Tasha Alexander Interview

As I mentioned at the end of my previous post, on Friday of last week, I had the great pleasure of interviewing Tasha Alexander for New Books in Historical Fiction. She had many fascinating things to say about her books, her writing career, her vision of Lady Emily as a character, and what drew her to explore Emily’s world. She also talks about Venice, Renaissance families, difficult people, and her plans for Emily's future adventures. The interview went live on Tuesday.

You need only click on the NBHF link below to access the podcast. Once there, you can also subscribe to future podcasts, explore the other channels, and—if you feel so inclined—donate to the New Books Network, which operates entirely with the help of unpaid volunteers and on the generosity of its founder, Marshall Poe.

The rest of this post comes from the NBHF page.

Well-brought-up Victorian ladies don’t expect their childhood nemeses to write from out of the blue, pleading for help because, as the nemesis so tactfully puts it, “what lady of my rank would associate with persons who investigate crimes?”

In this case, the crime is murder, and the summons brings Lady Emily Hargreaves post-haste from London to aid and support Contessa Emma Barozzi—née Callum, and the nemesis from Emily’s past—whose husband the Venetian police suspect of dispatching his own father with a medieval stiletto and fleeing with Emma’s inheritance, a cache of illuminated Renaissance manuscript books.

Although tempted to refuse Emma’s plea for help, Emily cannot abandon a fellow Englishwoman in the midst of crisis—or turn down an opportunity to overcome the petty dislikes of childhood. Moreover, Emily, through no fault of her own, has amassed a certain amount of experience in solving deadly crimes in London, Vienna, Istanbul, and rural France. With her husband, an agent of the British crown, she plunges into an unfamiliar, sometimes terrifying, but appealing world of art, gondolas, canals, decaying palazzi, back streets, brothels, bookstores, carnival figures, and ancient noble families with unresolved feuds that predate Romeo and Juliet. Soon Emily begins to suspect that the key to the mystery lies four centuries in the past, with links to the fifteenth-century ring found clasped in the victim’s dead hand.

This is the seventh of Lady Emily’s adventures, which began with And Only to Deceive. The next in the Lady Emily series, Behind the Shattered Glass, is due off-press in October 2013. On what Tasha has in store for her characters after that, you will have to listen to the podcast. She is a wonderful speaker: I promise you will not be disappointed. And, of course, read Death in the Floating City.