C.S. O’Cinneide's Blog, page 3

Petra’s Ghost a Semi-finalist in Goodreads Choice Awards 2019

I must admit, I almost had a coronary today when I saw that my novel, Petra’s Ghost was voted into the semi-finalist nominee round for Horror in the Goodreads Choice Awards for 2019.

There weren’t a lot of ladies on the original list of authors and I am so grateful to the readers who went the extra mile and typed in Petra’s Ghost as their vote. Just being on a list with writers like Stephen King and Mona Awad is mind blowing for me.

The novels that were elevated to the semi-final round by reader write-ins include:

The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling
Bunny by Mona Awad
The Need by Helen Phillips
Petra’s Ghost by C.S. O’Cinneide
The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht

Hmm. All women writers. I guess I’m not the only one who noticed the low percentage of ladies in the original list.

If you enjoyed Petra’s Ghost, please vote in this semi-final round. I’d love it if this Canadian indie novel about an Irishman on a Spanish trail made it to the big time. To vote go to https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-horror-books-2019

Bunny by Mona Awad

It is tough to nail down the genre of Bunny, A Novel by Mona Awad. Is it noir? Horror? Crime fiction?  Is it an acid flashback from that tab you dropped stupidly in college? Or maybe we will just call it Literary, the great catch-all for all exceptionally well-written works that often defy description.

Whatever you call it, this novel is fascinatingly dark, wonderfully experimental, and guaranteed to make you cringe in your reading chair, even as you crack a smile at the wit underlying the wickedness. I love stories that play with the dark and the light in this way, punctuating the narrative with shades of each. I love to write them for that matter. Both my novel, Petra’s Ghost as well as The Starr Sting Scale, play the horrific off the hilarious at times. I think it may serve as a metaphor for life. Or maybe just my life, who’s to say?

But even Awad’s black comedy exploration of body image in 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl couldn’t have prepared me for the triumph in gallows humour that Bunny provides. Don’t get me wrong, you won’t be guffawing your way through this one. The humour is much more sly and subtle than that. In this way, it mirrors the behavior of the women in the book that the protagonist, Samantha Heather Mackey refers to as the Bunnies, the primped and presumptuous fellow members of her MFA fiction writing cohort. Their cliquey dismissal of Samantha’s work never varies from one to the other, thinly disguised as constructive feedback. Dark but like not in a good way? Sort of in love with its own outsiderness, you know? Their bonded together cruelty is insidious, cloaked in pretentious false insight. They are the kind of girls who whisper to one another behind their hands while staring at you, and then dissolve into laughter that makes you question not only what you wore that day but your very existence.

Samantha and her friend, Ava make their own casually catty jokes about these grown women who hug each other and scream “I love you, Bunny!” every time they meet like a bunch of vacuous valley girls. They even have code names for them. Creepy Doll. Cupcake. The Duchess. One of my favourites was Vignette, which if you look up in the dictionary has a further meaning of a portrait “which fades into its background without a definite border.” The Bunnies have no borders. They travel and think en masse, like a colony of Portuguese Man of War dressed in high heels.

That being said, almost every outsider secretly desires to be “in.”  It’s not fun to be left out in the cold. Particularly at the prestigious university campus that Samantha and the Bunnies attend, where mysterious murders seem to be occurring with far too much regularity for my taste, often with beheadings thrown in for good measure. One wonders at the acceptance of this violence in a New England university town. I used to live in Connecticut years ago, and I would have thought a good decapitation might threaten enrollment numbers in a serious way in that neck of the woods. But perhaps the prolific use of guns in the U.S. makes the dispatch of a victim by hatchet somehow quaint and thus in keeping with the New England aesthetic, like clam bakes in Maine.

Regardless, as I said, many people harbour a secret wish to be part of the in-crowd, even as we are being persecuted by them. Just ask the girl who got pig’s blood dumped on her and John Travolta at the prom in the Stephen King film. So, when Samantha receives a smiley-faced encrusted invitation folded into an origami swan in her school mailbox to one of the Bunnies’ private “Smut Salon” parties, she goes. Later, she will wish she hadn’t.

But you, as the reader. will be glad that she did. Because herein lies Awad’s weird and superbly written story.

Whatever you choose to call it.

To find out more about Bunny and the author, Mona Awad, go to http://mona-awad-grou.squarespace.com/

Divorce is Murder By Elka Ray

Divorce is Murder. I can attest to that. Although despite the messy demise of an ill-fated starter marriage in my twenties, no one seemed driven to committing an actual homicide (note to self: cancel outstanding professional contract hit on ex-husband arranged during a night with friends and too much Sangria).

But when Josh Barton walks into Toby Wong’s law office in the novel, Divorce is Murder, he is looking for a less nefarious way to end his marriage. Or so it seems at first. He wants Toby to handle the divorce from his wife, Tonya. Which would be standard stuff. If not for the fact that Josh was Toby’s Grade Eight crush. And Tonya was one of the mean girls who made her life a living pubescent hell back at summer camp all those years ago. When Tonya ends up dead, this further complicates things. Although her murder does make for a whole lot less paperwork around dissolution of assets. Nonetheless, Toby finds herself drawn into the investigation of Tonya’s death, and is forced to question whether her handsome former high school hottie is really a cold-blooded killer. Even worse, she must come face to face with the other members of Tonya’s mean girl posse from summer camp in order to find out what really happened to the dead woman.

Now mean girls, possibly even more than divorce, can create a situation where a person might consider a little foul play in my humble opinion.  Kim Hexamer made me eat a bug once in seventh grade. And although this was decades ago, I still think if I met her for coffee today, I might try to slip some Ex-Lax into her latte. Old bullying runs deep. As do old crushes. It is amazing that we can be full-on adults and continue to feel the sting of that thumb tack left on our chair in social studies. Or like Toby, be an accomplished professional woman and still dissolve into a vat of goo at the sight of the boy whose last name we used to pair with our first to write over and over again at the back of a three ring notebook when we should have been paying attention in French.

Toby Wong is a wonderful character, one that it easily empathized with and understood while still being nuanced and even slightly exotic with her Chinese-Canadian background and her Tarot card reading mother. Divorce is Murder is not the noir that Elka Ray brought us in her books like Saigon Dark and Hanoi Jane but is still a delicious mystery set along the shores of Vancouver Island with its rich land and seascapes. It showcases the author’s skill and flexibility as a writer that she can write an engaging mystery in both the gritty and cozy realms. I devoured the novel in a weekend, eagerly following Toby as she faced the childhood crimes made against her in the past while trying to ascertain who the present-day criminals were.  And she did it all without slipping a chocolate laxative into anyone’s coffee, which just proves she is a better woman than me.

Elka Ray has just signed a contract for a second novel featuring Toby Wong and her escapades. I’m not surprised. Readers will want to hear more from her west coast lawyer sleuth.  I look forward to where the author takes this unique everywoman character and to see what “is murder” in her next book.

To find out more about Divorce is Murder and Elka Ray go to http://elkaray.com/

Where the Ice Falls By J.E. Barnard

What better way to cool off during the dog days of summer than with a frosty winter mystery? Award-winning author J.E. Barnard’s Where the Ice Falls (The Falls Mysteries #2) is set in Alberta in late December.  After reading it, I would guess that most of the people who live in this area of Canada year-round know more than just a few words for snow.

Setting is definitely a character in this book, and a menacing one at that. There are blizzards that scatter cars on the side of the road like discarded Tonka toys, heavy snow and ice that can avalanche down a slope at a sneeze, and a threat of exposure and frostbite that keeps everyone on their toes (if they want to keep them) with well-packed emergency kits.

Not surprisingly then, our first corpse is found in a woodshed frozen stiff as a petrified log. Eric didn’t have his emergency kit, though he knew to carry one. Not that it would have done him a whole lot of good, since it looks like he’s been locked in that shed for over a month. You can only survive in sub-zero temperatures with a six-pack of granola bars and a pair of extra socks for so long.

But in Hamlet-like fashion, Eric’s ghost seems to be hanging around with some unfinished business concerning his icy death. Specifically, he is hanging around Zoe, who was there when his body was found. She and her family had planned to spend the holidays at the upscale chalet owned by Zoe’s oil magnate boss, but the dead body in the outbuilding really put a damper on their Christmas cheer. Unlike the Shakespearean play though, Eric is only providing hints to the source of his demise.  It will ultimately be up to the living to figure out what happened to him. Enter ex-Mountie, Lacey McCrae who came up to the chalet with her best friend, Dee to get some real estate pictures (Zoe’s boss is planning to sell).  I don’t know what the housing market is like in Alberta, but I am thinking that having an adult-sized Popsicle Pete on the property might affect the list price.

While the supernatural component is an important element in this story, I don’t want you to get the idea that Eric’s ghost is the celestial sleuth of this tale. Lacey’s approach to solving the mystery is as methodical as a police procedural, and her pragmatic approach strikes a nice balance with the more ethereal clues we are given by Zoe in her communing with the spirit world. Think Ghost meets Veronica Mars, but without that steamy pottery wheel scene, or the teenage angst.

I also don’t want you to think that this is a book that will leave you cold. Just like the warm breath of the chinook that blows in to melt the snow drifts periodically, J.E. Barnard intersperses her story of coolly calculated murder with the warming trend of family and friends— who pull together in the face of tragedy, illness, or just to chat over a steaming hot cup of tea. We are left with the impression that people stay close to one another during an Albertan winter, and it may not just be to keep from freezing to death.

To find out more about this author and her books, go to https://www.dundurn.com/authors/JE-Barnard   OR http://www.jaynebarnard.ca/

Petra’s Ghost – Official book trailer

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

It was the time I convinced myself I could make my own book trailer for Petra’s Ghost without having to pay a professional.

Note to self: There is a reason why people get paid for making book trailers and it probably has to do with that professional bit.

Regardless, after wrestling both iMovie and Youtube to the ground, I am proud to introduce the official book trailer for my debut novel, Petra’s Ghost.

Looking forward to getting back to reviews and interviews with other great authors starting mid-August. In the meantime, enjoy!

 

Petra's Ghost is an ALA Book Club Central Pick

Petra's Ghost has been selected as an American Library Association Book Club Central pick. Check out the link to find discussion questions and more! http://www.bookclubcentral.org/2019/0...
Petra's Ghost

Petra’s Ghost – Irish and Camino Trivia Time!

Well, it’s less than a week before my dark thriller, PETRA’S GHOST hits the shelves here in Canada (a month later for you Yanks and Brits).

So, since the novel follows Daniel, an Irish ex-pat who walks the Camino de Santiago, I thought we’d have some Irish and Camino themed trivia to celebrate.  How many can you answer correctly without using Google or divine intervention?

In the book, Daniel is walking the Camino Frances route from St. Jean Pied de Port in France to Santiago. How many kilometers/miles is that approximately?
In what year did the partition of Ireland occur resulting in splitting the isle between two countries, Northern Ireland (UK) and the present-day Republic of Ireland?
How many Irish born writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature?
What well-known feature of the night sky does the Camino de Santiago roughly follow?
PETRA’S GHOST is written by C.S. O’Cinneide (oh-ki-nay-da). O’Cinneide is the original version of what well-known anglicized Irish surname?
If you walk at least 100 km of the Camino, you can receive your Compostela certificate from the Pilgrimage Office in Santiago. How many people received the Compostela last year? 11,321?  168,623? Or 327,342?
There are starting points for the Camino de Santiago in many countries across Europe. In Ireland the traditional starting point for the Camino is at the medieval gate of what city?
The Camino de Santiago is a pilgrimage to the Cathedral of St. James in Santiago. When is St. James’ Day?
The answer to #7 is where one of Ireland’s most famous frothy exports has been made since 1759. What is that export?
What name is used for the pilgrim hostels on the Camino de Santiago?
What screeching female spirit of Irish myth foretells the death of a family member?
What movie took place on the Camino de Santiago and starred Martin Sheen and his son, Emilio Estevez?

 

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Interview with C.J. Tudor

Bio

J. Tudor is the author of The Chalk Man, and lives in Nottingham, England, with her partner and three-year-old daughter. Over the years she has worked as a copywriter, television presenter, voice-over artist, and dog walker. She is now thrilled to be able to write full-time, and doesn’t miss chasing wet dogs through muddy fields all that much

Stephen King tweeted an endorsement of your novel, The Chalk Man, comparing it to his own venerable works. How did that feel? (NB- expletives and extraneous exclamation points allowed)

Bloody amazing! Total dream come true stuff. Stephen King has been my hero since I was twelve years old. The Chalk Man is basically a homage to King and all the books and films that I loved as an awkward teen in the 80s. It made me so happy that he got that – oh, and he told me that I ‘rock’. Totally going on my headstone!

Your latest novel, The Taking of Annie Thorne (titled The Hiding Place in North America) as well as The Chalk Man both have characters returning to the events of their youth for the solving of mysteries and ultimately redemption.  What mystery of your own youth would you like to solve and since it was the 80’s does it include absolution for having far too big hair?

Hmmm. Why were white socks and too short trousers ever acceptable? See also – rat tails. I had a very bad perm in the 80s. I’d asked for a shaggy perm but I ended up with a total frizzy granny perm. I was mortified. In fact, thanks to Sun-In and dodgy perms I had pretty awful hair throughout the 80s!

I’ve watched videos of you online and you are not in the least bit creepy. Where do you mine the dark and sinister subjects of your novels from? 

I’m not sure. I’ve always loved creepy stories, ever since I was a kid. I blame Scooby Doo! It’s funny though, I know a lot of crime writers and they are all the loveliest people, yet we write this really dark stuff. Perhaps that’s the key – we get all the bad thoughts out on the page, like purging ourselves or something!

Tell us about your upcoming book, The Other People, due out in February 2020. 

Okay . . .

‘Driving home one night, stuck behind a rusty old car, Gabe sees a little girl’s face appear in the rear window.

She mouths one word: ‘Daddy.’

It’s his five-year-old daughter, Izzy.

He never sees her again.

Three years later, Gabe spends his days and nights travelling up and down the motorway, searching for the car that took his daughter, refusing to give up hope, even though most people believe that Izzy is dead.

Fran and her daughter, Alice, also put in a lot of miles on the motorway. Not searching. But running. Trying to keep one step ahead of the people who want to hurt them.

Because Fran knows the truth. She knows what really happened to Gabe’s daughter. She knows who is responsible. And she knows what they will do if they ever catch up with her and Alice . . .’

I actually had the idea when I was driving home one night, stuck in traffic and I started thinking what would happen if a face popped up in the rear window of the car in front. What if it was someone I knew? What if they were being kidnapped? And then, what if it was my own daughter?

In the early nineties, you worked as a television presenter interviewing famous types. I understand you asked Tim Robbins about Susan Sarandon’s breasts and got a peek at Robert Downey Junior’s chest. Of all of your guests, who did you enjoy meeting the most and why?

Well, Robert Downey Junior wasn’t too shabby! Also, Sigourney Weaver was incredibly lovely – real fan girl moment there. But the very best had to be Robin Williams. So funny, generous and brilliant. I feel very privileged I had the opportunity to meet him.

There seems to be a resurgence of frightening stories involving kids these days. The revamping of Stephen King’s IT. The popularity of TV series like Stranger Things. Your novels tend to centre around young people in terrifying circumstances as well.  Where do you think this trend is coming from and why do you think it is resonating so much with the public right now?

I think every decade has a resurgence and currently it’s the 80s. Obviously Stranger Things, very much like The Chalk Man, is a homage to the books and films of that decade – when horror was big!

I was a teenager in the 80s so it’s a very vivid time for me. But the 80s were also a time of great fear (the cold war, nuclear weapons) and I think we’re in a similar place now – turbulent, frightening and uncertain. Perhaps, in a weird way, stories about kids defeating evil monsters are kind of comforting.

In your work in radio, you used to do voice-overs. I looked that up and found it is not like Ellen being Dory in the cartoon Finding Nemo, but it is a type of performance.  Are you a closet actor?

Christ, no! My voiceovers were strictly of the, ‘Come along to the family fun day’ variety. I think most authors live in a type of fantasy world. We inhabit different people through the characters we create. But you only have to hear some of us read from our own books to know that we are definitely not actors!

What book(s) are you reading right now and do any of them scare you?

I’ve just finished Golden State by Ben H. Winters and next up is A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill which I have heard very good things about. Books don’t generally scare me. Or perhaps I’m too busy thinking: ‘Yeah, that was good creeping out’ to be really scared!

Okay, I just can’t get the Finding Nemo thing out of my mind. If you were a cartoon character, which one would you be?

Tank Girl – because of the hair . . . and because she kicks ass.

 

For more about C.J. Tudor, go to https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2149259/c-j-tudor

Social Creature By Tara Isabella Burton

Props to Stacey Maddon, my friend and past Writing Mystery teacher, who put me on to this novel. It was in Stacey’s class that I started what would become the first Candace Starr crime novel, The Starr Sting Scale (Dundurn Press, Feb 2020). So, I guess I have more to thank Stacey for than his excellence in suggested reading lists.

But back to Social Creature. When lonely Louise meets up with life-of-the-party Lavinia , she feels like one of the chosen ones, basking in the glow of Lavinia’s gregarious and glamourous lifestyle.  The two run the gauntlet of New York City’s in-crowd party scene. They dance at night clubs made up as haunted hotels alongside insane asylum performance art. They attend speakeasies that you can only get into if you sign up in a telephone booth guest book two hours before (and then only if you are deemed not boring enough to receive a text with its secret location). They hang out with pompous literati, drink copious amounts of alcohol and do boutique illicit drugs. They even quote Tennyson while running naked along the frigid winter shoreline, then get matching tattoos on their forearms that read “More Poetry” as a reminder. With Lavinia’s money and connections, she and Louise are able to access all that is possible for young people with a deep sense of FOMO, and more energy than sense. And in all their adventures, as it is with most of their contemporaries, they incessantly take pictures and post them onto social media. Likes being the new currency in order to measure a full life worth living.

But as with so many friendships where one has all the power and the other so much to lose, trouble ensues.  It is hard to get up in the morning and go to work as a barista in a coffee shop when you’ve been doing molly until six in the morning at an all-night-open-bar-kiss-a-stranger-and-see party.  Lavinia gets demanding. Louise lets things slide. Their relationship becomes a twisted unbalanced obsessive one. But all the world sees are the smiling selfies. Best friends forever! Which I suppose ends up being true, because Lavinia ends up dead, which is a forever kind of thing.

Lately I have been contemplating our non-stop plugged-in digital lifestyle. The constant barrage of texts, the one-upmanship of the Facebook post. I try not to be seduced. But if you have ever heard the siren song of that little ping on your phone, you know that it is tough not to be lured onto its rocky shores. Reading this book, I found the anxiety of a thousand of those pings mounting up for Louise, literally and figuratively.  It made me want to take my iPhone and bury it under the floor boards, like Edgar Allen Poe’s ceaselessly  beating tell tale heart.

Come for a sneak peak into New York City’s wild parties and underground sex clubs. Stay for the taut thriller touted as “A Talented Mr. Ripley for the digital age.” You won’t be disappointed.

Just make sure you take a selfie while you’re reading the book, so I can like it.

To learn more about Tara Isabella Burton and her writing, go to http://www.taraisabellaburton.com/

The Blood Spilt By Åsa Larsson

Before reviewing this book, I had to look up the term “Nordic Noir.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_noir) Basically, it is crime fiction that is set somewhere in Scandinavia  that is short on metaphor and long on bleak landscapes.  The weather in that part of the world lends itself well to bleakness apparently, particularly in the north.  And this in turn, lends itself well to nasty crimes. Anyone who has lived through the month of February in Canada barely containing themselves form stabbing someone to death with an ice scraper can easily understand why. I also understand Nordic Noir tends to have a female protagonist. I find this rather compelling. but don’t entirely understand, as women in general are always down for a good metaphor, particularly if the pithy posts I see on Facebook are any indication.  Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, he became a butterfly!  Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be! What does that even mean?

Anyway, I digress. The Blood Spilt won Sweden’s Best Crime Novel award for Larsson and given that you can’t swing an Ikea catalogue without hitting a crime writer in that country, that’s a pretty huge accomplishment.  The story starts of with a dead female vicar swinging from the organ pipes of a local church. Well that is not entirely true. It starts with a heavily depressed Rebecka Martinsson, an attorney who will end up crossing paths with the mystery of the swinging vicar.  Coincidentally, Rebecka had to kill three men in the recent past in order to stop another murder spree involving priests. That’s why she is depressed.  It also may be why there are a dwindling number of people in Sweden interested in joining the clergy.

I liked how both Rebecka and a policewoman named Anna-Maria Mella worked in parallel but separately in order to figure out what happened to the dead woman.  Rebecka, mostly because she is in the wrong place at the right time, and the policewoman because it is her job. Larsson takes time to explore the personalities of both women and their backstories. Anna-Maria is a young mother with marital and work-life balance issues. Rebecka is a broken woman trying to salvage her career and find her way back from PTSD.  Larsson does a wonderful job of detailing and expanding all her characters in the book. I was particularly smitten with a mentally challenged man that Rebecka befriends. He reminds me of my cousin, Wayne, who has the mental age of a seven-year-old but possesses more wisdom at times than a team of Platos.

It is strange that a country that brought us the sunny songs of Abba, could also bring us such disturbing but beautifully crafted noir. But I guess even the Dancing Queen has days when her mood is too dark and morally complex to move her feet.  Except to walk out the door and fetch the ice scraper, that is.  But then I suppose she does a different dance, and the bloodstains are never coming out of that shiny white pantsuit with the rhinestones.

To learn more about Åsa Larsson and her books, go to  https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/69304/asa-larsson/