Ray Celestin: The Mobster’s Lament, Pan Macmillian, 9781509838967, paperback

Ray Celestin’s third book in the City Blues Quartet series has been my savior during the start of the Corona crisis. “The Mobster’s Lament” took my mind far away when real world Corona events became so surreal and crazy,  I could not have imagined them in my night mares.  

This perfect escape came in the form of an electrifying historical crime novel set in the mobster world of 1947 New York, starring Ida Young, private investigator from New Orleans via Chicago,  now widowed, coming to the aid of retired investigator Michael Talbot whose son Tom finds himself imprisoned in Rikers Island accused of having brutally murdered 4 people in a Harlem hotel.  As soon as Ida starts looking into the police records and the actual murder site there is no doubt that Tom was set up and sacrificed for death row with the real killer still at large.  Enter the Mobster world of the Luciano Family with Frank Castello as acting boss and Gabriel Leveson, Castello’s fixer who runs the famous Copa club who has his own reasons to leave the city.  When Castello gives him the job of finding 2 million dollars who have disappeared, Gabriel‘s plan to flee New York in 10 days is in serious jeopardy.  Louis Armstrong, as a friend of Ida’s from her New Orleans days, has a minor role in this third sequel.  Celestin is a master at stringing along multiple intricate plots with fabulously  well drawn out characters. He never fails to amaze me how tidily he brings the strings all together in the end. I have never been able to figure out how it could all possibly connect in the end, chapeau! 

If you want 550 pages of brilliant historical crime fiction at its highest level, this is your book. Not surprised it has been listed for several awards already, I am just sad I am finished now and have to wait a while for book number four which will be set in Los Angeles.

Lennie Goodings:  A Bite of the Apple - A Life with Books, Writers and Virago, 

9780198828754, Oxford University Press, hardback, also available as E-Book

Lennie Goodings is one of the pioneers in feminist publishing, arriving first as publicists and later becoming publisher/editor at Virago Press whose fate she helped shape to this day.  

Coming  originally from Canada and joining then tiny Virago Press in 1978 with their larger than life publisher Carmen Cahill,  Lennie started her career at one of most important feminist publishing houses dedicated to publishing  female authors and topics solely,  a revolutionary concept then. 

“A Bite of the Apple” is a fascinating recollection, of great interest to anyone interested in UK publishing, feminism and literature.  Part memoir, part history of Virago with all its politics, successes and economic struggles, I was particularly captured by Lennie’s own thoughts about editing and her stories and commitment to her authors.  I know Lennie from my days at Penguin and had the great pleasure to help sell Virago books into Germany when Virago was sold to Little Brown, now Hachette.  Consequently reading her book felt like a déjà vu to me, I savored her spilling the beans about office and publishing politics, so many names and people were familiar. I vividly remember her enthusiastic presentations of her books at sales conferences followed by wild dancing and partying in the evening!  “A Bite of the Apple” is a  frank, intimate and passionate memoir, exquisitely written as one might expect of someone like Lennie who introduced such great authors as Margaret Atwood, Marilynne Robinson, Sarah Waters, Linda Grant, Natasha Walter, Naomi Wolf and Maya Angelou among many others into UK and European market.