Exclusive interview with author Tasha Alexander and a review of her mystery novel featuring Lady Emily and her husband Colin, a spy for the British government
Rating: 3 stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
Hollywood CA, (Gosh!TV): “I wanted to explore secrets,” says A Crimson Warning author Tasha Alexander. “Nearly everyone has something he or she would rather keep private forever. But how would people react if they had been put on notice that their secret was about to be exposed? Would they take radical measures to keep it private? Would they try to deny the truth? Would they preemptively confess? Would they commit suicide rather than be found out? And what sort of a person chooses to deliberately reveal this sort of sensitive information?”
A Crimson Warning paints Victorian England vividly with Alexander’s descriptions of London…the houses they lived in, what people were wearing. The villain is someone who wants to control people and to expose the hypocrisy of Victorian high society. The interaction between Lady Emily and her husband feels more modern than the time period as he lets her help in solving his cases. The cast of characters each has their own eccentricities that add to the story. This is book six in the series.
We meet Lady Emily Hargreaves, who has returned to her home in Mayfair looking forward to the season with her dashing husband Colin. She can catch up on her reading…in Latin….and join the Women’s Liberal Federation as a favor to her mother-in-law.
But then a vandal starts marking the front stoops of aristocrats and politicians. This marking in red paint is the warning of scandalous secrets to be revealed. Some will kill themselves in fear of their secrets being revealed. Can Colin and Lady Emily uncover the identity and reveal the motives of the twisted mind behind it all before another life is lost?
The idea for the book came to Alexander while walking in Bayswater along a long row of white houses. “I started to think about how any splash of color would be striking against them,” says Alexander. “This brought a vivid image to me…red paint splattered across their fronts. What a perfect, and unhideable, way to announce to someone that his secret would soon be revealed.”
Alexander says she always starts her research by reading a great deal, then travels to the locations. “I wrote most of the book in London, as well as doing the research,” says Alexander. “A book can’t tell you what the walk from Mayfair to the East End is like. And no amount of reading can make you truly understand a city.”
“I never object to spending lots of time in London,” says Alexander. “It’s one of the best cities in the world. I’m getting homesick for it just thinking about it. My husband is English, and we spend close to half our time in the UK.” Her husband is the novelist Andrew Grant.
Sometimes local research takes an odd turn. “This is what happens after one spends the day searching through Hyde Park for the best location to stash a body,” says Alexander.
Alexander says she read memoirs, letters, any primary source she could get. “I studied plans of the British Museum as well as photographs of the old Reading Room at the now-defunct British Museum Library,” says Alexander. “It breaks my heart that it’s no longer open.
Alexander has been nominated for both the RT Book Reviewers award and the Bruce Alexander Historical Mystery award. She’s won two Lovvies, a leading award for murder mystery writers.
Alexander and her husband divide their time between Chicago and the United Kingdom.
A Crimson Warning: A Lady Emily Mystery (Lady Emily Mysteries) by Tasha Alexander • Trade Paperback, 352 pages, Publisher: Minotaur Books; First Edition (August 7, 2012), Language: English, ISBN: 9781250007186 $14.99
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