Another  snippet…

 There was one woman besides Clare, a woman a newspaper reporter would have described as “well nourished,” dressed in a long and somewhat dilapidated black coat with a deep red silk flounce peeping out from beneath the hem. She turned her head when Clare came in. She had bad teeth, dyed hair, a large felt beauty mark pasted near the corner of her mouth, and shadows beneath her eyes that spoke of a long night on the job. 

Dana sez–
I first heard of Mrs. Cusey, aka Madam Millie, from her obituary in 1993, because at one point she ran a brothel in Ketchikan, Alaska, and Alaska newspapers decided that attention must be paid. She’s a bit out of her own time here but not by much, and the impulse to feature her in a cameo appearance was irresistible.

Clare2, aka The Iron Trail

Well, hell. Usually I know ahead of time who’s going to die. Now my heart’s broken.

"Kill your darlings." — Stephen King

So, a new thing

Some of you may have noticed a new item at the bottom of every Book Review Monday blog post: A banner the twin of the one above with a link beneath it that will take you directly to the No Stars Bookshop. It features buy links for the titles of the books I have reviewed on Book Review Monday, one easy click away!

No Stars, Reviews of Other People’s Books

I got on Goodreads some twenty years ago because my publisher made me. I was supposed to use it to connect with fans and new readers my publisher hoped would turn into fans. Instead I used it to keep track of what I was reading and of the books I used to research my own novels, and somewhere in there I started reviewing what I read.

When it got to be a ridiculous amount of reviews (About 1200 now, I think? Aiyeeee…) I decided to package them in a collection and publish them in e. That collection is now available on Kindle, Apple and Kobo. Buy links above. A Second Edition including the reviews I wrote this year (see below) will come out in January.

Book Review Monday

But if you’d rather read my reviews one at a time (and who could blame you, because I can be pretty opinionated), you can read them first on Book Review Monday. Link below, under the image above, or right here.

Every year for the past six years I have been privileged to sit down once a month  with the Storyknife writers in residence. Every month I walk home marveling at their sense of community and their productivity. They are to a woman so grateful for the opportunity that I feel honor-bound to remind them that every one of them wrote their way there, that it was their own work that earned them their residency. I can’t wait to meet next year’s residents!

We got the party started; now we have to keep it going. Tomorrow morning I will go to the Storyknife donation page to contribute to 2026’s End-of-Year Match. Every donation large and small will be matched dollar for dollar up to $50,000.

Here’s hoping this will nudge you into doing the same, and thank you all so much for your support!