One violent act draws together three very different people in Alan Bray’s haunting debut The Hour of Parade. The year is 1806, and Russian cavalry officer Alexi Ruzhensky travels to Munich to kill the man responsible for murdering his brother in a duel, French officer Louis Valsin. Obsessed by the main character in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel Julie, Alexi delays his search and becomes romantically entangled with a young Bavarian woman. When he finally meets Valsin and his mistress Anne-Marie, Alexi hides his true identity and befriends them. As the three grow closer, tensions mount as Alexi and Anne-Marie desperately try to resist their growing attraction. But in the novel’s explosive conclusion, Alexi will learn that revenge cannot be forgotten so easily.
revenge
The Lupane Legacy
Award: Awesome Indies: APPROVED
Categories: Crime, Mystery, Thrillers and Suspense
Tags: africa, betrayal, CIA, espionage, family, female protagonist, government agent, historical fiction, international intrigue, mystery, political thriller, revenge, Robert Mugabe, suspense, Zimbabwe
Publisher: Manor Minor Press
Author: Darby G. Holladay
A story of international intrigue, of the ghosts of Africa’s history, of tangled family ties, of betrayal, revenge, and redemption, and of two people finding a new start. In 1983 Patrick Khumalo, a five-year-old boy out gathering firewood for his mother in rural Zimbabwe, is the only survivor of one of Robert Mugabe’s notorious Gukurahundi massacres. White Rhodesian settlers who live nearby take the traumatized child in and raise him with their own children. In 2012, Patrick is an archivist for Robert Mugabe’s government. Everyone knows him as the ideal public servant, removed from politics and passion. But Patrick has a secret life, into which he draws Constance, the impulsive, idealistic girl he grew up with, now a classical violinist living in Austria. On the other side of the world, in Washington, D.C., ex-Marine Joshua Denham is trying to find his feet in civilian life as a newly wealthy man with political aspirations. At an Austrian Embassy concert where his cousin Constance is performing, a woman who’s been haunting him for the past year—a private banker he last saw in Kyrgyzstan—sits down at the end of his row. Perhaps he’s found what he was looking for . . . but Devon isn’t quite what she seems. Constance is acting strangely, too. After she leaves abruptly for the airport, Joshua gets a desperate call from her estranged father, Roger: Constance is in trouble. Joshua flies to meet Roger in South Africa, only to find that Roger has his own dark secret. Devon finds herself drawn after them to an abandoned farmhouse in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland District, and an explosive reckoning with the ghosts of the Rhodesian Bush War. The Lupane Legacy, the first in a series of novels of international suspense and intrigue, is a thriller for the thinking reader, a nuanced exploration of the history of postcolonial Africa as well as of Beltway politics and diplomacy. It’s a story of tangled family ties, of betrayal, revenge, and redemption, and of two people finding their way toward each other, and a new beginning.
Assessed for Awesome Indies
The Scottish Movie
Award: Awesome Indies: APPROVED
Categories: Contemporary Fiction, Humor
Tags: alternative history, déjà vu, Drama, historical, Hollywood, humor, humour, Macbeth, movie making, movies, play, revenge, Shakespeare, theater, theatre, theft, YA Contemporary
Author: Paul Collis
Why is 'Macbeth' known as 'the unlucky play'? Young Harry's unpublished novel has the answer. And when some Hollywood producers steal it, they find themselves making a very unlucky movie. Harry Greenville, a young actor and part-time writer struggling to make a living in modern Los Angeles, writes a novel about Shakespeare. ‘It’s 1606 and the Bard needs a new play for King James, who is notoriously hard to please. As history tells us, he comes up with ‘Macbeth’. But the rehearsals are dogged by illnesses and accidents, the royal premiere gets the royal thumbs down, and the actors consider the play to be more than unlucky – they believe it’s cursed. The question is: Why?’ Harry’s novel offers an intriguing answer, and he posts the first draft on a website in the hope that a Hollywood agent will discover it. And someone in the movie business does discover it – but not the kind of person Harry had in mind. The result is a truly Shakespearean tale of theft, revenge, and just desserts.