Moyer’s first novel captures the feel of San Francisco in 1915, with its genteel upper class and ambitious working class, as well as the excitement for the future brought about by the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. VERDICT: Both major and minor characters spring to life in this polished historical fantasy/mystery that should appeal to a wide variety of readers and could cross over to mainstream readers as well.
4 star rating from Romantic Times:
Turn-of-the-century San Francisco is as much a character as any other in this historical paranormal fantasy.
Publisher’s Weekly: Moyer’s detailed research regarding early-20th-century police work and the San Francisco Panama–Pacific Expo help make this romantic supernatural murder mystery sparkle
“Like fog creeping in from the Bay, this ghostly, romantic tale of San Francisco past made the outside world disappear and sent shivery tendrils into my soul. A gorgeous and haunting book.” –Rae Carson, author of The Girl of Fire and Thorns and The Crown of Embers
“Spirits seek vengeance while the young try to build a future in a fog-shrouded San Francisco shaken by more than the great earthquake. This bravura mix of ghost story and historical mystery will chill and grip its readers from first page to last.”—Chaz Brenchley , author of House of Doors and House of Bells
“Moyer creates a hauntingly real San Francisco, full of characters you can’t wait to get to know better. Except for the killer, of course. He’s just disturbing as heck. Delia’s Shadow is an engaging debut novel, one that cost me a good night’s sleep.”—Jim C. HInes, author of Libriomancer: Magic Ex Libris Book 1
DELIA’S SHADOW is harrowing and intense, vibrant both in light and shade. Moyer’s deft handling of her characters (all of them haunted in different ways, how clever!) had me rooting for them from the first page, and her depiction of turn-of-the-century San Francisco was pitch- perfect.—M. K. Hobson, author of Native Star, The Hidden Goddess and The Warlock’s Curse.
“Haunting and sweet, Delias’s Shadow pulls off the rare feat of combining a thrilling ghost story with a gentle romance. A lovely book.”—S. C. Butler, author of The Stoneways Trilogy: Riffen’s Choice, Queen Ferris, and The Magicians’ Daughter
I've always said that everything I write contains a love story of one kind or another. Love stories, to my mind, are always between equals. It's all about the power dynamic. Delia's Shadow is no exception.
Everyone wants a soul mate and a person to share their life with. The difference between fiction and real life is that if fictional characters are very lucky, and their author is a hopeless romantic at heart, they get to find that perfect person.
Delia's Shadow tells the love story of Gabe and Delia, and the story of Jack and Sadie, threads of hope woven around a ghost story and a gruesome murder mystery. This is also a story about friends who are always there for you, who pick you up and help you go on.
Police Sergeant Jack Fitzgerald and Sadie Larkin are planning their wedding when the book opens. The two of them are completely devoted to each other, hopelessly in love and planning on spending the rest of their life together. They accept each other's quirks and faults, share inside jokes. Jack and Sadie are unconditionally the best of friends, even when they fight.
And they do fight; loud, passionate arguments that respect each other's point of view and end with their relationship as solid as ever. The two of them ARE soul mates and all their friends know Jack and Sadie are perfect for each other.
Circumstances throw Jack's best friend, Police Lieutenant Gabe Ryan, together with Delia Martin, Sadie's best friend from childhood. Gabe is best man for the wedding, while Delia is maid of honor. That's all it takes to throw Sadie's matchmaker instincts into high gear.
To say that Delia and Gabe resist Sadie's efforts to push them closer is an understatement. Both of them have scars and secrets, wounds that haven't healed. And both of them are grownups, determined to make their own decisions.
Gabe doesn't know if he's ready to risk falling for someone. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the fire afterward killed his beloved wife Victoria and their unborn child. Gabe agonizes over every decision he made that day, and the unanswerable question that gives him nightmares: If he'd been home and not on duty, would he have been able to save them?
He's mourned Victoria for nine years, making no attempt to move on. But something about Delia is different. Gabe finds himself attracted to her, an attraction that grows deeper as he gets to know her. Jack encourages him to rejoin the living, and reassures Gabe that Victoria wouldn't want him to be alone.
Delia lost both her parents in the quake that took Gabe's wife and child. Sadie's mother took her in, and her best friend became close as a sister. She is just as nervous about growing close to Gabe, but for entirely different reasons. Delia sees ghosts, a secret only Sadie knows.
A few years after the quake, ghosts drove Delia away from San Francisco. Now a mysterious spirit Delia names Shadow is haunting her. Shadow leads her back to San Francisco to solve the mystery of why Shadow never made it home one night. That mystery is linked to a serial killer Gabe and Jack are desperately trying to find before he kills again.
Delia is certain that Gabe will doubt her sanity for not only believing in ghosts, but for thinking herself haunted. But as Shadow reveals details of her murder to Delia and the evidence that Shadow was murdered, Detective Gabe Ryan has no choice but to believe.
Gabe and Delia end up working together on the case, each equally determined to see justice done. Along the way they become good friends who trust and respect each other, ask the other's opinion, and enjoy each other's company. Before too long, Gabe starts making excuses to spend all the time he can with Delia.
Not long after that, stalked by the killer, surrounded by danger and both of them terrified of the future they both want being taken away, Delia and Gabe realize they love each other. Admitting that to themselves is hard. Saying it to each other is harder still.
People have said to me that I wrote a very grownup love story. Since that is exactly what I set out to do, hearing that made me very happy.
That is the story behind the love stories in Delia's Shadow. It is not, however, the end. Gabe and Delia, Jack and Sadie, will be back for two more books.
I don't think it's a spoiler to say they still love each other.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Jaime Lee Moyer lives in San Antonio with writer Marshall Payne, two cats, three guitars and a growing collection of books and music. Her first novel, DELIA’S SHADOW, will be published by TOR Books in September 2013. Her novels are represented by Tamar Rydzinski of the Laura Dail Literary Agency.
Jaime has sold short fiction to Lone Star Stories, Daily Science Fiction, and to the Triangulations: End of the Rainbow, and Triangulations: Last Contact anthologies. She was poetry editor for Ideomancer Speculative Fiction for five years and edited the 2010 Rhysling Award Anthology for the Science Fiction Poetry Association. A poet in her own right, she’s sold more than her share of poetry.
She writes a lot. She reads as much as she can."I used to say that each time I sent a story out on submission, or queried an agent, and even when my agent was shopping the first book around. It was a kind of sad, hopeful thing to say, the plea of the beginning writer hoping someone–an editor–will like your work enough to buy it.
Writer’s spend a lot of time hoping someone will love the stories they tell. And when (oh joy of joys) an editor does buy your work, you shift the hope, the worry, the dreams, over to being noticed and to being read.
Four months ago my first book hit the shelves. Being noticed and being read is at the very very top of my things to worry about list. I dream about failure and the consequences of blowing my chance. I dream about never getting another contract, never being allowed to publish another book. I wander through crowds of people in these dreams, in strange buildings and unknown cities, trying to find someone I know–someone who will notice I’m there.
Stress dreams, each and every one. I’m not a fan.
Want to know what makes the dreams worse? Reading all the end of the year, best of 2013 lists.
Let me state right up front, I never expected Delia’s Shadow to make any best of the year lists. Delia got starred reviews from Library Journal, Romantic Times, a wonderful review from PW, and Kirkus didn’t rip me a new one, but the book straddles too many genres in a lot of people’s minds.
Which is a whole other blog post (for another day) about marketing and preconceived notions.
A couple of bloggers put Delia on their YB lists, which seriously thrilled me, and is a lot more than I expected. I can’t thank them enough for that.
But, it’s a first novel, a debut. Then there’s the romance (another blog post) and the violence, and all those women characters, who apparently aren’t the “right kind” of women,(two more blog posts) and well, you get the idea.
But as I said, I never expected to make any lists. I knew that going in.
What kills me is that so many women who should be on these lists? They aren’t there.
As in, taken strictly by appearances in year’s best lists–women didn’t publish much of anything last year.
Nada. Zero, zip. Nothing.
Which, as you know Roberta, is total bullshit. Women published some amazing novels last year.
Yet I’ve read list after list where five out of five best of the year books were written by men, or eight out of ten, or on a good list, seven out of ten were written by men. Thousands of books published by women every year, and list makers can’t find any for a YB list?
After the first dozen or so lists like that, I’ll be honest, I stopped looking at book titles. I was too busy counting male vs female authors, or googling authors with initials trying to figure out where they fit. Some of them turned out to be women, making the balance more positive. Just as often they turned out to be men, maintaining the status quo.
And then I stopped looking at YB lists completely. It was pissing me off and depressing the hell out of me, both at the same time.
The deck is so very stacked. I mean, I knew that going in. But until you really start looking and counting, I don’t think it really sinks in.
Other than the obvious answer, deeply embedded, institutional sexism, why are these lists so heavily biased toward men? One answer I can think of is that the people putting these lists together only read books written by men. If you never crack the cover of a book authored by a woman, it’s not going to make your YB list.
But is it really that simple and self-selecting? I don’t know. I’d like to know. I’d like to change it.
It’s one of those mysteries of the universe, like why does buzz appear to generate spontaneously around male authors, even debut authors, but not women? Or why do men writing about sexism in any form get praised to the stars, while women writing about the same subjects are greeted with the sound of crickets?
Or, you know, death threats.
Yeah, I know. Hard questions. Answers and turning the tide are harder.
So…where do we start?Belief
More than a hundred years before Photoshop, spirit photography made it’s first appearance.
The Victorians weren’t above taking advantage of people’s naivety and grief. A whole industry grew up around the 19th century and early 20th century spiritualism movement. People wanted proof that the spirits of their loved ones lingered, watching over them. Spirit photographers gave them that proof.
These photographers were frauds, charlatans who knew the tricks of double exposure and layering images from multiple negatives. That didn’t matter to the people who came to have their photos taken. Those people believed the cloudy apparition hovering behind them was the ghost of someone they’d lost.
Some photographers were true artists, rendering images that were beautiful even if they were lies. Others are obvious fakes to the modern eye, but people today weren’t the target audience. We are all too grounded in the real world, too educated in the ways of technology and science to believe.
The point is that people living in the 1800s and early 1900s did believe in ghosts, and spirits lingering long after death. Spirituals and mediums were seen as a means to communicate with the dead, special people with special gifts, and seances were very common.
And if that strong belief in ghosts and haunts ever began to waiver, the evidence–their cherished photographs–was right before their eyes.
1920s
1920s
GIVEAWAY TIMEEEE!
Jaime has generously offered a signed copy of Delia's Shadow to one lucky winner. This giveaway is US only, my dears, apologies to my international readers.
US peeps, enter the Rafflecopter and keep your fingers crossed.
Author: Jaime Lee Moyer
Series: Delia Martin, #1Released: September 17th 2013
Publisher: Tor
Hardcover, 336 pages
Buy: The Book Depository