Camille Crossan appears to be living an idyllic life in Claire Fullerton’s poignant, evocative novel, Mourning Dove. Living in a superbly appointed mansion in “magnolia-lined and manicured” Memphis during the 1960s and 1970s, Camille’s family life shimmers with Southern charm. Her mother, Posey, usually outfitted in a Lily Pulitzer shift, Pappagallo shoes, and a signature shade of pink lipstick, is a beauty with the wryest sense of humor and steel determination.
As a young girl, Camille, known as Millie, sees how those in her mother’s social orbit are captivated by her aura, how men are easily seduced by her flirtatious charm. Society is a game played by those who know its rules, and Posey means to win. Every time. She, however, isn’t even the charismatic one in the family – that’s Finley, Millie’s older brother, who brims with intelligence, startling good looks, and messianic magnetism. A peek beneath the shiny surface of gracious Southern living, however, reveals enormous cracks in the foundation of the Crossan family. One of the first things the adult Millie tells us about her brother is that he is dead. She takes the reader back, though, to their childhood and coming of age, a tumultuous journey that both binds and separates the siblings.
During her first decade, Millie’s family was living in Minneapolis with her tender-hearted, intellectual father who succumbed to alcoholism. Loss of money and, worse, the accompanying loss of social status, motivates Posey to uproot her children and move them to her childhood home in Memphis, a palatial mansion filled with antiques and portraits of forebears. It’s a volatile time, inside and outside the house, as centuries-old Southern traditions clash with the youth counterculture.
Millie watches as her mother holds court during daily cocktail hours, a prospective second husband soon on the reel, and Finley, a gifted guitarist, plunges into the local music scene. But what role will she play? It’s difficult for her to see herself entirely separate from her brother for whom she has, “…a love devoid of envy, tied up in shared survival and my inability to see myself as anything more than the larger-than-life Finley’s little sister.” Millie will grapple with her identity and question her destiny, whether she’ll be a bride in the Southern belle mode of her mother or if she’ll be the blossom that falls far from the magnolia tree. Meanwhile, Finley’s charisma both explodes and implodes in shocking and dangerous ways as he becomes revered by a group of people with no connection to the gentrified life. Like Millie, the reader is transfixed and apprehensive about where this less-traveled road will take Finley. Although the reader knows his grim fate from the outset of the book, his storyline is so engrossing that no drama is lost.
Author, Claire Fullerton, is an enchantress with prose. The writing in this novel will cause you to stop, reread sentences, savor them, and note their architecture. Scenes sparkle as she masterfully summons moods and atmosphere. The reader can see Millie’s lovely but haunting home, and smell the rich fragrance of dogwood on a soft spring day. Fullerton has a keen ear for witty, authentic dialogue, and she deftly reveals much about personalities via conversation. It’s difficult to take leave of such a vivid, fully realized world. Fortunately for readers, Fullerton has written several books, opportunities to spend more time in her richly crafted worlds.
Mourning Dove won First Place in the CIBA 2018 Somerset Awards for Literary Fiction.
Secrets buried at sea have a grave tendency to resurface in time. The incident happened twenty years ago. A Naval exercise has gone wrong at a rocky point near San Diego. Not just wrong, it was a complete Ballast Point Breakdown. Butch Fleetwood participated in that Naval exercise. He was a rebel. After so many years, Butch Fleetwood is an urgent problem for P.I. Rolly Waters now, even though Butch Fleetwood is dead.
Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Edward the Second (1592) and Derek Jarman’s film (Edward II, 1991) fans will want to sit up and take notice of how Anna Belfrage navigates her way through this installment of the Under the Approaching Dark, the third book in The King’s Greatest Enemy series. With a vast cast and two kings from the same family to deal with, the challenges were immense. And she’s succeeded.
Five young friends from then-English Newfoundland and Ireland together join a regiment to serve in the war, as does a young nurse from Dublin. At first, a reader might be lulled into thinking this is a light-hearted Irish dialect-filled romp a la Finian’s Rainbow, but the novel takes us deep into the lives of its characters as they serve in the bloody trenches, convalesce, and try to live normal lives despite the physical and emotional damages they suffered.
Ruth Hull Chatlien’s historical novel Blood Moon: A Captive’s Tale shines a light on two worlds trying to coexist in the 1860s Minnesota, that of Westward Expansion and white settlers, and that of the complex network of Sioux tribes dealing with starvation and disease. We follow her protagonist, Mrs. Sarah Wakefield, as she is thrust unwillingly into the midst of the Indian Wars.
Texas transplant Franki Amato has only lived in New Orleans for only a year and a half, but she has already seen some pretty strange things. As a private investigator for Private Chicks, she has had her share of oddball cases and clients, but this one is blood-curdling – a vampire serial killer is stalking The Big Easy. With Halloween only days away, the initial robberies of local blood banks by a caped figure seem more prank-like than serious until a fraternity member of Delta Upsilon Delta is found drained of blood in one of the city’s above-ground crypts with the message “Campari Crimson” scrawled on the wall in his own blood. Franki wants nothing to do with the cryptic case, but when a psychic gives Franki a chilling impromptu reading from a restless spirit who claims someone drained and drank his blood and then warns her the same thing is going to happen to her brother Anthony, Franki fears she will be drawn in anyway. Her fears are confirmed when Josh Santo, a multi-millionaire millennial, hires Franki to find the real culprit after he is accused of the thefts. Josh’s bizarre behavior of dressing up as infamous self-proclaimed NOLA vamp Compte Jacques de Saint Germain – all while living in the house belonging to the bloodsucker – attracts the attention of Detective Wesley Sullivan and Franki thinks Josh may be more guilty than innocent. As the case escalates with yet another killing, Franki faces danger at every turn and finding the killer becomes entirely too personal. The Crescent City on the eve of a blood moon Halloween, what could possibly go wrong?
The Soolivan family is split apart by the Civil War, but when the ugly side of fate intervenes, a silver lining appears to bring a broken family back together again. While Andy Soolivan is convalescing in the hospital with his new friend, Bicker, he receives news that his uncles have all been killed. In a letter explaining the details, August Soolivan urges his son Andy to come home. The family has suffered enough.
