Tainted Waters by Maggie Thom

Tainted Waters by Maggie Thom (Excerpt 1)

“You’re fired!”

Sam’s hands slammed down on the arms of the office chair as she jerked forward. “Because some dude stole a necklace from his wife, pawned it and got the insurance for it? And I had the nerve to tell the story?”

“You’re fired!”

There was so much more she wanted to say to him. To tell him. It wasn’t fair that she was getting kicked to the curb for other people’s lies and secrets. It wasn’t her fault that she felt truth should win out at all costs. Climbing to her feet, she stared hard at her boss, debating about telling him again why she’d written that story. The blue vein bulging from his forehead and the deep crimson color of his puffy cheeks told her it was pointless and might just cause a heart attack.

“The story didn’t run, so what’s the big deal?”

His mottled face started to shake with fury. Sam picked up her coffee which she was glad she’d set down when she came in and took a step back. The last man she’d seen that angry had thrown a punch.

“Only because I caught it. Nothing and I mean nothing, gets printed in this paper without my say so. Very sneaky Samantha. Not acceptable. You’re done here. And don’t worry you won’t ever work in this industry again.”

She shook her head hoping something would fall into place and this would all make sense. It wasn’t like it was any different than any of the other stories the newspaper wrote – they got details, or as many as they could and then skewed them sideways if that’s what made the tale sensational. Only she hadn’t needed to do that. The facts themselves had been enough to make the story astounding. For once the paper might have been able to print the truth and nothing but the truth. The informant who’d put her on to this situation had been right, it had been unbelievable. She wished she’d been able to thank him but that was part of the agreement – no names, no thank yous, no mention of where the story started. And she couldn’t tell anyone because it wasn’t actually supposed to have been hers to tell.

“I’m fired.” It didn’t compute.

“Of course. I don’t say things I don’t mean. Now get out.”

She eyed Mr. Donner, the man that she’d thought she was going to have a lot of respect for, the man she’d envisioned thanking in the future for all he’d taught her. For taking her under his wing and making her the exceptional journalist that she was. Okay she knew that was crap but she had hoped that her initial ‘feeling’ about him had been wrong. Besides she figured that even if he wasn’t more than a pompous figurehead, there had to be some people at the paper that she could learn from. To date, unfortunately, she’d only been patted on the head and given the lame jobs. Still, she’d actually started to believe that this work might be her calling. Well, until she’d taken it into her head to run with a tip she’d been given. It hadn’t really been meant for her but since Tom hadn’t been at his desk when his phone kept ringing and ringing, she’d figured it had been hers to run with since she’d been the one to answer it. She had planned to show them what she could do and that would have been the start to her amazing career.

Another damn dream dashed.

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Genre – Suspense

Rating – PG13

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Website http://www.maggiethom.com/

The Pat O’Malley Historical Steampunk Mystery Trilogy - Jim Musgrave

Chapter 4:  Alcohol and the Black Cat

The next day, I wanted to go back and see if I could get some real information out of Plug Ugly gang leader Walter McKenzie in Hoboken, New Jersey.  He was doing business all along the docks during the time Poe was working in New York.  Today, he was limited to the docks in Jersey.  I was hoping he could supply me with some specific clues about Poe and his relationship with the murdered tobacco shop girl.

The cobblestone streets in the poorer neighborhoods collected refuse and dead animals.  People threw their garbage out of the windows and the dead rats, dogs and cats fell down into big cracks in the road where they would stink to high heaven.  One of our tortures as children would be to force the victim’s face down into one of these cracks until he or she began screaming for release.

I went through the same inspection process as I entered the dockside building where McKenzie had his center of business.  “Watch it with your hands, ladies,” I told them, “don’t touch anything you don’t want to buy,” I added, as they felt all around my legs and up my back.

“He’s clean,” said a ham-fisted gangster wearing a dock worker’s uniform of black gabardines and red suspenders.  He also had a cargo hook hanging from his belt that probably served more as a weapon than as a loading utensil.  The three of them pushed me into the back room and slammed the door.

Today, Walter McKenzie was not in his cups.  Instead, he had two prostitutes, one on each knee, giving him little chucks under his three chins and whispering sweet nothings in his cauliflower ears.  They wore Chinese gowns with gold dragons on the front, and their black stockings could be seen as their legs crossed each other. 

He swiveled his big chair around toward me.  “O’Malley, is it?  Ya ain’t no relation to Father O’Malley, the priest who comes down to the docks to tell us we’re all goin’ to Hades, are ya now?”

“No, I’m just trying to show the world that the Irish aren’t all a bunch of sots and drunkards.  I thought maybe you could answer a few questions for me now that you’re not besotted.  The case I’m working on has to do with events happening in New York City from 1846 to 1849.”

“It depends.  I ain’t no stool pigeon.  And I won’t help the police,” McKenzie said, pushing the girls off his knees and standing up.  “Get back to work on your backs!” he laughed, and the women left the room giggling.

“I won’t ask anything that would put your grand reputation in jeopardy,” I said, “and I am not a flat foot.  I’m a vet who’s trying to make a living in private investigations.”

“A man of the Union, are ya then?”

I nodded.

“That’s a horse of a different color, now ain’t it?  Ask away, O’Malley, me boy-o.  Ya risked your life so’s the likes of me can stay in business, and I’ll give ya my best memory, ‘though there’s been a lot of malt into me bowels and a few whacks on me skull during all these years,” McKenzie laughed, pointing to his head.

“Did you ever work for a gentleman by the name of John Anderson?  He owned a tobacco shop in New York during those years,” I said.

“Anderson.  Let me see now.  That name’s familiar.  It was an Anderson come to me about that Rogers girl.  Mary Rogers was her name.  But it weren’t a Mister Anderson.  It were Missus Anderson who come to me about the woman trouble that Rogers was having.  She was ready with the money, and I told her about the best: Madame Restell, the female doctor with the mansion on Fifth Avenue.”

I tried a different approach on the old blackguard. “All right.  I know about Mary Rogers and her troubles.  What I want to know is if Mister Anderson was mentioned at any point in your conversation with his wife?”

McKenzie furrowed his brow.  “Ya know, she did say that the girl was living with them when she got into trouble.  I thought it were strange, but these rich bastards are always knockin’ up the hired help, if ya know what I mean,” he snickered into his big hand.  “She also asked me if I could send somebody to follow this Mary Rogers around.  Missus Anderson said she was worried that she’d get into more girl trouble.  So’s I sent Bernie Ryan to do it.”

Most of this information, except for the hired goon, verified what the poet William Ross Wallace was telling me about Anderson and his relationship with the Rogers girl.  Ergo, if Anderson got his tobacco shop girl pregnant, and his wife found out about it, then she would certainly want to have the problem taken care of post haste.  Mary Rogers and her mother moved into their own place shortly after that.  She was finally out of temptation’s way.

However, if Anderson did impregnate the girl, it still didn’t prove he wanted to kill Poe.  Poe, in fact, according to Wallace, was hired to write the story that helped keep the police from suspecting the tobacconist millionaire of killing the girl.  Anderson would not have wanted Poe harmed, if he were being helped by the famous writer.  No, there must be another connection between Poe’s death and the death of Mary Rogers, and I needed more information to find out what that connection was.

“Is there any more information you remember about Rogers and the Andersons?  Also, did you ever hear about Edgar Allan Poe having anything to do with the Rogers death?” I asked McKenzie.

“No, all I knew were that Missus Anderson wanted the problem handled by the best.  I never heard no Mister Poe mentioned at all, me boy-o,” said McKenzie.

I got up from my chair and reached out to shake Walter McKenzie’s hand.  His grip was still strong at age sixty-two.  “Thank you.  I’ll be in touch, if you don’t mind, if I can think of anything else,” I said, and I handed him one of my business cards.  “If you remember anything, just send me a message,” I said, and I left the room.

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Genre – Historical Steampunk Mystery

Rating – PG13

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Website http://contempinstruct.com/Forevermore/

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Ronald Probstein – World War I

World War I From Honest Sid

by Ronald Probstein – World War 1

America entered World War I in April 1917 and at the end of the racing season in October Honest Sid decided the season had been so poor because of men going to war and the absence of horses from Europe that he might as well enlist in the Army.  After receiving a modicum of training in Long Island he went to New York City on his first leave, which he decided to extend by a few days and immediately on returning to camp was court-martialed, sentenced to hard labor for one month, and clapped in the guardhouse for being AWOL.  He was released a few days early because his unit, the Rainbow Division, was one of the first American divisions to be sent to France to fight.

When I asked him about the fighting (pp. 31, 32); “He would always side-step my entreaties. He described his first exposure to combat at Baccarat by saying, “It was pretty quiet when we got to the front.  We spent more time sittin’ in the dugouts playin’ cards or ‘readin’ our shirts, which was pickin’ the cooties out of our clothes, than we did fightin’. He never mentioned in this little “quiet war” the occasional massive gas attacks, when mortar shells filled with phosgene, arsenic or mustard gas rained down on the men, killing, blinding, or burning hundreds in minutes, nor did he discuss the artillery barrages which blew men and munitions into the stench-filled air.  And he never talked about the infantry raids that left pieces of bodies hanging from the miles of barbed wire stretched across the trenches on both sides.”

He was in the largest trench battle of the War at Champagne but all I could get him to tell me about were the artillery barrages (p. 33): ”When we started firing it was like the Fourth of July.  What a sight.” I thought I was watching a show, until all of a sudden the Krauts let loose with a shower that made our act look like the opener.  I slid into the nearest hole like it was second base and didn’t see much after that because I kept my head down. It wasn’t so great, kid, since I crapped in my pants.”

“At Champagne, my father sustained a minor wound in his rear end –which, as he told me with the wryest of smiles, “Happened when I got confused on the direction of the German trenches and ran the other way.”

If you’re going to live outside the law, you’d better be honest. This seeming paradox was the operating principle of Sid Probstein’s life. Guileless and endlessly optimistic, he was known as Honest Sid around his stomping ground of New York’s Broadway. Sid wasn’t a tough guy, or even a bad guy. He just never had the patience for the “straight” life, grinding out a living at some monotonous desk job.

He was the quintessential American dreamer, always sure that the good life was just one big score away, a man who never stopped believing in his own good luck, even when the evidence said otherwise. He had all the tools, he was charming, good-looking, quick-witted and decent, but he had an obsession he couldn’t escape.

Honest Sid is the story of an American archetype as seen through the eyes of his son, Ronald, who loved him, and who almost lost him. It follows Sid’s adventures in the world of bookies and bettors, fighters and fixers, players and suckers set against the often-romanticized backdrop of Depression-era New York. It is also the passionate tale of the great and tempestuous love between Sid and his wife Sally, and of his son Ronald whom he idolized.

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Genre – Biographies & Memoirs

Rating – PG13

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Happy Again! by Harriet Hodgson

“Will I survive? Will I ever be happy again? Questions that Harriet Hodgson asked herself after she was left to raise her twin grandchildren, while grieving for four family members, including her daughter. Harriet reminds us that we are not alone in our grief and, though losses may define our lives, they will not destroy them. This book tugged at my heartstrings. Harriet’s account of a journey from despair to hope is filled with practical suggestions on how to once again have a meaningful life.

“Happy Again! inspired me and I think it will inspire you.” ~ Heidi Horsley, PsyD, LMSW, Executive Director, Open to Hope Foundation and Adjunct Professor, Columbia University

“Harriet Hodgson speaks wisely and compassionately from the very depths of her soul. Engagingly written with personal experiences, psychological insights, and practical wisdom, she transforms crushing tragedy to growth and a positive affirmation of life.” ~ Rabbi Earl Grollman, DHL, DD, author of Living When a Loved One has Died

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Genre – Non-fiction

Rating – G

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Website http://harriethodgson.com/

The Benjamin Chronicles: Relativity by Matthew DiConti

Conal Benjamin never let the love of his life Abigail Bradley know of his romantic feelings for her. Years of living with that regret haunted Conals life and left him with an emptiness in his heart. In one serendipitous moment they are reunited at an alumni science exhibit giving Conal a second chance but in a cruel twist of fate Conal’s triggers an unexpected chain of events sending Abby and himself through a wormhole to 1888 Whitechapel, London, the time and place of one of the most horrifying serial killers in history, Jack the Ripper. With the time machine lost and Conal and Abby separated, the fate of both of their lives hang in the balance. Nothing is what it appears to be and it’s up to Conal to unravel the mysteries that await him, before it’s too late.

“I could not put this cleverly crafted paranormal fiction novel down. I can’t wait to go on the next time travel journey with Benjamin! It would make for a great TV Series/Feature Film. Out of 5 stars I give it 6!”   - Kelly V. Dolan, NBC News Radio

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Genre - Paranormal Fiction

Rating – NC17

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Website http://matthewdiconti.com/

Author Interview – Mike Hartner

1. Write two truths and one lie (but don’t tell us which is which until I say so. ) A. I’m happily married B. My proudest achievement is my son. C. The next several books are planned already.
2. Tell us a bit about yourself
a. What was the first book you remember reading? HARRY THE DIRTY DOG
b. What is your greatest fear Something tragic happening to my son and/or wife
c. If you were on a deserted island what three items would you want with you? Sat phone to call for help, good book to keep me company, food.
d. Your favorite musician Bruce Springsteen
e. Your Favorite song No Surrender followed closely by From Small Things

3. Where did you find the inspiration for your most recent book? My book is inspired by my muse and some back history.
4. Do you have rituals for when you are writing? Particular place you write, music you listen to, specific drink or snack? Anything you must do when you are writing… My writing includes being seated in a comfortable surrounding, usually lounging in a part of my house, with headphones and classical music dictated by the book and the character.
5. Who is your favorite character in your book and why? It’s tough to answer that question, since all of the characters are favorites.
6. Do you use a particular writing method? Like do you use index cards, outlines, free writing for ten minutes? How do you organize your thoughts before and while writing? I write totally organic. I will usually have interesting ideas for the book percolate through the mind a day or two before. Then, I sit and write. When I’m done writing, then I edit.
7. How long did it take you to write your book? About 10 months.
8. What are your goals for the future (as a writer) I, WALTER is the start of a series that will bring us to present day before it’s finished. My ambition, and my intent, is to write each and every one of these books in a way that will continue to be enjoyed by all of the readers.

Rapid Answer Zone
1. What was the last movie you saw? The Dark Knight
2. What did you do last Halloween? Stayed home
3. What is the name of your car? Dah-ling.

Now, which one of the three was the lie? C. I may be privy to the name of the main character, but that’s as far as it goes. Their life events are organic and surprising, even to me.

Walter Crofter was born into Elizabethan England.
In a country and a time where favor and politics were both deadly, can an honest boy stay true to himself?
Especially given his family background?

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Genre - Historical Fiction/Romance

Rating – G

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Website http://accidentalauthor.ca/

The Magistrate (The Prisonworld Trilogy) by Keira Michelle Telford

« P »

Five years ago …

An explosion shakes the ground and sends a plume of thick black smoke up into the air, a raging ball of fire beneath it. Debris is thrown up and comes crashing back down to earth: bits of stone and brick, chunks of twisted metal, and scraps of human flesh.

The entire western elevation of Hamilton House—an imposing Victorian building located on the Victoria Embankment in the EC4 zone of London, right at the edge of the Square Mile—is destroyed, leaving a gaping, fiery hole from which the screams of the injured echo into the deserted Inner Temple Gardens beside it.

After the blast, and the brief moment of hollow silence following it, the normally tranquil area around Victoria Embankment is flooded with noise.

Sirens.

Fire.

Police.

Medics.

In the coming hours, the news will report that the Home Secretary is dead, along with several senior Section Five officers. Many more people—other Section Five officers included—were injured, and the first to be dragged from the wreckage by a couple of passing pedestrians is a forty-odd-year-old man. His shoulder-length light brown hair, which is normally pulled back into a neat ponytail, is bedraggled and scruffy. Dressed like a proper gentleman—in other words, a toff—he’s wearing an expensive suit, complete with waistcoat and silk puff tie.

His tweed flat cap falls off, getting trampled on as the two conscientious humanitarians pull him across Inner Temple Gardens and lie him down on the soft green grass away from the fire and the smoke, helping him to breathe.

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Genre - Lesbian Romance/ Dystopian/ Neo-Victorian

Rating – R (18+)

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Website http://www.ellacross.com/