mystery – Lyndsey Hall

Happy Release Day to Hickory Dickory Death by N.D. Testa

Hello and happy Spooky Season! I’ve got an exciting post for you today, because my friend and Enchanted Anthologies coauthor, N.D. Testa, has published her debut novel!

Hickory Dickory Death is a collection of short, gaslamp, Victorian era, fantasy horror stories, and it’s perfect Autumnal/Halloween reading.

Blurb

A Soul for A Soul

I am a woman
I am a man
I am the one who seeks revenge

In Victorian Era England, five people come face to face with life’s most feared entity: Death.

During their time of mourning, each is approached by a peddler woman who calls herself Persephone. Surrounded in mystery and magic, she gives the grievers advice and hands them a box which contains an article of jewelry. Beneath the beauty and sparkle, lies a secret that is more than the recipients imagined:

An escape from their sorrow…

A chance for revenge…

A bewitching exchange…

A soul for a soul…

The chosen must come to grips with their own quests in order to right the wrongs that have been inflicted on their spirits.

I was lucky enough to interview N.D. Testa for this blog before release day. Here’s what we chatted about:

Hi Nic, welcome back to my blog! Tell us a little about yourself, for those who haven’t had the pleasure yet.

My name is Nicole. I write under the pennames N.D.T. Casale and N.D. Testa. I live on the East Coast of the United States. I am Italian-American. I am trilingual with aspirations to learn more languages (I speak English, Italian, and Spanish). I love to eat, cook, and experience good food. I am an animal lover. I love to travel and go on adventures. Fitness is a big part of my life. In my free time I lift weights, snowboard, and ride horses. I am a fashionista. I love clothes, shoes, makeup, and skincare.

You’re a multi talented woman! I love how many passions and interests you have, I bet it really helps when it comes to creating characters and fantasy worlds. So, what got you started writing?

I have been writing stories since I was a child. During summer break from school, when I was little, my mom used to give me a notebook to practice my writing. She would give me random topics and challenge me to write stories. My dad and I used to read books together when I was growing up and it drew me into the world of fantasy. When my sister was little, I told my sister stories I created before she went to bed. As I have grown my writing has blossomed into multiple books that I am hoping to publish in the future.

What a dreamy bookish childhood! My dad also got me into reading when I was a kid, he would pick up new books from the library for me every week, asking the librarians what they recommended for an animal loving ten -year-old. And it was actually his mum, my gran, who got me into fantasy when she bought me the first two Harry Potter books. What genres do you like to write? Are they same ones you like to read?

I write fantasy and mystery books. In the coming year, I plan on publishing a few children’s books I have written. I always like to challenge myself and try to write different genres when the inspiration arises. I like to read fantasy books because they allow me to escape reality. I like to read mystery books because I enjoy solving puzzles.

My two favourite genres to read are fantasy and crime/mystery novels, I always think about writing a crime thriller and publishing it under a pen name. Maybe one day! Tell us a little about your debut novel, which comes out today.

My novel Hickory Dickory Death will be available October 13, 2022. It is a gaslamp fantasy/mystery novel with twists and turns, heart-stopping action, and bewitching exchanges.

I can absolutely attest to that, having beta read a few of the stories in the collection! Congratulations again on your debut novel, it’s been an honour publishing our short stories side by side in anthologies, but I’m so excited for everything you have coming up. So, how do you create your characters?

I create my characters based on life experiences. The highs, the lows, the joys, the trials, the tribulations, the people, the feelings, all have a big influence on my writing. I love the quote “what we give power has power,” because being a writer gives us power. In many of my stories, the situations my characters partake in mirror experiences I have gone through and what I have felt.

I create characters of different walks of life, nationalities, races, and backgrounds in my novels because I want everyone to feel welcome in my books. I hope that my stories can help people like myself who have gone through challenging times find hope again. I want readers to know they are not alone. No matter how challenging our lives can be, we can persevere. We can overcome, we are warriors, and we can find happiness again. Lastly, many characters I magically create in my head. I wait for them to talk to me and tell me what to write. 🙂

Real life is such a beautiful and rich source of inspiration for characters and stories, you’ll definitely never run out of ideas! Where do you write? Do you plot extensively or are you a pantser?

I write sitting on my bed. Sometimes I write outside when the weather is nice. I am a plotter. I use notebooks to sketch an outline of how I want the story to go and then I elaborate from there.

I’m a plotter too, I’m in awe of anyone who can pants a whole book and it turns out as a complete story! I need a strict outline that I can veer away from but always come back to. What are you working on as we speak?

I am finalizing my novel Hickory Dickory Death (out now!). I am working on another book titled Sapphora: Shards of Secrecy. It is a fantasy novel that combines Egyptian Mythology and secrecy. I am also working on short stories for the two charity anthologies I am a part of: Enchanted Anthologies Series and What’s in a Name series.

I’m so excited for your fantasy novel, I love mythology and don’t think I’ve read anything based on Egyptian Myths yet! And I really need to start working on my short stories for the anthologies to, the deadline are creeping up! What would your advice be for aspiring authors?

Truthfully I still consider myself to be in the early stages of authorship. I am learning so much yet I still have a lot to learn. Advice I would give to others is write from your heart, believe in yourself, and believe in your writing. Never let anyone try to change your style. Get involved, join groups on social media, and talk to other authors. Lastly, do your research, there are many steps to publishing a book that I never knew existed. Take your time and go at your own pace.

Nic, it has been an absolute pleasure catching up with you. Congratulations on publishing your debut novel today, everybody should go and grab it now! How can we find out more about you and your books?

You can follow my author adventures on Instagram and Tik Tok @ndtcasale!

Newsletter signup: https://gmail.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=07f73c8702d2b351c72884c8b&id=be08135b3e

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ndtcasale/

Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/NDT-Casale-ND-Testa-101615729259730/?ref=page_internal

TikTok: https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdVSM9Xt/

Goodreads:

N.D.T. Casale https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21051236.N_D_T_Casale

N.D. Testa https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/153233523-n-d-testa

Thank you so much to Nic for chatting with me, and huge congratulations on your debut novel coming out today!

Don’t forget to get your copy of Hickory Dickory Death on Amazon!

Lyndsey

Three Thrillers to Get Your Blood Pumping This January

I’ve read a few thrillers/suspense novels recently as a foil to my YA romantic fantasy edits (The Solitary King comes out 31 Jan!!), so I thought I’d round up all of my reviews into one post. After all, if you’re a thriller fan you’d probably rather read one post about three (very different) books to see which sounds like your cup of tea, than three separate review posts, right?

Great, let’s go.

The Cottage by Lisa Stone – 3.5 stars

Jan needs a fresh start, she’s just lost her job and split from her boyfriend, so when she sees an ad looking for someone to house sit a remote cottage and look after the owner’s dog while she’s working abroad, Jan jumps at the chance. But before long, strange noises start to disturb her at night, and when someone dismantles the fence she puts up to stop foxes getting into the garden, she knows it can’t be an animal.

The Cottage sucked me in with the creepy cover and blurb, but it didn’t turn out to be as dark and thrilling as I’d hoped. It was definitely tense and I wanted to know what was really going on, but it was one of those stories where there’s a reasonable explanation for everything, and I had gone in wanting something a bit darker.

I guessed a few of the plot twists (occupational hazard of being a true crime obsessive), but some of them were genuine surprises and the story did keep me reading just to see what would happen in the end.

I know the author also writes non-fiction/true crime books and this did read almost like a memoir, I could believe everything that was happening was possible, which did make it all the more fascinating.

I’d recommend it if you’re looking for an easy, lighter read with a really interesting premise and a few shock twists, but it won’t keep you awake at night.

The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell – 4.5 stars

Libby just turned twenty-five and inherited a multi-million pound property, but more importantly she’s just discovered the truth – her parents were found dead in very suspicious circumstances, and she is the baby that was found happy and healthy in the cot while three bodies lay on the kitchen floor. Desperate to know what happened, she finds the journalist who wrote a recent article about the unsolved murders and together they dig into a history that only becomes more twisted and shocking the closer they get to the truth.

The Family Upstairs is told from three points of view, Libby and Lucy in the here and now, and Henry describing the events that led up to the three bodies being found in the house he shared with his sister (the aforementioned Lucy), their parents, and another family who came to stay and never left.

I loved the slow build up of tension in this book, I couldn’t take my eyes of Henry’s chapters as the happy family life he enjoyed as a child became increasingly strange and frightening, under the oppressive control of David Thomsen, a house guest who gradually took control over the entire household.

Between unreliable narrators and the slow, drip feed of information building the suspense throughout the book, I was absolutely glued to my seat, especially for the final few chapters. I was a little bit disappointed by the conclusion, but now there’s a sequel coming this summer, The Family Remains (which can apparently be read as standalone) and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Without giving too much away, I highly recommend this book if you love true crime, particularly podcasts and documentaries about cults.

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley – 5 stars

Seven friends go to a remote Scottish hunting lodge for New Year, and only six of them survive. Every single one of them is hiding something, including the staff, but who is the body at the bottom of the waterfall, and how did they end up dead?

Told over three days and five POVs, The Hunting Party is a fast-paced whodunit (and who-was-it-done-to) that kept me guessing until the very last page. Every character was a possible victim and a potential killer, they were all full-formed and believably complex (read: awful) people.

I flew through the last hundred pages, I desperately needed to know who had been killed and why, even more so than who had done it. Some of the red herrings Foley threw out to distract us and keep us off the right trail were so good, I did spot one of the reveals from early on, but I genuinely couldn’t guess the full truth until it was written on the page.

This is a definite five star read for me, and I’ll be snapping up all of Foley’s other domestic thrillers. I recommend this book to absolutely everyone who likes a good, twisty thriller, you won’t be able to see it coming, I can guarantee it!

There you go, I hope you liked the sound of one or all of these. I actually borrowed them from the library, and now I’ve got C.L. Taylor’s Strangers waiting for me when I finish my edits. Back to the edit cave, Batgirl!

Lyndsey

Review: The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

I’d heard The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware mentioned a few times before it popped up as the Audible Daily Deal, and it actually turned out my Mum read it on holiday last year! I love a good thriller/mystery so I downloaded it straight away for when I’d finished The Raven King and needed to dive straight into something easy-listening to stave off the book hangover. It definitely did the trick.

TL;DR Lo Blacklock is a travel journalist on a private, luxury cruise who thinks she witnesses a murder. The only problem is, cabin 10 was always supposed to be empty, and no one else saw the woman before she vanished. Is Lo losing her mind, or is something more sinister going on in the Fjords?

As a big cruise fan I couldn’t wait to listen to this audio book and imagine myself on board the ship, cruising the Norwegian Fjords with the characters. I haven’t done a Fjords cruise yet, but my Mum’s been a few times and I’ve seen the photos, so I could picture the setting no problem. The ship was a little more difficult, as it’s only a ten cabin mini cruise ship, like a large yacht really, but with the same finery inside, just on a smaller scale. I don’t get claustrophobic on cruises, but I can imagine feeling really uncomfortable and panicky on a ship that small with the same ten other people every day, and that’s before the events of the story take place!

The overall feel of the story is very Agatha Christie – a small number of people in a remote location with nowhere to go and no escape from the murderer in their midst. Think And Then There Were None and Murder on the Orient Express. There are also elements of The Girl on the Train, Lo is quite a heavy drinker to begin with and it’s her drinking that leads her to question what she saw and whether she imagined or dreamed the whole thing. It’s well paced and tense throughout, and there are a couple of really surprising twists that I didn’t see coming!

At the beginning of the story, Lo’s flat is burgled while she’s sleeping, and when she gets up to see what’s going on the burglar slams the bedroom door in her face and locks her in. This encounter is pretty terrifying, especially for a woman who often sleeps alone when my husband is away with work (luckily we have a dog so I live in hope she’d scare off any potential attackers). I wanted the burglary at the beginning to have deeper implications than it did, but ultimately it served to put Lo on edge from the very beginning, seeing danger and threats everywhere and explaining some of her reactions later.

In addition, Lo suffers from anxiety and takes medication, which has no bearing on her state of mind at the time of the incident, but is used against her by some of the other characters when they find out. I think this is quite a good representation of the stigma mental health issues can suffer, as well as showing that her mental illness doesn’t impact on the plot or make her an unreliable narrator.

The Woman in Cabin 10 is a pretty easy read, perfect for holiday reading and anyone who likes a good murder mystery a la Christie and Hawkins. Lo isn’t always a very likeable character, she’s quite standoffish and rude, and coupled with her heavy drinking she did remind me of Rachel from The Girl on the Train. Ultimately though, I did find myself rooting for her, as I wanted to know what was really going on onboard the cruise ship and whether she was going to be the next victim, or if it was all an elaborate hoax.

I gave the book 3.5 stars, because I did enjoy it and got through it quite quickly, and the twists towards the end were surprising to me, but it wasn’t quite up to the standard of Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train.

Have you read The Woman in Cabin 10? What did you think? Am I the only one who obsessed over Judah? Please tell me I’m not alone!

Lyndsey

I am a member of the Book Depository affiliate program, so if you click through and buy any of the books mentioned in this blog I might make a little commission, but I am not paid to review books and all reviews are my own opinions!