Book Link

From Amazon:

Two women dead: One a twenty-year-old cold case, the other brutally fresh. Both had their lives cut short and their hearts cut from their body. PI Tony Razzolito, working for his favorite pro bono client, can’t seem to stop second guessing the results of the police department’s original investigation as he works to put the pieces together to solve the twenty-year-old murder. And now, as the cops are deep into trying to figure out who committed the new crime, the clues appear to keep leading back to the same suspects from the cold case. And to make matters worse, Tony keeps finding himself stepping on the toes of the seasoned homicide detective who was never able to solve the original murder the first time around.

—This is book two in The Razzman Crime Files – A Tony Razzolito PI Story series—

My Review:

This is the second book I’ve read by this author. I tried to figure out the whodunit but I failed in doing so. Congel has written a murder book mixed with scorned loves. A love that is broken, and scorned, can be deadly. It is that way in the real world so why not in a book? The characters are just as awesome as the first book in this series and you will love the detectives and private investigators. They clash but just a bit less in this book as they have to admit that some clues on either side were impressive and they have seemed to finally realized that fact, a bit grudgingly.

Book Link

From Amazon:

When Hollywood comes to small-town Connecticut, it should be the stuff of dreams—but when a fading movie star ends up dead, a whole different kind of stuff hits the fan.

Unity Historical Society head and antique household items—stuff!—expert Christian Shaw is on set when actor Brett Studebaker falls from the pulpit during a streaming service shoot in an old church. She, the “dads she should have had,” Garrett and Ed, her son Henry, who has a photographic memory and Type-1 Diabetes, and her colorful friends end up helping Assistant State’s Attorney Joe Poli track the killer. Along for the ride: her giant tuxedo cat, Cookie, Ed and Garrett’s big red mutt, Norm, and Joe’s tiny dog, Cannoli. Woodworking, embroidery, old poisons, and vintage weapons all figure in the case, which comes together in a wild scene at the Historical Society on Fourth-Grade Field Trip Day.

My Review:

This novel is full of Hollywood style big shots, big shot wannabes, and a very messy murder of a man trying to make a comeback on a movie that was doomed before it even started. Cut to our heroine who is raising a son with Type I Diabetes and has an insulin pump. She’s been raising her son alone for two years now. His father died in a motor vehicle accident as he’d headed to report on a situation. Cue back to the story. Our heroine is heroic and very good at what she does concerning historic pieces and history as she received a doctorate in that specific area. Cue back to the story, an actor falls to his doom from an altar that was on a raised dais. Now, the story goes into who might have wanted to off the actor. The whodunit will be for the next reader.

Book Title: The Royal Women Who Made England: The Tenth Century in Saxon England

Author: MJ Porter

Publication Date: 30^th January 2024 hardback UK/epub direct from publisher/4^th April 2024 US and kindle edition

Publisher: Pen and Sword

Page Length: 237

Genre: non-fiction

Twitter Handle: @coloursofunison @cathiedunn

Instagram Handle: @m_j_porter @thecoffeepotbookclub

Hashtags: #NonFiction #TheTenthCentury #ForgottenWomen #WomenInHistory #BlogTour #TheCoffeePotBookClub

Tour Schedule Page: https://thecoffeepotbookclub.blogspot.com/2024/02/blog-tour-the-royal-women-who-made-england-by-mj-porter.html

Book Title and Author Name:

The Royal Women Who Made England: The Tenth Century in Saxon England

MJ Porter

Blurb:

Throughout the tenth century, England, as it would be recognized today, formed. No longer many Saxon kingdoms, but rather, just England. Yet, this development masks much in the century in which the Viking raiders were seemingly driven from England’s shores by Alfred, his children and grandchildren, only to return during the reign of his great, great-grandson, the much-maligned Æthelred II.

Not one but two kings would be murdered, others would die at a young age, and a child would be named king on four occasions. Two kings would never marry, and a third would be forcefully divorced from his wife. Yet, the development towards ‘England’ did not stop. At no point did it truly fracture back into its constituent parts. Who then ensured this stability? To whom did the witan turn when kings died, and children were raised to the kingship?

The royal woman of the House of Wessex came into prominence during the century, perhaps the most well-known being Æthelflæd, daughter of King Alfred. Perhaps the most maligned being Ælfthryth (Elfrida), accused of murdering her stepson to clear the path to the kingdom for her son, Æthelred II, but there were many more women, rich and powerful in their own right, where their names and landholdings can be traced in the scant historical record.

Using contemporary source material, The Royal Women Who Made England can be plucked from the obscurity that has seen their names and deeds lost, even within a generation of their own lives.

Snippet 3:

The first wife of King Edward the Elder, mother of King Athelstan

Almost nothing is known of the woman who was King Edward the Elder’s first wife. Her name is believed to have been Ecgwynn. But all that can be said with any certainty is that she did exist, as her son, Athelstan, later king of the English, most certainly existed and was not claimed by either of King Edward’s second and third wives as belonging to them. Athelstan was invested by King Alfred during his lifetime, and this, more than anything, proves that the marriage was deemed as legitimate and that Alfred believed Athelstan would one day rule in his stead.

It is believed that Ecgwynn’s family may have had roots in the west of the country. The pair had married by c.893. A later reference in the Vita S Dunstani suggests the possibility that she may have been related to Archbishop Dunstan’s family. William of Malmesbury describes her as an illustris femina, ‘noble lady’. Alternatively, she may have been a Mercian by birth.

Buy Links:

Universal Buy Link: https://books2read.com/TheRoyalWomenWhoMadeEngland

Publisher Link: https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/The-Royal-Women-Who-Made-England-Hardback/p/24395

Author Bio:

MJ Porter is the author of over fifty fiction titles set in Saxon England and the era before the tumultuous events of 1066. Raised in the shadow of a strange little building and told from a young age that it housed the long-dead bones of Saxon kings, it’s little wonder that the study of the era was undertaken at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

The Royal Women of the Tenth Century is a first non-fiction title. It explores the ‘lost’ women of this period through the surviving contemporary source material. It stemmed from a frustration with how difficult it was to find a single volume dedicated to these ‘lost’ women and hopes to make it much easier for others to understand the prestige, wealth and influence of the women of the royal House of Wessex.

Author Links:

Website: www.mjporterauthor.com/ or www.mjporterauthor.blog

Twitter: www.twitter.com/coloursofunison

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MJPorterauthor/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mj-porterauthor/

Instagram: instagram.com/m_j_porter/

Threads: https://www.threads.net/@m_j_porter

Bluesky: mjporterauthor.bsky.social

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/coloursofunison/

Book Bub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/mj-porter

Amazon Author Page: www.amazon.com/MJ-Porter/e/B006N8K6X4

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7163404.M_J_Porter

TikTok: tiktok.com/@mjporterauthor

LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/MJPorterauthor

Book Title: Anywhere But Schuylkill

Series: The Great Upheaval Trilogy

Author: Michael Dunn

Publication Date: September 25, 2023

Publisher: Historium Press

Page Length: 301

Genre: Historical Fiction

Twitter Handle: @MikeDunnAuthor @cathiedunn

Instagram Handle: @michaeldunnauthor @thecoffeepotbookclub

Hashtags: #MikeDoyle #AnywhereButSchuylkill #MollyMaguires #HistoricalFiction #BlogTour #TheCoffeePotBookClub

Tour Schedule Page: https://thecoffeepotbookclub.blogspot.com/2023/12/blog-tour-anywhere-but-schuylkill-by-michael-dunn.html

Book Title and Author Name:

Anywhere But Schuylkill

by Michael Dunn

Blurb:

In 1877, twenty Irish coal miners hanged for a terrorist conspiracy that never occurred. Anywhere But Schuylkill is the story of one who escaped, Mike Doyle, a teenager trying to keep his family alive during the worst depression the nation has ever faced. Banks and railroads are going under. Children are dying of hunger. The Reading Railroad has slashed wages and hired Pinkerton spies to infiltrate the miners’ union. And there is a sectarian war between rival gangs. But none of this compares with the threat at home.

Buy Links:

Universal Buy Link: https://books2read.com/u/496Ag0

Historium Press: https://www.thehistoricalfictioncompany.com/it/michael-dunn

Lucy Parsons, An American Radical

“What I want is for every dirty, lousy tramp to arm himself with a revolver or knife on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot their owners as they come out.”

This was what Lucy Parsons, then in her 80s, told a crowd at a May Day rally in Chicago, at the height of the Great Depression. The way folk singer Utah Phillips tells the story, she was the image of everybody’s grandmother, prim and proper, face creased with age, tiny voice, hair tied back in a bun.

Fascinating woman? Absolutely. But what does she have to do with historical fiction?

Originally, I had intended to write my first historical novel about a little-known piece of American history called the Great Upheaval, a massive strike wave that erupted in the summer of 1877. It started with the railroad men of Martinsburg, West Virginia, and spread quickly to Baltimore, and Pittsburgh, where much of downtown was burned to the ground. They completely halted rail traffic. Miners, mill workers, and others joined them. Militias mutinied and fraternized with the strikers. It spread from New York to Louisiana, and west, to California. There were uprisings in several towns. Armories were looted. Nationwide, at least 100 people were killed by police and national guards. Black and white workers united in New Orleans, Louisville, Galveston, and in Saint Louis, where they occupied government offices and took over management of city services. Karl Marx called it “the first uprising against the oligarchy of capital since the Civil War.” The event radicalized Lucy Parsons, who was living in Chicago, and set her on a course for a lifetime of activism and protest.

Little is known about Lucy Parson’s early life, but various records indicate that she was born to an enslaved African American woman, in Virginia, sometime around 1848-1851. She may also have had indigenous and Mexican ancestry. Some documents record her name as Lucia Gonzalez. In 1863, her family moved to Waco, Texas. There, as a teenager, she married a freedman named Oliver Benton. But she later married Albert Parsons, a former Confederate officer from Waco, who had become a radical Republican after the war. He worked for the Waco Spectator, which criticized the Klan and demanded sociopolitical equality for African Americans. Albert was shot in the leg and threatened with lynching for helping African Americans register to vote. It is unclear whether her initial marriage was ever dissolved, and likely that her second marriage was more of a common-law arrangement, considering the anti-miscegenation laws that existed then.

In 1873, Lucy and Albert moved to Chicago to get away from the racist violence and threats of the KKK. There, they became members of the socialist International Workingmen’s Association, and the Knights of Labor, a radical labor union that organized all workers, regardless of race or gender. They had two children in the 1870s, one of whom died from illness at the age of eight. Lucy worked as a seamstress. Albert worked as a printer for the Chicago Times. These were incredibly difficult times for workers. The Long Depression had just begun, one of the worst, and longest, depressions in U.S. history. Jobs were scarce and wages were low. Additionally, bosses were exploiting the Contract Labor Law of 1864 to bring in immigrant workers who they could pay even less than native-born workers.

In 1877, Lucy and Albert Parsons helped organize protests and strikes in Chicago during the Great Upheaval. The police violence against the workers there was intense. One journalist wrote, “The sound of clubs falling on skulls was sickening for the first minute, until one grew accustomed to it. A rioter dropped at every whack, it seemed, for the ground was covered with them.” During the Battle of the Viaduct (July 25, 1877), the police slaughtered thirty workers and injured over one hundred. Albert was fired from his job and blacklisted, because of his revolutionary street corner speeches.

After the Great Upheaval, they both moved away from electoral politics and began to support more radical anarchist activism. Lucy condoned political violence, self-defense against racial violence, and class struggle against religion. Along with Lizzie Swank, and others, she helped found the Chicago Working Women’s Union (WWU), which encouraged women workers to unionize and promoted the eight-hour workday.

During the late 1870s and early 1880s, she wrote numerous articles, including “Our Civilization, Is it Worth Saving?” and “The Factory Child. Their Wrongs Portrayed and Their Rescue Demanded.” In 1884, she helped edit the radical newspaper The Alarm. She wrote an article for that paper, “To Tramps, the Unemployed, the Disinherited and Miserable,” which sold of over 100,000 copies. In that article, she advocated using violence against the bosses. In 1885, she published “Dynamite! The only voice the oppressors of the people can understand,” in the Denver Labor Enquirer. During this period, Lucy gave numerous fiery speeches on the shores of Lake Michigan. Hundreds of people routinely attended. Mother Jones thought her speeches advocated too much violence. The Chicago Police Department called her “more dangerous than 1,000 rioters.”

On May 1, 1886, 350,000 workers went on strike across the U.S. to demand the eight-hour workday. In Chicago, Albert and Lucy led a peaceful demonstration of 80,000 people down Michigan Avenue. It was the world’s first May Day/International Workers’ Day demonstration—an event that has been celebrated ever since, by nearly every country in the world, except for the U.S. Two days later, another anarchist, August Spies, addressed striking workers at the McCormick Reaper factory. Chicago Police and Pinkertons attacked the crowd, killing at least one person. On May 4, anarchists organized a demonstration at Haymarket Square to protest that police violence. The police ordered the protesters to disperse. Somebody threw a bomb, which killed at least one cop. The police opened fire, killing another seven workers. Six police also died, likely from “friendly fire” by other cops.

The authorities, in their outrage, went on a witch hunt, rounding up most of the city’s leading anarchists and radical labor leaders, including Albert Parsons and August Spies. Lucy toured the country, giving speeches and distributing literature about the men’s innocence. Everywhere she went, she was greeted by police, often being barred entrance to the meeting halls where she was scheduled to speak. She was also arrested numerous times.

Despite her efforts, and those of other activists fighting to free the Haymarket anarchists, seven were ultimately convicted of killing the cops, even though none of them were present at Haymarket Square when the bomb was thrown. Four were executed, in 1887, including Albert Parsons. On the morning of his execution, Lucy brought their children to see him for the last time, but she was arrested and taken to the Chicago Avenue police station, where they strip-searched her for explosives.Albert’s casket was later brought to Lucy’s sewing shop, where over 10,000 people came to pay their respects. 15,000 people attended his funeral. Several years later, the governor of Illinois pardoned all seven men, determining that neither the police, nor the Pinkertons, who testified against them, were reliable witnesses.

After her husband’s execution, Lucy continued her radical organizing, writing, and speeches. In October 1888, she visited London, where she met with the anarchists Peter Kropotkin and William Morris. In the 1890s, she edited and wrote for the newspaper Freedom, A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly. In 1892, Alexander Berkman (an anarchist comrade and lover of Emma Goldman) attempted to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, for his role in the slaughter of striking steel workers, during the Homestead Strike. Lucy published the following in Freedom: “For our part we have only the greatest admiration for a hero like Berkman.”

In 1897, Lucy met Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman, both of whom she admired initially. However, she began to clash with Goldman over her advocacy of free love, which Lucy felt was degrading to women. Lucy, in spite of her fiery rhetoric, and her own extramarital affairs, liked to present herself as respectable and well-bred. She endorsed monogamy, marriage and motherhood.

Lucy opposed the Spanish–American War and the Philippine–American War, as did most anarchists. She criticized both U.S. imperialism and Spanish colonialism. When her son, Albert Jr., attempted to enlist during the Spanish-American war, she had him committed to the Northern Illinois State Mental Hospital, where he remained for the rest of his life, dying there in 1919 from tuberculosis.

In 1905, Lucy cofounded the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), along with Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, James Connolly, and others. The IWW was, and still is, a revolutionary union, seeking not only better working conditions in the here and now, but the complete abolition of capitalism. The preamble to their constitution states, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” They advocate the General Strike and sabotage as two of many means to these ends.

At the founding meeting of the IWW, Lucy said that women were the slaves of slaves. “We are exploited more ruthlessly than men. Whenever wages are to be reduced the capitalist class use women to reduce them.” She called on the new union to fight for gender equality and to assess underpaid women lower union dues. She also started advocating for nonviolent protest, telling workers that instead of walking off the job, and starving, they should strike, but remain at their worksites, taking control of their bosses’ machinery and property. This was years before Gandhi started leading Indians in nonviolent protest.

Lucy continued her radical activism from the early 1900s through the 1930s, touring the US, making speeches and selling pamphlets, while also editing the radical newspapers The Liberator (published by the IWW) and The Alarm. From 1907-1908, she worked with the IWW, in San Francisco, to organize against hunger and unemployment. In 1915, she organized and led a large hunger march in Chicago. She organized for the freedom of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, labor organizers who had been wrongly convicted of the 1919 San Francisco Preparedness Day bombing. She also fought for the freedom of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African American teenagers who were falsely convicted of raping two white women in 1931.

Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, Lucy, like many radicals of her day, moved toward communism. She began working with the Communist Party in 1925, officially joining in 1939. She was now blind, approaching her nineties, but still participating in May Day marches and demonstrations. She died in a house fire 1942. Police and FBI combed through the wreckage, confiscating her large library and her personal writings, and never returned them to her family. She was buried in the German Waldheim Cemetery, along with her husband, Albert, where the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument stands. 

“When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then.” –Lucy Parsons

Author Bio:

Michael Dunn writes Working-Class Fiction from the Not So Gilded Age. Anywhere But Schuylkill is the first in his Great Upheaval trilogy. A lifelong union activist, he has always been drawn to stories of the past, particularly those of regular working people, struggling to make a better life for themselves and their families.

Stories most people do not know, or have forgotten, because history is written by the victors, the robber barons and plutocrats, not the workers and immigrants. Yet their stories are among the most compelling in America. They resonate today because they are the stories of our own ancestors, because their passions and desires, struggles and tragedies, were so similar to our own.

When Michael Dunn is not writing historical fiction, he teaches high school, and writes about labor history and culture.

Author Links:

Website: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MikeDunnAuthor

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Michael.Dunn.Fiction

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

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Michael-Dunn/author/B0CJXGQYZ8

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/45063197.Michael_Dunn

Book Link

From Amazon:

‘Timeless in their relevance to people and the world we live and love in. . . . Lily’s realistic, but positive world view shines.’

Time stands still
sometimes I wish it would,
in the moments of joy,
in the laughter,
in the sharing,
in the hugs.
yet it moves on,
endless, unceasing
I try to capture
the memories,
and hold onto them
forever.

My Review:

This is another winning poetry book by Lawson. I love her poetry because it speaks to the heart. Wine was never mine, not as Lily writes it. We are all different, yet we ll want certain things. I loved Goodbye, as oftentimes, we must say Goodbye to another person for one reason or another. A toxic relationship is not a relationship no matter how badly the other party wants you to stay. Then we have Easter, and the poem is true. I laughed to myself when I realized this poem, and the timing of Easter is off by one day thanks to leap year. The Sunday after spring begins is Palm Sunday this year. There are many poems contained in this book, but my favorite is a world without hunger, illness, racial differences, shelterless, and the list never ends. But what a world that would be. In Heaven it shall be.