I’m so excited to have Annie Rains, author of the Sweetwater Springs novels, on the blog today to share with us how to make Christmas trees out of tomato cages!
‘Tis the season for Christmas trees of all shapes and sizes, colors and décor! In my new novel SEASON OF JOY, the hero Granger Fields is a down-on-his-luck Christmas tree farmer. Half his farm burned down in the spring and now he’s struggling to make ends meet while raising his two little girls. Enter my heroine Joy Benson, who agrees to help Granger care for his girls during the farm’s busiest season. She also comes up with an idea for a Christmas Tree Workshop to allow the folks of Sweetwater Springs to make their own special tree this year.
The tomato cage Christmas tree is so easy to make and the results are beautiful! Here’s how to make your own tree without having to head to Merry Mountain Farms in Sweetwater Springs to do so (although if you want to take a trip, you can find SEASON OF JOY on a shelf near you).
How to Make a Tomato Cage Christmas Tree:
Needed:
– Wire tomato cage
– Garland
– Decorations, accessories, lights
– Hot glue gun/glue sticks
– Wire or zip tie
– Optional: festive holiday music to get you in the Christmas mood.
Step one: Find a tomato cage. They’re easy to locate in the spring when gardeners are growing tomatoes. You can locate them on Amazon year-round as well. Tomato cages are just the wire contraptions that are placed around a growing plant.
Step two: Flip the tomato cage over and gather the loose wires at the top with a zip tie or another piece of pliable wire. This should give you the Christmas tree’s conical shape.
Step three: Use a hot glue gun to apply glue to the garland and adhere to the wire every few inches as you wrap, starting at the top and working your way toward the bottom.
Step four: Now for the fun part! Get creative and add ornaments, poinsettias, holly branches, strings of beads, velvet bows, or whatever festive items you have lying around in your boxes of decorations. Don’t forget the lights!
Voila! Now you have a tree that you can pull out every year to add to the merriment of your home. These make great gifts as well!
Wishing you all a merry holiday full of family, friends, & good books!
Annie Rains
Season of Joy by Annie Rains Series: Sweetwater Springs #6 Published by Forever on October 13, 2020 Genre: Contemporary Romance — Christmas Add to Goodreads | Amazon
Tis the season for love
For single father Granger Fields, Christmas is his busiest and most profitable time of the year. But when a fire devastates the Merry Mountain Tree Farm, he fears the season won’t be holly or jolly unless he can convince free spirit Joy Benson to care for his two rambunctious daughters. Yet while Granger wants to focus on saving his business, Joy seems determined to shake up his family’s Christmas with her festive ideas and merry making.
Joy is counting down the days until she can open her own art gallery. Babysitting Abby and Willow will help her reach her goal, and when inspiration strikes, Joy convinces Granger that her craft classes can bring even more holiday cheer to the farm. As crowds return and Joy’s creative side flourishes, life with Granger and his girls begins to feel like home. But with Christmas coming nearer, can Joy convince Granger to open his heart again? Or will their newfound happiness be as fleeting as the newly fallen snow?
Annie Rains is a contemporary romance author who writes small town love stories set in fictional towns on the coast of North Carolina. Raised in one of America’s largest military communities, Annie often features heroes who fight for their countries, while also fighting for a place to call home and a good woman to love. When Annie isn’t writing, she’s spending time with her husband and 3 children, or reading a book by one of her favorite authors.
I’m so happy to have one of my dear friends, Andi, on the blog today to share some of her beautiful holiday card creations! Enter to win what she’s made at the end of the post!
I’m really excited to take part in Jana’s Bookish Little Christmas. For those of you that don’t know me I’m Andi from the book blog Andi’s ABCs. But besides book blogging I also make handmade cards and some other paper crafts. I sell them in my Etsy shop, Cards by Andrea S.. When I signed up for Jana’s Bookish Little Christmas I knew I was going to craft a few items starting with some gift card holders, my new favorite thing to make. I went to my supplies and pulled some stuff out.
I grabbed my new Glitter Paper from The Stamp Market and decided to work with that and with the Bag and Tag die set. The great thing about the Bag and Tag die set if you can make one bag that is the perfect size for gift card and another bag that can be whatever size you want. Once the base was decided I grabbed my favorite Altenew ink in Crimson and the candy cane stamp from the No Peeking stamp and die set.
Taking the glitter paper I die cut the bags and used double sided tape to hold seal the sides securely. When the bags were complete I set them aside and grabbed my Misti Stamping tool and stamped two candy canes. Using my mini die cutting machine and matching die I cut the candy canes into tags.
With the bags and candy canes done I searched my stash and found some red snowflakes I had previously cut. Grabbing two clothes pins, one with an embellishment, I simply attached the the two tags to the bags. Once again looking in my stash of previously made items I found two tags to include in the larger bag.
Then it was time to move to the cards:
I decided to keep the cards pretty simple by within the same theme. Using the Altenew ink I grabbed a small candy cane stamp set. I stamped the message in the corner and used one of the candy canes and created a pattern surrounding the sentiment. Creating a random pattern is the easiest way to make a simple card and I was able to quickly do this. And that is all there is to it.
And there you have it, two gift card holders, two tags, and two holiday cards. And what is the best parr about that? Well they are all up for grabs for you to win. One winner (US only) will receive all of the items I made and a code to save in my Etsy shop should you want to order something in the future.
Thank you so much Jana for having me! It was a lot of fun. I hope everyone has a Happy Bookish Little Christmas!
I’m so happy to have Lizzie Shane, author of The Twelve Dogs of Christmas, on the blog today to celebrate A Bookish Little Christmas with me! I have a major sweet tooth, so this was the perfect post for me. Who doesn’t love brownies?? Read more about Lizzie and her book below, and enter to win one of five copies of the book!
Tis the season for holiday treats! I love making special goodies for the holidays, but I’m also a big believer in simple, time-saving recipes that feel special while still being super easy. Enter Brownie Toppers.
In my new release, The Twelve Dogs of Christmas, town Scrooge Ben is overwhelmed by his Christmas obligations and isn’t much of a baker – but he’s still determined to make something special for his niece’s holiday bake sale. So, of course, our heroine Ally saves the day by helping him dress up some brownies so they become the hit of the holiday fair. (And then they fall madly in love, of course.)
In college I was addicted to the fancy brownies at a sweet shop in town (I still think back fondly on the M&M brownie…) and when I started playing at replicating them, they became one of my favorite holiday hacks.
S’mores Brownies, Peppermint Bark Brownies, “Dirt” Brownies, Salted Caramel Pretzel Brownies and more. Seriously, these are so easy.
Start with your favorite BROWNIE MIX – or you can make them from scratch if you’re fancy. I like Ghirardelli Double Chocolate mix (and I can get it in bulk at Costco!).
PREPARE the brownies like you usually would and let them cool completely. While they are cooling you can start assembling your toppings.
(photo by Lizzie Shane)
For the S’mores Brownies, you’ll want:
Marshmallow fluff (or lightly warmed/softened marshmallows to make your own – 10 seconds in the microwave and a quick stir usually does the trick)
Crumbled graham crackers
Hershey squares
After the brownies have cooled, cut them into squares FIRST (otherwise you’ll never get them to cut cleanly because the marshmallow will be everywhere). Spread the marshmallow fluff on each brownie, then sprinkle graham cracker crumbles on top and set a single Hershey square in the center. Super fast. Super easy. Super delicious. (If you’re wrapping them individually, make sure you really cover the fluff with graham crumbles or it will stick to the saran wrap forever.)
For the Peppermint Bark Brownies, you’ll need:
White Chocolate Chips
Crumbled Candy Canes (or Peppermint Bark)
Shortening (or vegetable oil)
Peppermint Extract or Peppermint Schnapps (optional)
After the brownies have cooled, you can either cut them into squares if you want the white chocolate dripping down the sides (I like it that way) or leave them in the pan if you’d like a clean white chocolate layer on top of the brownies. In a microwave-safe dish, combine the white chocolate chips, shortening (for 1.5 cups chips, I add 1.5 tablespoons of shortening), and a splash of peppermint schnapps or ½ tsp of peppermint extract if you want extra minty-ness. Melt for 30 seconds in the microwave, stir, melt for another 30, another stir, and you should have smooth, liquid, pourable chocolate.
Pour the white chocolate on top of the fully cooled brownies and sprinkle crushed candy canes on top while the chocolate is still warm and soft. Let cool and harden completely. If the brownies are still in the pan, be sure to score the chocolate with a knife as it is cooling, otherwise the chocolate topping will crack when you try to cut your squares.
For “Dirt” Brownies, you’ll need:
Chocolate frosting
Gummy worms
Crumbled Oreos (optional)
Once the brownies have cooled, cut them into squares (since the gummy worms are very difficult to cut after the fact). You can cover the brownie squares with melted chocolate by replicating the steps above in the Peppermint Bark recipe, only with milk chocolate morsels instead of white chocolate, or you can simply cover them with a thin layer of frosting and a light dusting of Oreo crumbs before pressing the gummy worms on top. And then you’re done. Easy peasy.
For Caramel Pretzel Brownies, you’ll need:
Soft caramels
Salted Pretzels
Sea Salt (optional)
Cut the cooled brownies into squares again (because like the marshmallow, the caramel does not cut cleanly). Melt the caramels in the microwave – I tend to do this ten seconds at a time, stirring as I check them, because the caramel burns easily. You can drizzle lightly on top, but I like to slather it on with a knife because I like a lot of caramel. Then, while the caramel is still warm, press the pretzels into the top. You can either crumble them into pieces or press them on whole. I also like to sprinkle a pinch of sea salt on top, for that extra salty kick. Then just let cool completely and enjoy!
That’s it! “Fancy” brownies with very little effort.
You can always mix and match your favorite toppings too. I love white chocolate with Oreo crumbs (like Cookies n Cream), or a dollop of peanut butter with a Hershey square, or marshmallow fluff with M&Ms.
These are all very sweet, but they are a perfect holiday sugar rush. And hopefully they make you as much the hit of the holidays as they did Ben and Ally. Happy baking and happy reading!
A delightful holiday romance about a small-town single dad and an animal rescue owner as they try to find forever homes for a dozen lovable pups before Christmas.
Pine Hollow has everything Ally Gilmore could wish for in a holiday break: gently falling snow in a charming small town and time with her family. Then she learns some Grinch has pulled the funding for her family’s rescue shelter, and now she has only four weeks to find new homes for a dozen dogs! But when she confronts her Scroogey councilman nemesis, Ally finds he’s far more reasonable — and handsome — than she ever expected.
As the guardian of his dog-obsessed ten-year-old niece, Ben West doesn’t have time to build a cuddly reputation. But he does feel guilty about the shelter closing. So he proposes a truce with Ally, agreeing to help her adopt out the pups. As the two spend more time together, the town’s gossip is spreading faster than Santa’s sleigh on Christmas Eve. And soon Ben is hoping he can convince Ally that Pine Hollow is her home for the holidays. . . and the whole year through.
About Lizzie Shane
Contemporary romance author Lizzie Shane was born in Alaska and still calls the frozen north home, though she can frequently be found indulging her travel addiction. Thankfully, her laptop travels with her and she has written her way through all fifty states and over fifty countries.
Lizzie has been honored to win the Golden Heart Award and HOLT Medallion, and has been named a finalist three times for Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA Award®, but her main claim to fame is that she lost on Jeopardy! For more about Lizzie and her books, please visit http://www.lizzieshane.com.
Today I have a Christmas treat for you! Gallery Books has given me an excerpt of Christina Lauren’s new Christmas book to share with you, plus they are sponsoring a giveaway of a copy of the book for A Bookish Little Christmas! I’m reading In a Holidaze right now, and it’s so much fun so far. Trust me, you’re going to want to win this!
In a Holidaze by Christina Lauren Published by Gallery Books on October 6, 2020 Genres: Contemporary Romance — Christmas Pages: 336
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One Christmas wish, two brothers, and a lifetime of hope are on the line for hapless Maelyn Jones in In a Holidaze, the quintessential holiday romantic novel by Christina Lauren, the New York Times bestselling author of The Unhoneymooners.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year…but not for Maelyn Jones. She’s living with her parents, hates her going-nowhere job, and has just made a romantic error of epic proportions.
But perhaps worst of all, this is the last Christmas Mae will be at her favorite place in the world—the snowy Utah cabin where she and her family have spent every holiday since she was born, along with two other beloved families. Mentally melting down as she drives away from the cabin for the final time, Mae throws out what she thinks is a simple plea to the universe: Please. Show me what will make me happy.
The next thing she knows, tires screech and metal collides, everything goes black. But when Mae gasps awake…she’s on an airplane bound for Utah, where she begins the same holiday all over again. With one hilarious disaster after another sending her back to the plane, Mae must figure out how to break free of the strange time loop—and finally get her true love under the mistletoe.
Jam-packed with yuletide cheer, an unforgettable cast of characters, and Christina Lauren’s trademark “downright hilarious” (Helen Hoang, author of The Bride Test) hijinks, this swoon-worthy romantic read will make you believe in the power of wishes and the magic of the holidays.
In a Holidaze by Christina Lauren Chapter 1 (Excerpt)
December 26
Call me harlot. Call me impulsive. Call me hungover.
No one ever has before, but someone absolutely should this morning. Last night was a disaster.
As quietly as I can, I slip out of the bottom bunk and tip- toe across the freezing floor to the stairs. My heart is beating so hard I wonder if it’s audible outside of my body. The last thing I want is to wake Theo and have to look him in the eye before my brain is warmed up and my thoughts are cohesive.
The second step from the bottom always creaks like something out of a haunted house; it’s been victimized by nearly three decades of us “kids” run-stomping our way up for meals and down for games and bed in the basement. I stretch to carefully put my foot on the one just above it, exhaling when I land with no sound. Not everyone is so lucky; that loose board has busted Theo sneaking in late—or early, depending on how you look at it—more times than I can count.
Once I’m in the kitchen, I worry less about stealth and go for speed. It’s still dark; the house is quiet, but Uncle Ricky will be up soon. This cabin is full of early risers. My window of opportunity to figure out how to fix this is narrowing quickly.
With a barrage of memories from last night rolling like a mortifying flip book through my head, I jog up the wide stairway to the second floor, ignore the mistletoe hanging above the landing, round the banister in my candy cane socks, sneak quietly down the hallway, and open the door to the narrower set of stairs leading to the attic. At the top, I nudge open Benny’s door.
“Benny,” I whisper into the chilly blackness. “Benny, wake up. It’s an emergency.”
A gravelly groan comes from across the room, and I warn him, “I’m turning on the light.”
“No—”
“Yes.” I reach over, flicking the switch and illuminating the room. While we offspring have long been relegated to bunk beds in the basement, this attic is Benny’s bedroom every December, and I think it’s the best one in the house. It has pitched ceilings and a long stained-glass window at the far end that projects sunlight across the walls in brilliant stripes of blue, red, green, and orange. The narrow twin bed up here shares the space with the organized clutter of family heirlooms, boxes of decorations for various holidays, and a wardrobe full of Grandma and Grandpa Hollis’s old winter clothes, from back when buying a cabin in Park City wasn’t a laughable financial prospect for a high school principal from Salt Lake. Since none of the other families had girls when I was a kid, I would play dress-up all alone up here, or sometimes with Benny as my audience.
But now I don’t need an audience, I need a kind ear and a cold, hard shot of advice because I am on the verge of hysteria.
“Benny. Wake up.”
He pushes up onto an elbow and, with his other hand, wipes the sleep from his eyes. His Aussie accent comes out hoarse: “What time is it?”
I look at the phone I have gripped in my clammy palm. “Five thirty.”
He stares at me with squinty, incredulous eyes. “Is somebody dead?”
“No.”
“Missing?”
“No.”
“Bleeding profusely?”
“Mentally bleeding, yes.” I step deeper into the room, wrap myself up in an old afghan, and sit in a wicker chair that faces the bed. “Help.”
At fifty-five years old, Benny still has the same fluffy sandy-brown hair he’s sported my entire life. It reaches just past his chin, wavy like it was permed for years and at some point decided to stay that way. I used to imagine he was a roadie for some aging eighties rock band, or an adventurer who led rich tourists to their doom out in the bush. The reality—he’s a Portland locksmith—is less exciting, but his jangle of turquoise bracelets and beaded necklaces at least lets me pretend.
Right now that hair is mostly a tangled halo of chaos around his head.
With each of the twelve other bodies in this house, I’ve got deep history, but Benny is special. He’s a college friend of my parents—all of the grown-ups in this house attended the University of Utah together, except Kyle, who married into the group—but Benny has always been more friend than parent figure. He’s from Melbourne, even-tempered and open-minded. Benny is the eternal bachelor, the wise adviser, and the one person in my life I know I can count on to give me perspective when my own thoughts are swerving out of control.
When I was a kid, I would save up my gossip until I saw him over the Fourth of July weekend or Christmas break, and then unload everything the moment I had him to myself. Benny has a way of listening and giving the simplest, most judgment-free advice without lecturing. I’m just hoping his level head can save me now.
“Okay.” He clears some of the gravel out of his throat with a cough and brushes a few wayward strands of hair out of his face. “Let’s have it.”
“Right. So.” Despite my panic and the ticking clock, I decide it’s best to ease him in gently to this conversation. “Theo, Miles, Andrew, and I were playing board games last night in the basement,” I start.
A low “Mm-hm” rumbles out of him. “A standard night.”
“Clue,” I stall, tugging my dark hair over my shoulder.
“Okay.” Benny, as ever, is blissfully patient.
“Miles fell asleep on the floor,” I say. My younger brother is seventeen and, like most teenagers, can sleep on a pointy rock. “Andrew went out to the Boathouse.”
This “Mm-hm” is a chuckle because Benny still finds it hilarious that Andrew Hollis—Theo’s older brother— finally put his foot down with his father and found a way out of the infantilizing bunk bed situation: he moved into the Boathouse for the duration of the Christmas holiday. The Boathouse is a small, drafty old building about twenty yards from the main cabin. What cracks me up is that the Boathouse isn’t anywhere near a body of water. It’s most frequently used as an extension of the backyard in the summer and most assuredly not set up for overnight guests to the Rocky Mountains in December.
And as much as I hated not seeing Andrew Hollis in the top bunk across the room, I honestly can’t blame him.
No one sleeping in the basement is actually a kid anymore. It’s been well established that Theo can (ahem) sleep anywhere, my brother, Miles, idolizes Theo and will go wherever Theo is, and I put up with it because my mother would murder me barehanded if I ever complained about the Hollis family’s abundant hospitality. But Andrew, nearly thirty years old, was apparently done placating the parents, and took a camping cot and sleeping bag and strolled his way out of the cabin our first night here.
“We’d all had a couple drinks by then,” I say, then amend, “Well, not Miles, obviously, but the rest of us.”
Benny’s brows lift.
“Two.” I grimace. “Eggnog.”
I wonder if Benny knows where this is going. I am a notoriously wussy drinker and Theo is a notoriously horny one. Though, to be fair, Theo is just notoriously horny.
“Theo and I went upstairs to grab some water.” I lick my lips and swallow, suddenly parched. “Um, and then we were like, ‘Let’s drunkenly go for a walk in the snow!’ but instead . . .” I hold my breath, strangling my words. “We made out in the mudroom.”
Benny goes still, and then turns his suddenly-wide-awake hazel eyes on me. “You’re talking about Andrew, right? You and Andrew?”
And there it is. With that gentle question, Benny has hit the nail on the head. “No,” I say finally. “Not Andrew. Theo.”
I’m pleased to welcome to Karen Odden, author of A Dangerous Duet, to the blog today to talk about the next book in her Victorian Mystery series, A Trace of Deceit! I love art (I minored in art history during undergrad), so this entire post is just fascinating to me. Read more about Karen and A Trace of Deceit below, and enter to win a copy of your own!
Christie’s Auction House, Art, & A Trace of Deceit
by Karen Odden
On my 29th birthday, November 11, 1994, I was standing in the main sales room at Christie’s auction house in New York City. The elegant room was crowded for the rare book auction scheduled to begin at 10 o’clock. On an elevated stage at the front stood Stephen Massey, the head of the Rare Books department, behind a podium. I stood along one wall surveying the rows of chairs, filled with potential buyers and some gawkers. On the opposite wall was a bank of tables draped with black fabric, with phones for other Christie’s employees who’d be taking the bids of people calling in. The star of the auction that day was Leonardo Da Vinci’s Codex Hammer, one of his notebooks, 32 pages, written right to left, in his mirror handwriting, and featuring the famous image of the Vitruvian Man, among others.
A page from the Codex Leicester (a.k.a. Codex Hammer) by da Vinci, 1510
People who attend Christie’s auctions are generally well behaved. They speak in soft tones, if they speak at all. No one shouts out or flaps their paddle around. But that day people could not stop murmuring. Rare manuscripts, signed copies and first editions sold as expected. But everyone was waiting for the Da Vinci notebook.
As usual the auctioneer started the bidding below the presale estimate. Between buyers in the room and on the phones, the bid began to climb: 6 million, 6.5, 7, 7.5 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 20. Soon it became a duel between two bidders, one in the room and one on the phone, and the employee at the phone bank just kept raising her hand. Eventually the hammer came down at 28 million dollars to a phone bidder whose identity was kept confidential. Later, I heard one of the Christie’s employees say, “It went to someone named Cates.” His friend replied, “Not Cates, Gates. I think he does something with computers.” Back in 1994, Windows 95 was still months away, and Bill Gates wasn’t a household name yet.
That morning was the first time I felt down to my bones the way suspense and story could swirl around art.
I wasn’t at Christie’s because of my art expertise. I was a media buyer, purchasing print ad space to support sales of everything from paintings and photographs to silver, coins and Faberge eggs, Chinese and Latin American art, and antique furniture. I placed ads in publications such as the New York Times, New Yorker, Architectural Digest, Art and Auction, and ArtNews. Because I was buying ad space, I had to read these publications in order to know what art to advertise where, and for the first few weeks of my job, I sat in my cubicle and read magazines. It was fun. (My dad always said, you’re never going to find a job that pays you to read! Ha!)
So like many things in my life I came to art through reading. And while I enjoy art, it’s the stories around art that captivate me. The precious manuscripts smuggled out of Wartime Germany by an American soldier, only to be found by his grandchildren forty years later, after his death. The art heists and dramatic thefts out of museums. The Renaissance painting by Cimabue that a 90-year-old Frenchwoman had hung over her kitchen stove for years because she thought it was a knock off. The painter who fell in love with his subject and then couldn’t bring himself to sell the painting to her husband. So when it came time to write my third book, I had a whole backlog of interest in stories about art.
Kate Greenaway, “Diamonds and Toads,” 1871
I write mysteries set in Victorian England, specifically the 1870s, largely because I wrote my dissertation at NYU on British literature from 1850-1890. It’s my happy time and place. (My son, who is called upon to help me with my iPhone teases me that I belong there.) But if I wanted to write another novel about a young woman in 1870s London, I needed to find a place for her to study. Fortunately, the Slade School, now world-renowned and part of the University College London, was opened in 1871, after a bequest by a very forward-thinking gentleman named Felix Slade, who wanted a school where men and women could study art together. This was met with resistance from the men. Still, women entered with the first class, and early students included Kate Greenaway who became famous for her exquisite illustrations for children’s books.
At the time I began to write, I was thinking a lot about memory—how memory isn’t static, like a painting. You can’t come back to it and see the exact same image. Memory changes with time; and sometimes we unconsciously suppress memories or alter them, depending on the kinds of stories we want to tell about ourselves or people we love or our lives. I also wanted to write about how talent or genius can sometimes be a burden, or even something that is put to use by parents of the gifted child.
With this, Annabel’s story started taking shape. She has an older brother named Edwin, an outrageously talented painter, and his father started to push him, hard, when Edwin was seven. As a result Edwin became a troublemaker and rebellious. He went to school at age 12, and when he returned he had deeply changed. Troubled and angry, he visited opium dens down by the Thames, forging paintings to support himself. He stumbled home more times than Annabel can remember, swearing he was going to do better. This cycle of what we would now call addiction and relapse recurred again and again, until he was arrested for forging and thrown in prison for a year.
As the book begins, Edwin has been out of prison for four months. He has sworn to Annabel that he is going to stay away from opium and to live within the law. When Annabel and Edwin meet, he appears on time; he’s clear eyed; he talks responsibly about his paintings and his work. Slowly Annabel begins to trust him. Besides, he is her only family, and she wants desperately to believe in him.
In the first chapter, Annabel is at her easel at the Slade. Her work finished for the day, she retrieves her umbrella from the stand and ventures out in the rain. At the terraced house where Edwin rented rooms, she climbs the stairs to the top floor, and sees the door open. That’s odd, she thinks. Odder still is the sight of two strange men riffling through Edwin’s paintings and papers. She bursts out, “What are you doing? Where’s Edwin?” They turn, and she sees the truncheon that one of them carries. She realizes they’re plainclothes detectives, and Annabel feels her heart sink, for she assumes that Edwin has fallen back into his old patterns. Unhappily, she sighs and asks, “What has Edwin done now?”
But in fact, Edwin has been murdered.
Christie’s Auction Rooms, engraving from ‘The Microcosm of London’ published by Rudolph Ackermann, 1808
Within hours, Annabel discovers that a priceless painting of Madame de Pompadour, by the French master Francois Boucher, has gone missing from her brother’s studio. Edwin was cleaning it in preparation for an auction to take place in two weeks, at Bettridge’s, an up-and-coming house trying to compete with Christie’s and Sotheby’s, both of which were established in London in the eighteenth century. The painting I’ve described is fictional—but Boucher painted nearly a dozen of Madame de Pompadour, who was King Louis XV’s mistress from 1745-1751. In my novel, this Boucher painting is the star of the auction—like Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex—but then its true owner appears, claiming the original was destroyed a fire in 1874.
François Boucher, “Madame de Pompadour”, 1756
So the questions begin. Was the painting that Edwin was cleaning a forgery? Had Edwin made the forgery? Was he murdered because his past had caught up to him? But even more important than learning why Edwin was murdered, Annabel longs to discover the truth about who her brother was before he died. Was he lying to her about reforming, or sincere? She wants to fix his character in her mind, render it as something stable, the way she paints her portraits and small scenes, so she can find some closure and peace. But what complicates Annabel’s inquiry is that in the process of investigating Edwin’s past, she comes to recognize a general truth: that there is a trace of deceit in many of our memories, both our happiest ones and our most painful; and that memories are not like paintings. They shift and sideslip, depending on the stories we want to tell ourselves—and the ones we want to conceal. Annabel learns that her memories both enable and limit what she can know about Edwin. Indeed, the closure and peace she seeks won’t come through fixing her brother’s character as in a portrait, but in weaving together her brother’s story and her own, and accepting—and grieving—that there are pieces missing. But that perhaps a sincere effort to understand, founded in love, is enough.
About Karen Odden
After writing her PhD dissertation on Victorian railway disasters, Karen became trapped in the era. (Her teenage son, who helps her with tech, teases that she belongs there.) Before turning to fiction, Karen taught at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and her essays on literature have appeared in numerous academic journals and books. Her three novels, set in 1870s London, feature young women who solve mysteries with personal stakes. Her first, A Lady in the Smoke, was a USA Today bestseller; A Dangerous Duet won best Historical Fiction at the New Mexico/Arizona book awards; and A Trace of Deceit (Harper Collins) was published in December. She lives in Arizona with her family and beagle-muse Rosy. Visit www.karenodden.com, or find her on twitter: @karen_odden and instagram: @karen_m_odden.
A Trace of Deceit by Karen Odden Series: Victorian Mystery #2 Other books in the series:A Dangerous Duet (#1) Publisher: William Morrow Genres: Adult Fiction — Historical, Mystery
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A young painter digs beneath the veneer of Victorian London’s art world to learn the truth behind her brother’s murder…
Edwin is dead. That’s what Inspector Matthew Hallam of Scotland Yard tells Annabel Rowe when she discovers him searching her brother’s flat for clues. While the news is shocking, Annabel can’t say it’s wholly unexpected, given Edwin’s past as a dissolute risk-taker and art forger, although he swore he’d reformed. After years spent blaming his reckless behavior for their parents’ deaths, Annabel is now faced with the question of who murdered him—because Edwin’s death was both violent and deliberate. A valuable French painting he’d been restoring for an auction house is missing from his studio: find the painting, find the murderer. But the owner of the artwork claims it was destroyed in a warehouse fire years ago.
As a painter at the prestigious Slade School of Art and as Edwin’s closest relative, Annabel makes the case that she is crucial to Matthew’s investigation. But in their search for the painting, Matthew and Annabel trace a path of deceit and viciousness that reaches far beyond the elegant rooms of the auction house, into an underworld of politics, corruption, and secrets someone will kill to keep.
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