GUEST POST BY KATE PARKER

ABOUT THE BOOK 

Everyone hides secrets. Some provoke murder. 

Olivia Denis discovers her father kneeling over the body of a man . . . a man who supposedly drowned in the Channel years before. Olivia wants to ring for help, her father wants to hide the body, but a mysterious phone call brings Scotland Yard to the murder scene.

Olivia can’t stand by and let her maddening, disapproving father hang. To prove his innocence – and learn his secrets – she must work with a master spy. The search for clues takes Olivia to the continent and the Kent countryside, Hastings and London, pushing her deeper into the world of danger and deception.

As war between Germany and Britain stalks closer, the hunt for a Nazi collaborator intensifies. With a mounting death toll, Olivia knows she must unmask the killer or be the next to die.

Book Details:

Title: Deadly Deception

Author: Kate Parker
Genre: Historical Cozy Mystery

Series: The Deadly Series, book 4

Publisher: JDP Press (March 22, 2019)

Print length: 316 pages

GUEST POST BY KATE PARKER

Kristallnacht

In writing historical mysteries, it’s always important to remember what was happening in the world at that time. For Deadly Deception, a key event occurring during the four weeks of the story is Kristallnacht.

The bare facts about Kristallnacht are simple enough. On November 7, 1938, a seventeen-year-old Polish-German Jewish student shot a Nazi embassy official in Paris. The student, who had grown up in Germany but whose parents were born in Poland, was angry at the treatment of his family. On October 28, Germany had expelled many Polish-Jewish citizens who were living in Germany, but Poland refused to let them in. Thousands of people were trapped at the German-Polish border, unable to get into either country, left without food, shelter or their basic human needs being met. Winter would soon kill them all by cold and illness. The parents of the student were in this borderland.
The embassy official died of his wounds on the morning of November 9th. In retaliation that night, “spontaneous” attacks, well-organized and led by Nazi SA thugs, looted, attacked, and burned thousands of Jewish owned businesses, homes, and synagogues all over Germany and Austria, which had been annexed into Germany. So much glass was broken from shop windows that it looked like the roads were paved in it, giving the event the name Kristallnacht, which means the night of broken glass.

The army, the police, and the fire brigades all over the country were ordered to look the other way. While many members of these organizations were happy to stand back and let the attacks go on, or where afraid to act against the orders of the Gestapo, some policemen and firemen did try to stop the destruction.

The destruction went on all night and into the next day. When it ended, 91 people were killed and 30,000 males between 16 and 60 were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Hundreds of buildings were burned and destroyed. Thousands of homes were ransacked. All compensation money paid by insurance companies was confiscated by the Nazi government. The government fined the Jewish community in Germany and Austria one Billion Reichsmarks in damages, blaming the Jews for starting the fires.

Since the war had not yet started, newspapers from various countries had reporters in Germany who reported on the violence and destruction of Kristallnacht. Citizens and governments around the world protested against the riots.

This was considered the beginning of the Holocaust. Jewish children were barred from attending school starting November 15, and by December, Jews were banned from most public places in Germany. Jewish newspapers were closed. Jews were no longer allowed to possess weapons. If found in possession of a weapon, the penalty was twenty years confinement in a concentration camp.

In the ten months from Kristallnacht until the beginning of World War II, more than 115,000 Jews were able to leave Germany for other European nations, the US, Palestine, and Shanghai, China. This was despite the resistance from other nations to take in German refugees. The German government was in favor of Jewish emigration because the government would then take everything they left behind, buildings, home furnishings, businesses, to give to their own followers.

Olivia Denis, the heroine of Deadly Deception, is in Berlin to help two older women escape to Britain when Kristallnacht is about to begin. She’s warned by a German army colonel she first met in London in Deadly Scandal that they must leave that day. The colonel isn’t a Nazi or a fan of their politics, and he is happy to warn Olivia of the coming danger. From the train heading for France, the three women see the fires of Kristallnacht.

Kristallnacht is just one event in Deadly Deception. Olivia’s greatest wish is to hurry back to London, because her father has been charged with murder and with the police not looking for another suspect, she needs to prove her father innocent.

The Deadly Series, including the latest, Deadly Deception, can be found in e-books and paperbacks at your favorite online retailers, including:
Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble  |  iTunes  |  Kobo

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kate Parker grew up in Washington, D C, spent several years along the Carolina coast, and now finds herself in the Colorado front range. All the time, she has been busy plotting to spend more time in her favorite city, London, where her books are set. So far, she hasn’t been able to build a time machine, so she has to visit historical sites and books to immerse herself in the details of life in bygone days.

2019 will see the publication of her fourth Deadly Series book, Deadly Deception, as well as a novella, The Mystery at Chadwick House. Chadwick House will both be for sale at the usual retailers plus given away to the readers of her newsletter. It is her first contemporary mystery. Later in the year, Kate plans on publishing the second Milliner Mystery. Her daughter has informed her this year she will also become the servant of a large, exuberant dog.

Connect with Kate:

Website  |   Facebook  |   Twitter  |   Goodreads 

Buy the book:
Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble  |  iTunes  | Kobo 

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FEATURED AUTHOR: KATE PARKER

ABOUT THE BOOK

Why would a man, knowing his life was in danger, turn his back on his killer?

In pre-war London, Olivia Denis wins a plum assignment from her newspaper when she meets the glamorous French fashion designer, Mimi Mareau. Mimi has it all—wealth, talent, acclaim, and a British duke for a lover. But on her first visit to Mimi’s new Mayfair house of haute couture, Olivia finds something else—the body of an unknown man.

Mimi and her three French assistants say they don’t know the man, but is that true? As Olivia spends time around the salon, she learns at least one of the women knew the dead man and all four women are lying.

A British agent in possession of a terrible secret, an attempt on the life of a British leader, a fashion house in the middle of it all, while war marches closer. Can Olivia stop a murderer before he or she strikes again, or will time run out on the fragile peace, ending Olivia’s efforts? 

Book Details:

Title: Deadly Fashion (The Deadly Series) 
3rd in Series
Author’s name: Kate Parker       
Genre: historical cozy mystery
Publish date: (print 12/8/17) (ebook 1/11/18)
Publisher: JDP Press (December 8, 2017)
Paperback: 324 pages




INTERVIEW WITH KATE PARKER

Kate, what books do you currently have published?
So far I’ve published five Victorian Bookshop Mysteries about a young lady in the 1890’s in London who runs a bookshop while assisting in investigations with the secret Archivist Society. 

Deadly Fashion is the third of the Deadly series about a young widow who is a society reporter while secretly carrying out searches and smuggling for her boss, the publisher of the London daily newspaper where she works. These stories take place just before World War II, and in Deadly Fashion, the reporter finds a murdered man in the London fashion salon of a famous French designer.

In the spring, The Killing at Kaldaire House will come out, about a milliner in London in 1905 who is caught between the widow of the murdered man she found, a Scotland Yard detective who suspects she is guilty of murder, and her father’s family of conmen.  


Is writing your dream job?
How could it not be my dream job? After a terrible commute in the DC suburbs, I now go to work each day by walking across the house in my pjs. I get to dream up exciting tales of murder and mayhem and set them in the past. Digging through arcane sources online isn’t wasting time, it’s research. I’m my own boss…oh, wait. I named my publishing imprint after my husband, and now he’s decided he’s in charge of my career.  I let him think that. ;-)

This is the first job I’ve ever had that I wanted to go to work each day, and every day is different. Since I write mysteries set in England in the past, this necessitates research trips overseas, purchases of fascinating book reprints from the eras that I write about, and tours of sites that provide insights that make my stories come alive. I feel blessed to have this job.

And if I didn’t write, the voices in my head would never leave me alone.


If you could only watch one television station for a year, what would it be?
Most of the time when I watch TV, I’m watching PBS. Our local affiliate runs a lot of British and Australian  mysteries, including some I’d never heard of before they appeared in the TV lineup.

What do you love about where you live?
I live on the southeast coast of the US, and I love being where I can walk on the beach 12 months of the year. We seldom get snow, and if we do, it disappears in hours. Of course, since it is often hot out, and I love hot tea, air conditioning is essential to life as I want to live it. Our town has been around since colonial times and we are lucky enough to have some wonderful old buildings. Since I’m fascinated with the past, I love to stroll the downtown area. Small, friendly, and not too busy.


Where is your favorite place to visit?
London. Hand me a plane ticket and I’d go in a minute. Every time I go, I’m researching a different book and I’m looking for different buildings, museums, and tours. I can spend hours in the newspaper collection of the British Library, finding such gems as the real female German spymaster who’d been in and out of England twice. No one was quite sure what she looked like, no one knew her real name, and they couldn’t catch her. I used her as a model of the French assassin in Deadly Fashion. And from London, nowhere I need to research is too far by train. I love European trains.

What would you name your autobiography?
Dropping the Ball. Many, many years ago when my children were small and I was working outside the home full-time, I read an article called “Juggling.” That was when I knew if I was to write nonfiction on my methods, I would call it Dropping the Ball.

What’s your least favorite chore?
I hate washing dishes. The first time my husband of forty years came over to my house, he found a neat, clean house and a sink full of dirty dishes. He washed them for me, and I was instantly in love. He’s washed them ever since. He’s a keeper.


Sounds like it! What’s one of your favorite quotes?
George Eliot’s “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” I suspect this has nothing to do with playing tennis or being a ballerina, but since I was retired before I was published, I’ll take this as my guiding star.

Where is your favorite library, and what do you love about it?
The British Library near King’s Cross in London. I could get lost for years in the newspaper reading room with all those fabulous issues, year after year, on microfilm. The gift shop on the ground floor is fascinating. And there’s a pub that does great lunches right across Euston Road. 


What are you working on now?
I’m getting The Killing at Kaldaire House, my 1905 story about a free-spirited milliner, ready to send to my editor. In my spare moments, I’m doing research for Deadly Deception, the fourth in the Deadly Series, that immediately follows Deadly Fashion. I know that Olivia, my heroine in Deadly Fashion, will be following another mystery with twists and turns as Europe prepares for war.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kate Parker grew up reading her mother’s collection of mystery books and her father’s library of history and biography books. Now she can’t write a story that isn’t set in the past with a few decent corpses littered about. It took her years to convince her husband she hadn’t poisoned dinner; that funny taste is because she can’t cook. Now she can read books on poisons and other lethal means at the dinner table and he doesn’t blink.

Their children have grown up to be surprisingly normal, but two of them are developing their own love of creating literary mayhem, so the term “normal” may have to be revised.

Living in a nineteenth century town has further inspired Kate’s love of history. But as much as she loves stately architecture and vintage clothing, she has also developed an appreciation of central heating and air conditioning. She’s discovered life in coastal Carolina requires her to wear shorts and T-shirts while drinking hot tea and it takes a great deal of imagination to picture cool, misty weather when it’s 90 degrees out and sunny.


Connect with Kate:

Website  |  
Facebook  |  
Twitter  |  Goodreads 

Buy the book:
Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble  |  iTunes  |  Kobo

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GUEST POST BY KATE PARKER

ABOUT THE BOOK

The only thing standing between Georgia and her fairy-tale wedding is a murder. Or two.
When a young woman pleads for help from Georgia Fenchurch in locating a missing Crown investigator, Georgia resists. Her wedding is only a week away. Before she can say no, she’s knocked to the ground by an assailant attempting to kill the young woman.

Georgia now feels she must help. She soon finds herself up to her wedding veil in stolen treasure and coded letters. With the Duke of Blackford’s help, Georgia follows a trail of missing men and dead bodies. Every victim had one thing in common – a desire to possess a fortune in gold.

In between the society balls and social calls of late Victorian London, Georgia works on her last case before the big day. Will she stop a ruthless killer in time? Or will Georgia find getting to the altar on time is going to be murder?

GUEST POST BY KATE PARKER

My parents read a lot of history and biography as well as mysteries by the British masters, Christie, Sayer, Marsh, Allingham, and the rest. Being surrounded by this as a child led me to set my mystery stories in the past. Research for the Victorian Bookshop Mysteries has been a pleasure.

I didn’t realize when I read Roger Owen’s biography of Lord Cromer that I was reading the basis of the latest Victorian Bookshop Mystery, The Detecting Duchess. Cromer, part of a cadre of imperial administrators and leaders at the heyday of the British empire, spent a good part of his working career in Cairo. This included the late 1890’s, when he was the Consul-General, the ranking British official in Cairo.

The book is full of details on Egyptian finances, taxation, agriculture, and education. It explains how the Egyptians paid back the huge debt they labored under after the construction of the Suez Canal. The debt payment dates and amounts in 1897, the Queen’s birthday celebrations, and the European return to Europe and cooler weather in the summer all led to the sinister plot that Georgia must solve in The Detecting Duchess.

I had been asked by several readers to give them the story of Georgia’s wedding. Could Georgia get ready for her wedding and solve a plot of theft and murder at the same time? Since the suspects could well be in London, or at least England, in the summer following the theft, she wouldn’t have to leave town to investigate. Would she try to puzzle out the solution to the theft and murders? Surely. Could she accomplish this in her last week as an unmarried woman? That is the story you’ll find in The Detecting Duchess.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kate Parker grew up reading her mother's collection of mystery books by Christie, Sayers, and others. Now she can't write a story without someone being murdered, and everyday items are studied for their lethal potential. It's taken her years to convince her husband that she hasn't poisoned dinner; that funny taste is because she just can't cook. The five books in her Victorian Bookshop Mystery series are currently available, as are the first two books in her Deadly series. She may be found at www.KateParkerbooks.com and www.Facebook.com/Author.Kate.Parker/



Connect with Kate:
Website  |  Facebook  |  Twitter  |  Goodreads 

Buy the book:

Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble