inimitable Jennifer Do.

Oh, and that’s an Egyptian scarab on the cover, not a flying cockroach.

That’s my story anyway. 

Eudora Welty on characters

“Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.”

                –Eudora Welty

Favorites:

Losing Battles

The Robber Bridegroom

The Ponder Heart

Plus, a bonus quote:

“I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”

Robert Graves on story-tellers

The Devil’s Advice to Storytellers 

 Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue, 

Keep probability – some say – in view. 

But my advice to story-tellers is: 

Weigh out no gross of probabilities, 

Nor yet make diligent transcriptions of 

Known instances of virtue, crime or love. 

To forge a picture that will pass for true, 

Do conscientiously what liars do – 

Born liars, not the lesser sort that raid 

The mouths of others for their stock-in-trade: 

Assemble, first, all casual bits and scraps 

That may shake down into a world perhaps; 

People this world, by chance created so, 

With random persons whom you do not know – 

The teashop sort, or travellers in a train 

Seen once, guessed idly at, not seen again; 

Let the erratic course they steer surprise 

Their own and your own and your readers’ eyes; 

Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair) 

Motive and end and moral in the air; 

Nice contradiction between fact and fact 

Will make the whole read human and exact. 

 

                                      —Robert Graves

Favorites:

Collected Poems

The White Goddess

Goodbye to All That

And a bonus quote:

“To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.”

Review: The Law of Falling Bodies

 The Law of Falling Bodies is like cooking a souffle while doing a high wire act.
There’s no way it’s going to work. But what if it does? I’m almost tempted to leave my review it at that, but I’ll go further, at the risk of a few mini-spoilers. It does something I normally despise: it turns a murder story into an espionage story. With Nazis.

But: the author pulls it off, largely through the agency of his main character, a thoroughly grounded, down-to-earth, self-deprecating, modest graduate student in physics who is the only person who could ever solve the many mysteries presented to him, in part because he and his antagonist go together like yin and yang.

It’s a spy novel which may also qualify as a cozy mystery. It includes an alluring local cop and an asshole FBI agent who may be allies or enemies. Through it all, it’s strangely believable. This is an overlooked gem. Pick it up now.

The Law of Falling Bodies can be found here on Amazon.