Join in a book event with Patrice Mcdonough on “A Slash of Emerald.”
BOOK EVENT DETAILS
3/28/2025
LET’S PLAY BOOKS COMPANY
244 MAIN ST
EMMAUS, PA 18049-2703
About the Author:
Patrice McDonough, a native of the Garden State, has a master’s degree in history from Rutgers University/NJIT. She teaches history and serves as Department Chair at a college preparatory high school for girls, was named an Outstanding Educator by the Archdiocese of Newark in 1995, and is a member of the Historical Writers of America. She spends her leisure time begging her golf ball to land on the fairway or reading the histories, mysteries, and historical novels piled high on her night table. While thinking about her World History and Western Civilization students and sitting in front of a 1789 map of Paris, she wrote Clock Master’s Daughter: A Novel of the French Revolution.
About the Book:
In a riveting new novel in a Victorian-set mystery series brimming with authentic atmosphere, Doctor Julia Lewis, Scotland Yard’s first female medical examiner, and her partner, Detective Inspector Richard Tennant, investigate a string of murders in the art world.
London, 1867: Among the genteel young ladies of London society, painting is a perfectly acceptable pastime—but a woman who dares to pursue art as a profession is another prospect, indeed. Dr. Julia Lewis, familiar with the disrespect afforded women in untraditional careers, is hardly surprised when Scotland Yard shows little interest in complaints made by her friend, Mary Allingham, about a break-in at her art studio. Mary is just one of many “lady painters” being targeted by vandals.
Painters’ sitters are vanishing, too—women viewed by some as dispensable outcasts. Inspector Richard Tennant, however, takes the attacks seriously, suspecting they’re linked to the poison-pen letters received by additional members of the Allingham family. For Julia, the issue is complicated by Tennant’s previous relationship with Mary’s sister-in-law, Louisa, and by her own surprising reaction to that entanglement.
But when someone close to them commits suicide and a young woman turns up dead, the case can no longer be so easily ignored by ‘respectable’ society. Layer after layer, Julia and Tennant scrape away the facts of the case like paint from a canvas. What emerges is a somber picture of vice, depravity, and deception stretching from London’s East End to the Far East—with a killer at its center, determined to get away with one last, grisly murder . . .
