Susan Howatch's Blog

Q: Which bombshell beauty was a two-time Golden Globe® winner, but only made an Oscar® appearance as a presenter in 1951?

A: Marilyn Monroe

This elusive screen goddess proved challenging to capture outside of the camera's frame. Anthony Summers interviewed more than 600 people in his efforts to chronicle the life and legacy of Marilyn Monroe for the biography Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe .

Marilyn image via InStyle.com

Q: Which leading lady won her first Best Actress Oscar® for the 1969 film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie? These days she is better known as the sharp-tongued Dowager Countess of Grantham.

A: Dame Maggie Smith

“Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Maggie Smith's Jean Brodie, the magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic titular character in this 1969 film based on a novel of the same name by Muriel Spark. Brodie is a controversial teacher who deeply marks the lives of a select group of students in the years leading up to World War II. She remains one of twentieth-century English literature’s most iconic and complex characters—a woman at once admirable and sinister, benevolent and conniving. A bit like the Dowager Countess of Grantham, come to think of it.

Forget the chocolates, flowers, and teddy bears. This Valentine’s Day, show your children you love them with ebooks. If you have little ones, celebrate the heart-filled holiday with classic children’s picture book characters. If you have older children, encourage them to fall in love with middle-grade series or romantic young adult ebooks.

In Franklin’s Valentines, Franklin can’t wait to give his friends the cards he has made, but is heartbroken when he gets to school and discovers they’re missing. Big hearts prevail and Franklin soon learns that he has very good friends—and that he can be a good friend, too.

When Scaredy Squirrel finds the perfectly safe candidate for a friend (no teeth), he arms himself with a nametag, mittens, a mirror, and a lemon, so that he’s ready to make the Perfect First Impression. But when things don’t go according to plan, he’s not sure he’ll survive this ordeal. In Scaredy Squirrel Makes a Friend, this loveable squirrel discovers the true meaning of friendship. 

Young Kelly’s mom doesn’t understand about red. Sure, the brown mittens are warmer, but the red mitts make better snowballs. And the red boots aren’t just for rain; they take bigger steps in any weather. No doubt about it, Red is Best.

"When the baby bunnies come, will you still love me?" the bunny asks his mother. "Of course," said Mother Bunny. "You're my extra-special one. And I'll love you just as much when the baby bunnies come." In Will You Still Love Me?, various mothers reassure their little ones that love has no limits. 

Bingo Brown is confident that he can write the definitive guidebook for middle-school boys trying to win over girls. In Bingo Brown’s Guide to Romance and Bingo Brown and the Language of Love, Bingo Brown smartly captures all the highs and lows of adolescence.

Though identical on the outside, ten-year-old twins Claire and Luna Bundkin are as different on the inside as peaches and peanut butter. Claire is mischievous and Luna is a dreamer, but they do share a favorite hobby: witchcraft. In Witch Twins, the first book in the series, Claire and Luna discover there is no easy spell to stop a wedding.

 

In Titanic: The Long Night, two teenagers discover true love aboard the doomed ocean liner. Will they be able to stay together—even if they all survive?

When Serena Shane meets Pilot, a lifeguard who’s unlike any boy she’s ever known, an unforgettable summer of discovery begins in The Lifeguard.

After her parents’ divorce, Teddy realizes that love is not as easy as it looks. In Out of Love, Teddy learns that real love is far more complex than those old letters make it seem. And though her parents love and support her, Teddy’s perceptions of her family will have to change.

We’ve compiled eight of our post popular ebooks, which will be ON SALE through February 26th. See the complete collection on Amazon here.

 William Bernhardt’s seventeen-book Ben Kincaid series stars a honest, tough, idealistic defense attorney. In Perfect Justice, Kincaid’s case is handed to him during a fly-fishing trip in the forests of Arkansas. When a young activist is found dead, a white supremacist is the number-one suspect. Although his client may be an indefensible racist, Kincaid takes the case.

 Lawyer Trap by R. J. Jagger deftly combines a legal thriller and a police procedural. Riveting from beginning to end, the novel alternates between the points of view of three characters: good, evil, and somewhere in between . . .

People are often not what they seem, in or out of court. Stephen Solomita’s Bad Lawyer depicts a desperate lawyer defending a battered wife, who may or may not have killed her husband in self-defense. With shady friends and a drug addiction, Priscilla certainly isn’t the perfect client, but Sid Kaplan knows that if he wins the case, he will be famous—either on the front page or in the obituaries.

 Jon Land writes edge-of-your-seat thrillers impossible to put down. In The Eighth Trumpet, a killer proves he can penetrate the world’s finest security systems after he brutally murders three billionaires. It’s up to Jared Kimberlain, a retired special-forces agent, to come out of retirement and go undercover to protect the President before he becomes the next target.

For a look at New York City in the 1960s and ’70s, try Lawrence Sanders’s The Anderson Tapes. Professional burglar John Anderson targets a Manhattan luxury building for the biggest heist of his career. In order to pull it off, he’ll the need the help of the mafia. However, unbeknownst to them, their conversations have been recorded by the New York Police Department. While Anderson continues with his plan, believing it is foolproof, the NYPD has its own plan to bring Anderson to justice. Sanders tells the story primarily through these wiretaps, so that readers feel they’re in on the game while trying to guess who will win.

 The Eighth Dwarf, by Ross Thomas, has an especially unusual hero: Nicolae Polscaru, a three-and-a-half-foot-tall Romanian spy. He teams up with a former OSS officer to track down Kurt Oppenheimer, an expert assassin of high-ranking Nazis who won’t stop killing, even if it means disturbing world peace. The duo hopes to track down Oppenheimer and collect the bounty money—if they don’t kill each other first.

In James W. Hall’s first Thorn Mystery, Under Cover of Daylight, the protagonist is consumed by vengeance. On the day he was born, Thorn’s parents died when a drunk driver hit them on their way back from the hospital. Thorn survived, but nineteen years later he tracked down the killer and made him pay—with his life. Another twenty years later, Thorn is still scarred from what he did. When his foster mother is brutally murdered, Thorn vows to track down her killers, and confront the horror of his first act of vigilante justice.  

Be prepared to get blood on your dancing shoes. John Lutz’s riveting mystery Dancing with the Dead revolves around Mary Arlington, an amateur ballroom dancer in Ohio, who loves nothing more than the tango. The prospect of going to a national competition is a welcome distraction from a life burdened by an abusive boyfriend and an alcoholic mother. Then reports appear about ballroom dancers whose throats have been cut—women who have an uncanny resemblance to Mary. She begins to wonder if the only place she feels alive is also where her death awaits.

Today kicks off our two full weeks of non-stop action, as we pay homage to the thriller genre and its many courageous heroes. From the courtroom to the Cold War, February will be devoted to all of our favorite stories of conspiracy, killers, and corruption, both abroad and closer to home.

Be sure to check back on Open Road’s blog through the end of February to learn about more great thrillers. Happy reading!

Q: Which musician competed against himself at the 1985 Academy Awards®, with two nominated for Best Original Song? He ultimately won for "Say You, Say Me" from the film White Nights—but you might better remember his catchy #1 hit "All Night Long" from his 1982 debut solo album.

A: Lionel Richie

While “Say You, Say Me” scored the Oscar® in 1985, Lionel Ritchie also got the nod for his work on “Miss Celie’s Blues (Sister)” from the film The Color Purple, based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Alice Walker. Four years earlier, Richie got his first Academy Award nomination for “Endless Love,” the theme to the movie of the same title, adapted from Scott Spencer’s fiery teen romance.

 

 

Our Archival Photo of the Week features award-winning author, Virginia Hamilton outside of her first New York City apartment around 1960. Born in 1934, Hamilton grew up in Ohio. She moved to New York City in 1958, working as a museum receptionist, cost accountant, and nightclub singer, while she pursued her dream of being a published writer. She studied fiction writing at the New School for Social Research under Hiram Haydn, one of the founders of Atheneum Press. It was also in New York that Virginia met poet Arnold Adoff. They were married in 1960. Arnold worked as a teacher, and Virginia was able to devote her full attention to writing until her two children came along. The couple moved to a below-street-level single room on Jane Street and, Adoff says, “thought we were such hot stuff, living in the Village and taking our places in that wonderful and long line of writers banging their heads against the wall . . . but in style.”

In 1967, Hamilton published her first novel, Zeely, which was an instant success, winning a Nancy Bloch Award and was recognized as a Notable Children’s Book by the American Library Association. The next year, she published The House of Dies Drear (1968), a mystery that won the Edgar Allan Poe Award. By 1969, Hamilton, her husband and her two young children moved back to Yellow Springs, Ohio. Hamilton was able to devote more time to writing, and she published a book almost every year. Although Hamilton focused on writing books for young adults and children, she experimented in a wide variety of genres. Other notable books include The Planet of Junior Brown (1971), M.C. Higgins, the Great (1974), Cousins (1990), and Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982).  In 2002, Hamilton passed away after a long battle with breast cancer.

Q: Though he is considered one of the most influential filmmakers of the twentieth century, this director of fifty-three feature films failed to win any of the five Best Director Oscars® for which he was nominated. Who was he?

A: Alfred Hitchcock

Although Oscar eluded him, Alfred Hitchcock won the hearts of film critics, scholars, and avid movie fans. Hitchcock (2012), a film adaptation of Stephen Rebello's Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho explores the man, his masterpiece, and his indominatable wife, Alma.

The countdown is on! Just fourteen days until the 85th Annual Academy Awards® ceremony. This year also marks another major milestone in Oscar history as it is the inaugural year of the Open Road Oscar Trivia Challenge and Giveaway. Here's how it works.

Starting today, we will be sharing two Oscar-related trivia questions a day up through the ceremony on February 24. Watch our Twitter feed (@OpenRoadMedia) and Facebook page (facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia) at 11:00 AM and 6:00 PM daily (EST) for the questions. Anyone who retweets or comments on our Facebook post with the correct answer will be entered to win the grand prize: a digital copy of each of the 30 Oscar-related ebooks featured in the trivia questions.

Which ebooks are included in the prize? Well, we don't want to give away any answers by revealing the full list, but think classic books made into classic films and biographies of handsome leading men and stunning leading ladies.

Are you in? We hope so! Good luck!

THE FINE PRINT: Sorry, giveaway only eligible to US participants. But the pride that comes from getting the answers right is available to everyone. Official Rules and Regulations here: http://www.openroadmedia.com/OscarTriviaRules .

Perfect for those with the travel bug, these thrillers are all set overseas. A government conspiracy in China? A high-class forager in Angola? A James Bond–esque spy from Britain? The shady streets of nineteenth-century Barcelona? Forget the planes, trains, and hotels­: Sit back, relax, and do some literary globe-trotting from the comfort of home.

 Jon Land writes edge-of-your-seat thrillers impossible to put down. In The Eighth Trumpet, a killer proves he can penetrate the world’s finest security systems after he brutally murders three billionaires. It’s up to Jared Kimberlain, a retired special-forces agent, to come out of retirement and go undercover to protect the President before he becomes the next target.

Inspired by a true story, Thomas Gifford’s novel The Man from Lisbon brings to life a breathtaking international scam about a man with a knack for forging documents. In early twentieth-century Angola, a desperate Portuguese expat, Alves Reis, discovers an uncanny talent: He can fake diplomas, checks, even currency. In a scam that makes Madoff look like an amateur, this master swindler eventually brings a nation to its knees.

 Carl Hiaasen and Bill Montalbano set their riveting thriller A Death in China in Communist China. Tom Stratton, an art history professor, hasn’t seen his former mentor, David Wang, for years, until they run into each other on a guided tour of China. When Wang suddenly turns up dead, Stratton sets out to solve the crime, and gets quickly involved in a web of corruption and fatalities that reaches the highest rungs of the Chinese government.

Adam Quiller is the star of The Ninth Directive by British novelist Adam Hall. Quiller is a solitary, highly capable spy who works for British intelligence. In this installment, the #9 agent (Reliable Under Torture) is sent to Bangkok, where he must protect a very important diplomat from an assassination attempt on both of their lives.

The New York Times called Séance on a Wet Afternoon “a startlingly different crime novel.” In Mark McShane’s thriller, psychic Myra Savage tries to attract publicity for her sagging career by kidnapping a child, planning to later lead the police to the girl’s location through her special powers. But the plan goes terribly wrong, and Myra gives into her dream of speaking with the dead . . .

In the shady backstreets of late nineteenth-century Barcelona, where nothing is quite what it seems, a prosperous heir’s life is turned upside down when his working-class mistress mysteriously disappears. Roser Caminals-Heath was inspired by a popular local legend for her novel The Street of Three Beds, which explores the connections between Barcelona’s criminal underground and its echelons of power.

This week's Featured Military Excerpt is delivered in conjunction with our publishing partners at Warriors Publishing Group. Former Marine Sergeant, Gene Rackovitch, uses his experiences in Guam to tell the story of Marines and Renegades.  

It's December 1945 and two Japanese soldiers attempt to surrender to a patrol of Marines. The Marines assuming them to be armed, shoot and kill them. Another Japanese soldier witnesses the incident from the jungle. Over time, his zeal for retribution becomes ingrained in his psyche. 

In September of 1946 four Marines on a routine patrol seeking out renegade Japanese stealing from one of the out-lying villages, are ambushed and killed by the thieves. One of the participants is the zealous Japanese soldier who witnessed the earlier shooting incident. What happens next brings about a chain of events that leaves the reader wondering who the true renegades are, the Marines or the Japanese.

Marines and Renegades by Gene Rackovitch {Excerpt} by OpenRoadMedia