1867: After being fired from her latest variety hall engagement, Ophelia acts her way into a lady’s maid position for a crass American millionaire. But when her new job whisks her off to a foreboding castle straight out of a Grimm tale, she begins to wonder if her fast-talking ways might have been too hasty. The vast grounds contain the suspected remains of Snow White’s cottage, along with a disturbing dwarf skeleton. And when her millionaire boss turns up dead—poisoned by an apple—the fantastic setting turns into a once upon a crime scene.
To keep from rising to the top of the suspect list, Ophelia fights through a bramble of elegant lies, sinister folklore, and priceless treasure, with only a dashing but mysterious scholar as her ally. And as the clock ticks towards midnight, she’ll have to break a cunning killer’s spell before her own time runs out.
Yes. Call it Escape from Academic Drudgery. Charge me as guilty for writing an entire
novel as a way to procrastinate on my homework.
This
is what happened: I’ve always been fascinated with fairy tales, so when I had
the chance to pick my texts for a freshman comp class I was teaching, I decided
to use fairy tales and fairy tale criticism as a way to help my students learn to
write about literature. So I had fairy
tales on the brain, big time. The next
thing I knew, the fairy tale stuff had cross-pollinated in the back of my mind
with the nineteenth-century American literature texts I was reading in
preparation for my PhD qualifying exams.
Louisa May Alcott, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt
Whitman . . . yeah. How the heck does that crowd mix with fairy tales? But the more I thought about it, the more
excited I got. I’ve always loved stories
with outsider protagonists, and a Yankee girl in the Black Forest sounded like
a book I wanted to read. So I decided to write it. Kind of for fun. And as a way to procrastinate on grading
student papers and chewing through that pesky PhD reading list.
Once I got started writing and researching Snow White Red-Handed, other things
worked their way into the story. Some of
them are personal. For instance, my
heroine Ophelia Flax is a variety hall actress, and one of my
great-grandmothers was a singer on the variety hall stage.
Other personal ingredients are the Baden-Baden and
Heidelberg settings. When I was in
college, I spent two summers in Heidelberg working as an orchestral violinist
in Heidelberg’s Castle Festival, and I traveled a couple of times to
Baden-Baden on my days off.
Baden-Baden has a simply amazing thermal spa, by the way, if
you aren’t averse to getting whacked on the rear after your scrubbing has been
completed by a muscly attendant.
Seriously. I was enchanted by
the area, and it evidently left its mark on my imagination. I even have a recurring dream of hiking to a
castle inhabited by elves, hidden on a mountain above Heidelberg. There is a story to that, and no, it doesn’t
involve a psychotherapist. Although
maybe it should.
Another personal inspiration: I’ve always had a secret crush
on the composer Johannes Brahms, and Brahms spent a lot of time in
Baden-Baden. In fact, even though the hero
of Snow White Red-Handed, Professor
Penrose, is British, I picture him like the young Brahms, plus spectacles.
Okay, so I had this amazing setting that I’d always been in
love with, a hero who looks like the young Brahms, and the fruitfully absurd
concept of a practical Yankee variety hall actress who finds herself in the patently
impractical land of German fairy
tales. Add a castle, a murder, and a
cast of shifty characters, plus a hapless friend for Ophelia by the name of
Prue, and off I went.
There were times, I’ll admit, when writing Snow White Red-Handed seemed like a lot
more work than just doing my homework and grading my students’ papers, by
golly. The historical research was time
consuming, though once I found Mark Twain’s two travelogues The Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad,
things got smoother. Getting my characters’
speech to sound historical without confusing twenty-first century readers was also
tricky (fingers crossed that I pulled it off).
Oh, and then there was the little issue called the mystery plot. Tangled, indeed.
In the end, though, Snow
White Red-Handed almost miraculously turned out as that book I’d wanted to
read: an unexpected, frivolous, magical, adventurous, and romantic romp. I am so delighted that Berkley Prime Crime picked
up my Fairy Tale Fatal series, and I hope readers will enjoy escaping into the mysterious
woods of the nineteenth century as much as I did.
Maia is a candidate for the Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington. This means that the exploits of Fairy Tale Fatal’s heroine, variety hall actress Ophelia Flax, were dreamt up while Maia was purportedly researching 19th-century American literature and fairy tale criticism. The Discreet Retrieval Agency series was born of Maia’s fascination with vintage shoes, automobiles, and cocktails combined with an adoration of P. G. Wodehouse and chocolate.
Upcoming titles include Come Hell or Highball (St. Martin’s Press, 2015) and Cinderella Six Feet Under (Berkley Prime Crime, 2015). Maia lives in Seattle, where she shakes a killer martini, grows a mean radish, and bakes mocha bundts to die for.
These characters, Ophelia in particular, are wonderful. They draw out so many emotions and their personalities reflect those of the fairy tale characters beautifully. The way that the author has woven the lives of the human characters with those of the fantasy - flawless. Not to mention the smarts of our heroine, Ophelia. She is what makes the mystery of the novel come to life.
I was truthfully skeptical about this series at first, but having read Snow White Red-Handed, I can tell you that this is one series I'll be proud to have on my shelf!
Rating: 5 stars
I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. All conclusions reached are my own.
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1 comments:
Maia's admission that writing was an 'Escape from Academic Drudgery' really hit a chord! I think I'm going to like discovering this author! Thanks for the chance to win a unique cozy!
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