Welcome to Blood & Ink
“Essential reading for true crime buffs”
Not gonna lie, I’m still trying to wipe the smile off my face from this starred review in Publishers Weekly, which generously calls BLOOD & INK “the definitive account” of the 1922 Hall-Mills murders. Many thanks to PW’s un-bylined reviewer (whoever you are!) for the kind words and an encouraging kick-off to pub season.
In other news, my crack team at William Morrow/HarperCollins is doing a Goodreads giveaway now that the printer is getting fired up to spit out all those finished copies. There are 25 of them up for grabs—and 1,823 Goodreads users in the sweepstakes at the time of this writing. Whoah! If you want to roll the dice on snagging the book before it hits shelves in September, enter the giveaway here anytime between now and August 17. Meanwhile, have I shown you my website over at blood and dot ink? It’s a little spooky and mysterious with brooding old-time photographs like this one:
Enough about me, though—I want to thank YOU for begrudgingly adding yet another email subscription to the chaos of your inbox. You’re a small and exclusive crowd thus far, but then again there are more of you than I can count on my fingers and toes. With this newsletter, I want to keep you posted on BLOOD & INK and deliver some fun bonus content related to the book and my research. But I also want to keep you up to speed on all the latest in historical true crime and page-turning narrative history, starting with a recent release I just plowed through…
LAST CALL AT THE HOTEL IMPERIAL: The Reporters Who Took On a World War, by Deborah Cohen—about the Lost Generation-adjacent set of WW2-era foreign correspondents that included pioneers like John Gunther, author of DEATH BE NOT PROUD, and Dorothy Thompson, the first American reporter to get booted from Nazi Germany in the 1930s after calling Hitler a “little man.” There’s lots of world history and Freudian psychology and messy personal relationships, but it’s also a story of love, loss, adventure, and ideals amid the creeping shadow of fascism. [$30/Random House]
…and another that I just cracked open:
THE MONSTER’S BONES: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World, by fellow Montclair dweller David K. Randall—about “a fearless paleontologist, the founding of America’s most loved museums, and the race to find the largest dinosaurs on record [in] the dust of the Gilded Age Bone Wars.” I’m only two chapters in, but so far so good. And it reminds me that I need to finally take my kids to the Museum of Natural History, perhaps this fall or winter while in search of escapist family activities to counter-program the BA.8 or BA.9 or whatever surge. [$27.95/Norton]
Excerpts and Quick Reads: “U.S. shark mania began with this attack more than a century ago” [The Washington Post/Retropolis] “The Rise of Privateering in the American Revolution” [CrimeReads] “Why Hitler and Stalin Hated Esperanto, the 135-Year-Old Language of Peace” [Smithsonian]
Podcast Corner: Crimes of the Century is out with the second installment of its Hillside Strangler two-parter. Criminal resurrects a late-19th Century New York society murder. Kate Winkler Dawson gabs with POSION SQUAD author Deborah Blum on Wicked Words. And Most Notorious has Cara Robertson dishing about her hit Lizzie Borden book.
That’s all for now! More soon! I’ll leave you with this summertime jammer: