Kaira Rouda, The Paper Airplane and The Favorite Daughter

In her new domestic thriller THE FAVORITE DAUGHTER (Graydon House; May 21, 2019) USA Today bestselling author Kaira Rouda takes readers on a journey of psychological suspense set in an upscale Southern California community.  

In THE FAVORITE DAUGHTER, Rouda introduces to Delilah Jane—or just “Jane” as she’s known in her exclusive and lavish Orange County community—a mother stricken with grief in the aftermath of a tragic accident. 

Jane is a big fan of this paper airplane drink. She has fond memories of tossing things like paper airplanes as a child. Sometimes she still throws a few things when she’s angry, but who can help that?! 

Paper Airplane
Serves two

• 4 oz. Rye 
• 2 oz. Amaro 
• 1 oz. Aperol 
• ¾ oz. fresh lemon juice

Combine in an ice filled shaker and shake till frosty. Strain into coupes. Garnish with lemon peel.

*********
Excerpt from THE FAVORITE DAUGHTER

 
I’d worked hard since I’d moved to LA after high school. I’d lost my accent but I hadn’t lost my Southern charm. I could tell David was looking for someone like me, someone different, someone with big dreams, a charmed future: a diamond in the land of cubic zirconia. I slipped him my phone number, in the most old-fashioned way, written on a napkin placed under his beer, our fingers brushing as electricity surged between us.
 
Now, as David stands at the door to our bedroom, he laughs and shakes his head. “You shouldn’t yell, Jane. It’s not becoming.”
 
I walk to his side, my hands clenched. It’s part of our dance these days, this feigned politeness, this lingering something. Is it nostalgia or just an endurance test to the finish line on Thursday? I put my hand on his chest, imagine I’m touching his heart. “Sorry. Please stay.”
 
Instead of embracing me, he takes my hand from his chest and squeezes, an awkward gesture that presses my two-carat engagement ring into the knuckle of my middle finger. “I’m going to work out and grab dinner after at the club. Don’t wait up.”
 
Once he’s gone I sigh, trying to push my frustration aside. In the bathroom I pick up his bottle of cologne. When I unscrew the lid, I take a deep inhalation of his favorite scent, the smell of my husband. In our closet I see his silk ties hanging up in a neat little row. He’s so tidy. Likes his things under control, orderly. For David, and I suppose most husbands and fathers who are the “sole providers” for their families, their personal spaces at home provide the comfort they don’t find at the office. The sense of order, the semblance of routine. Home is so much more than a place; it’s your anchor, your retreat. I know it is especially important to him now that Mary is gone, his favorite daughter, his reflection. He finds peace in his color-coded closet. David is a cyclone of activity out in the world ever since the accident. He’s kept up a frenetic schedule this past year, but he always comes home to me, eventually.
I shake my head, knowing I don’t have the energy to straighten up the chaos on my side of the closet. I’ve learned to embrace my mess. And besides, I have other things to focus on. My husband deserves my thoughtfulness, my presence at the ceremony tomorrow, and I can’t wait to surprise him with everything else I have planned.
 
Each time he walks out our front door, he becomes someone different. At home, with me, he’s the grieving father of a dead daughter. Out in the world, he’s an über-successful businessman with his sculptured chin held high, invincible. Out in the world, he doesn’t worry about his sad wife. I’m sure of that. Most of the time, it’s easier for him if he doesn’t think of me at all. But I’m always thinking about him.
 
For example, who wears cologne and Gucci loafers to the gym? No one. I swallow and try to control my shaking hands by shoving them into the pockets of my jeans. I hurry from the bathroom and climb into bed as my tears roll down my cheeks and I stare at the dark black glass of our huge flat-screen TV. David insisted on having a television in the bedroom, something I opposed. I know myself. I can get sucked into a show, a story, and always ended up staying up too late when the girls were little. I like to lose myself while I watch television, one of the things my mom and I had in common. She had the television on all day and night, making me watch her favorite shows with her when she was in a good mood. She taught me how to critique actresses, and to learn from them.
 
And I’ve learned a lot over the years. That’s why it’s time to pull myself out of my seemingly unshakable depression. After this week, I’m going to begin my career again. I’ve already lined up a photographer to shoot some head shots. David will be so pleased. He fell in love with me when I was acting in LA. He’ll be so surprised when the old me makes a comeback. I’m focusing on the future now.
 
Tomorrow’s ceremony will be the beginning of my second act. Us women, especially moms, we’re resilient. At times life just throws us knockout punches. But I’ve always been a fighter. Sometimes we have to take a stand for those we love protect them from bad choices, love them even when they don’t think they need it.
 
I know some women who are stuck in their relationships, in their lives, who don’t have choices. I know how lucky I am and I know how to fight to get what I deserve.
 
So, life, let’s get ready to rumble.

Scot & Soda and the Stag's Breath

The fabulous and very entertaining Catriona McPherson is here today on Drinks with Reads. Catriona holds the distinction of being the very first Drinks with Reads guest poster. As such, we don't correct her odd, but incredibly charming, Scottish spellings. Not only because she's a good friend, but because, well, we like getting the free review copies. Don't want to stop that, right????


Scot & Soda (last Ditch Mysteries No. 2)

I actually do feature a favourite drink in this book. In chapter fourteen, Lexy and Todd get burritos and watermelon juice from the good taco wagon on E Street, in Cuento. El Mariachi, on G Street in Davis, used to do this. It was the finest, most refreshing, most delicious cold drink imaginable on a hot day, when the temperature climbs into the triple digits.

But then the owner wanted to retire, and his kids didn’t want to run a taqueria, so El Mariachi is now a Korean barbecue, with no watermelon juice to be had for love nor money.

I tried to make my own, but I haven’t got a juicer and, using a blender, it came out foamy and a lot less refreshing. It would have been a waste of a watermelon, but they’re 20c a pound in the height of summer.

Aaaaaanyway, that’s my excuse for offering this instead:

Stag’s Breath.
One measure of single malt Scotch whisky
One measure of Drambuie
One ice cube.

It’s as simple as that. If you don’t like whisky (who does, if we’re honest?), the Drambuie smooths it right out. And if you do like whisky (weirdo), whisky liqueur isn’t too much of a sacrilege. (By the way, if you use a blend instead of the single malt, it’s called a Rusty Nail. No judgement.)

And if you’re a whisky purist, think how much worse it could be. I know people who add Irn Bru.  (Irn Bru is our other national drink, but it makes Dr Pepper’s taste like mythical ambrosia. Blerk. That said, the adverts are very entertaining. Google “Irn Bru ad” and prepare to lose half an hour.)
Cheers!

A Spot of Sherry?

Edith Maxwell joins us today on Drinks with Reads to celebrate her new book, Charity's Burden. Edith writes the Quaker Midwife Mysteries, the Local Foods Mysteries, and award-winning short crime fiction. As Maddie Day she writes the Country Store Mysteries and the Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries. Maxwell, with seventeen novels in print and four more completed, has been nominated for an Agatha Award six times. She lives north of Boston with her beau and two elderly cats, and gardens and cooks when she isn’t killing people on the page or wasting time on Facebook. You can find her on Instagram, and at the Wicked Authors blog.

Edith is also giving away an autographed copy of the book. Simply comment below to enter. US Residents only. 

Quaker midwife Rose Carroll does not imbibe intoxicating beverages. But her quirky friend Bertie Winslow quite enjoys a spot of sherry after she arrives home from her job as postmistress of Amesbury, their bustling Massachusetts mill and factory town in the late 1880s. Sherry, a wine fortified with brandy, became a popular drink in nineteenth-century America.

I ran across this recipe for a fancier drink than simply sherry in a glass, and I imagine Bertie will be seen fixing it in my next Quaker Midwife mystery, too. The cobbler was apparently consumed widely. It was even mentioned in novels by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and by Charles Dickens after he toured the United States (https://www.saveur.com/sherry-cobbler-drink-of-an-era). Many of us think of baked fruit cobblers, but this use meaning a summer drink made with wine or liqueur, ice, and fruit slices is older. 

Enjoy!

Sherry Cobbler

4 oz. dry amontillado or oloroso sherry

¹⁄₄ oz. (or ½ tbsp.) simple syrup

2 slices orange, halved

Shake the sherry, syrup, and one half slice orange in a shaker. Strain it into a pretty glass filled with crushed ice or cubes and garnish with orange slices. Enjoy!

I’m delighted Charity’s Burden, Quaker Midwife Mystery #4, is out, and I am happy to announce the series is moving over to Beyond the Page Publishing. Look for Judge Thee Not to release this fall, and there will be at least two more books in the series after that. 

Charity’s Burden:

When Charity Skells dies in winter of 1889 from an apparent early miscarriage, Quaker midwife Rose Carroll wonders about the copious amount of blood. She learns Charity’s husband appears to be up to no good with a young woman, a mysterious Madame Restante appears to offer illegal abortions and herbal birth control, and a disgraced physician in town does the same. Rose once again works with police detective Kevin Donovan to solve the case before another life is taken. 

The Fourth Courier Rides A Moscow Mule

Timothy Jay Smith is making Moscow Mules to celebrate his new book, The Fourth Courier. The Fourth Courier is Tim's third published novel. He’s traveled the world collecting stories and characters for his books and screenplays which have received high praise. Fire on the Island won the Gold Medal in the 2017 Faulkner-Wisdom Competition for the Novel. He won the Paris Prize for Fiction for A Vision of Angels. Kirkus Reviews called Cooper’s Promise “literary dynamite” and selected it as one of the Best Books of 2012. Tim was nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize for his short fiction, Stolen Memories. His screenplays have won numerous international competitions. Tim is the founder of the Smith Prize for Political Theater. He lives in France.

A series of grisly murders in Poland suddenly becomes an international case when radiation is detected on the third victim’s hands, raising fears that all the victims may have smuggled nuclear material out of the recently-defunct Soviet Union. The FBI sends Special Agent Jay Porter to assist in the investigation. He teams up with a CIA agent, and when they learn that a Russian physicist who designed a portable atomic bomb is missing, the race is on to find him—and the bomb—before it ends up in the wrong hands.

The novel is set at the time of the seismic collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. This year marks the 30^thanniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Solidarity coming to power in Poland. The Fourth Courier captures that era. Jay becomes intimately involved with a Polish family, giving the reader a chance to see how people coped with their collective hangover from the communist era. Here’s how he sees one moment:

“A church’s onion dome loomed over the bent women and broken men who plied those streets. Here, a man sold oranges displayed on his car hood; there, a woman used a stick to rummage in a refuse bin; and everywhere, the poor scuffed their shoes in the gritty snow bargaining for toss-offs.”

And now for the Moscow Mule

What better drink to conjure up both Russia and Poland than one with vodka, the national brew in both countries? Even better, my story is about nuclear smuggling from Moscow, and mule is slang for a smuggler!

So Moscow Mule it had to be, and it’s so easy to make, you don’t need a recipe. Fill a copper mug with ice, squeeze a quarter of a lime over it, add as much vodka as you want, and fill it to the top with ginger beer. To spruce it up, stick in a sprig of mint.

For those who insist on a recipe, combine the following in a copper mug:

2 ounces vodka

1 tablespoon (1/2 ounce) fresh lime juice

4 ounces ginger beer (preferably a little spicy)

A sprig of mint (optional)

If you’re short a copper mug, a highball glass will do. Why a copper mug? Tradition.

Stay in touch with Tim on Facebook.