“The Secret of Dunhaven Castle” by Nellie Steele

Dr. Catherine (Cate) Kensie teaches history at Aberdeen College, a small liberal arts college in the American Midwest. She loves teaching and her subject, but her department is tiny and declining. She’s been promised a tenure-track position, but the promise is getting old, and she knows it’s not worth much if anything. Her department chair has dangled the promise to keep her accepting the times and courses no other professors want. She has little extracurricular life, except for much-loved dog, Riley. And she has no family, being an only child of parents who died in an automobile accident.

At home, she finds a telephone message. The voice refers to a letter she’s never received. Someone named William Smythe, a London attorney, is arriving that evening. He refers to the letter he’d sent, and says he has a fast turnaround and must return to Britain early the next day. When Smythe arrives, to obtain a DNA sample, she learns that she may be the only heir to a title and a castle in Scotland. Cate is stunned; she has no knowledge of family in Scotland or anywhere else. 

Two weeks later, she hears the results of the DNA test. She’s the heir, and she is now a countess. With her job at a dead-end, she decides she’s going to Scotland. She learns of a few odd requirements; the now-deceased previous countess is requiring she wear a watch on a chain around her neck at all times. But that seems a relatively minor obligation. And it’s off to Britain, first to London and then to Scotland.

Nellie Steele

And Dunhaven is indeed a castle, replete with battlements and legends and stories. Cate decides to use the castle’s large library and the village library and archives to figure out her connection to the MacKensie family, perhaps to write a book about the family history. And in the meantime, there are those strange people who keep showing up in period dress, the people who seem as real as Cate herself.

The Secret of Dunhaven Castle by Nellie Steele is the story of Cate Kensie discovering who her family is and was and the secret that’s harbored by the castle. It’s a mystery with a dash of science fiction and even a hint of romance (one suspects Cate’s estate manager might become something more than an employee). It’s written almost like the narrative in a journal, with a precise accounting of what happens each day over a several-week period. 

Nellie Steele is the pen name for the Melissa Sovak, who lives with her family in Pittsburgh and teaches statistics at a local university. She’s also written The Murder at Dunhaven Castle, the second in the Cate Kensie series, and two novels on the Shadow Slayer Series, Shadows of the Past and Stolen Portrait, Stolen Soul. 

If you like a story of a castle in Scotland, an unexpected American heiress, and odd things happening (and I do), The Secret of Dunhaven Castle is a great and almost-addictive read. 

London, Christmas, and Romance

Pettett & Mayfield is a fictitious London department store. In its heyday, it competed with Harrod’s, Selfridges, and similar stores. But it’s become a bit dowdy, and any suggestions for improvement meet the fierce opposition of aging Mrs. Pettett, who runs the store and its employees with an iron fist.

British author Autumn Macarthur uses Pettett & Mayfield as the backdrop for five Christmas romance stories, grouped as the “In Store” series. The first is The Wedding List, reviewed last September. The next two in the series are Believe in Me and Least Expected. 

In Believe in Me, Cara Talbott is the deputy assistant manager at Pettett & Mayfield, which means she “got landed with the management jobs no one else wants and the blame when things went wrong.” And one job she clearly doesn’t want is Mrs. Pettett’s latest brainchild – American television star Nick Callaghan is going to be the store’s celebrity Santa. Cara will be responsible for shepherding him in his duties, and she’s determined to have as little to do with him as possible, no matter how good-looking he is. 

Nick comes up with an idea, the 12 dates of Christmas, to help promote the store and what it sells. He will date a store employee for 12 romantic dates, jinning up free publicity, and tied to each date will be a store window depicting the date. Mrs. Pettett decides that she loves the idea, and Cara gets to be the store employee. For herself, Cara is mortified. Not only does she have to go on 12 dates with a shallow Hollywood star, she has to bury the growing attraction she feels for him. He first became famous as a teen movie star in a Christmas movie that had her then-teenaged heart fluttering. She even had a poster of him on her bedroom wall.

The dates begin, and the whole publicity program goes off in directions no one anticipates. Cara knows she’s falling for Nick, and Nick discovers a growing attraction for Cara. It’s a fun story, full of romantic mishaps, misunderstandings, and upsets.

In Least Expected, Maggie Golding is the 50-something window dresser, a friend of Nick Callaghan’s whom he gets to do the Pettett & Mayfield store windows for Christmas. Maggie is actually a set designer who does retail displays when business is slow. Each of her store windows tell a story, and they become a huge draw for Christmas shoppers. 

Maggie is a bit unconventional. It might be her multi-colored dyed hair, matched only by the multi-colored clothes she wears. The operative description would be barely restrained flamboyance. The last person in the world she thinks she could be attracted to is the buttoned-down Edgar Pettett, 50-something son of the woman who runs the store. His mother usually blows up any romantic interests he has in women.

Autumn Macarthur

But attracted she is. And proper Englishman Edgar is equally attracted. He asks Maggie out, she accepts, but the specter of his mother is hanging over their budding relationship. And they both know it will have to be faced and confronted. Least Expected is unusual for a romance novel in that the protagonists are not young and beautiful but older, more established, and certainly more mature. But love and romance can strike at any age.

Macarthur has written numerous books in the Christian inspirational romance genre and inspirational non-fiction. Her novels include The Macleans series, the Together for Christmas, series, the Billionaire Protectors series, the Sweetapple Falls series, the London Loves series, the Come to the Lake series, and the Huckleberry Lake series. She lives in London.

Both stories are fast-paced and fast-reading stories, with the added benefit of the sights and sounds of London at Christmastime. 

Related:

The Wedding List by Autumn Macarthur.

Top photo: Regent Street in London at Christmas by Luke Stackpoole via Unsplash. Used with permission. 

The Poet at Work

I was working in communications for a Fortune 500 company. A large portion of the day-to-day work was meetings. We had a team-based culture, and to our work, our teams had to meet. 

The teams, and the meetings, proliferated. We had departmental meetings. We had cross-functional meetings. We had committee and subcommittee meetings. We had telephone meetings, video meetings, and online chat session meetings. We had one-on-one meetings. We had staff meetings. We had briefing sessions, strategy discussions, and crisis planning meetings. We often had meetings to plan meeting agendas.

I often wondered if the curse placed upon Adam and his work for eating of the Tree of Knowledge possibly included meetings.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Poetry and Healing: “Waiting for Neruda’s Memoirs” by Laura Boggess

Amy Pinkleberry fears she’s losing her mind. She hears voices, disparaging voices, telling her she can’t make it on her own, that the money her ex-husband gave her will run out, that she can’t land a job. She flees what looks like a promising job interview with a bank manager because the voices are eroding any shred of self-confidence she might have. Her ex-husband may be right; she may very well be crazy.

She’s been waiting for two weeks for the Amazon delivery of Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems by Maureen Doallas. In Amy’s mind, the book has become a lifeline to sanity, because poetry is the only thing that stops the voices. Yes, it may be obsessive-compulsive disorder. Yes, it may be auditory hallucinations, as the doctor suggests. But it was only Emily Dickinson who could stop the voices last year; this year, it’s Maureen Doallas. When she finally checks her order (what happened to two-day delivery?), Amazon shows it as delivered – to a house down the street. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

“A Private in Gray” by Thomas Benton Reed

Thomas Benton Reed was a 24-year-old farmer living in “Halfway,” an area halfway between the towns of Natchitoches and Monroe in Louisiana. He had married in 1859, and he and his wife had a young son. His was not a slaveowning family. In 1862, he enlisted in the Louisiana company his two older brothers had joined the year before. And then he was sent with other enlistees to the Army of Northern Virginia.

Reed told his tale of the Civil War in A Private in Gray: Life in the Army of Northern Virginia from 1862 to 1865, first published in 1905. These types of memoirs by officers and soldiers alike were quite popular at the time; veterans and other participants were aging and wanting to preserve their memories and records. In reading Reed’s account, it soon becomes clear that he kept a journal; after a few introductory chapters, the account follows a straight chronology.

Accounts of battles are expected, and Reed includes them. But he also describes daily life in the Confederate army, and like similar memoirs from almost all wars, a great deal of discussion is devoted to boredom, finding enough food to eat, the weather (and especially the rain), and even the pranks soldiers played on each other.

Thomas Benton Reed

And disease. Before he gets involved in any battle, Reed comes down with the measles and spends several days recovering in the camp hospital. He’s also subject to various infections, including one on his head that he has to browbeat the doctor to lance. Later, after a minor wound in his leg during a battle, he almost comes to blows with the doctor over what Reed saw as an unnecessary amputation. He keeps his leg and recovers. 

As a soldier, Reed goes where his superiors tell him to go.  He’s not prone to name the battles he’s involved; you need to follow the account closely to identify them. For example, you don’t realize that his unit is part of the invasion of Pennsylvania that culminates in the Battle of Gettysburg, until Reed mentions the “Dutch woman” he meets and ask for food from. He was involved in the battle but didn’t participate in some of its more famous scenes. It’s one reason he lived to tell the tale. 

The most poignant parts of the book are when he describes the deaths of his two older brothers. For one, he risks his own life to find his body and bury him, and then he faces the onerous chore of having to write and tell his parents. The very last part of the book describes his return home, his life after the war, the deaths of his first two wives, and his move to Arkansas.

In turn, A Private in Gray is somber, comical, thoughtful, and occasionally profound; Thomas Benton Reed comes to understand that he’s a poor man fighting a rich man’s war. But he accepts his place and his lot, and he succeeds in making sure he survives.

Living to the law

After Romans 7:1-6

Living to the law

is abiding in death,

for the way of the law

is the way of death,

the path to oblivion.

The law brings knowledge,

like the bite of the apple, and

it brings passions, and

passions take control and

command us to death.

Released from the law,

our chains broken and

cast aside, we walk in

a new way, the new way

of that Holy Wind.

Who knew?

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads

If there is one endlessly repeated mantra about COVID-19, it’s “Follow the science.” Initially, the virus was downplayed – by the World Health Organization, by the Centers for Disease Control, and others. Dr. Anthony Fauci told us January and February that it was no big deal and wouldn’t have a big impact in the U.S. Things got more serious, more was learned, things started blowing apart in Europe, and it hit home. It was like the plague, but it wasn’t. You couldn’t compare it to the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1919, unless you needed to. 

And then came the Black Lives Matter protests, and suddenly all the advice, all the restrictions, and all the warnings went right out the window, replaced by a deafening silence or, in some cases, tacit approval to protest. Joel Zinburg at CityJournal looks at some of these developments, and asks, “Follow the Science – Where?” His answer: we might have been told to follow the science, but we were really being told to follow the policymakers and the politics.

The Society for Classical Poets is a relatively new group that promotes traditional poetry, and especially poetry that has rhyme and meter. It held an online symposium recently and collected some of the readings in one spot. You can watch and listen here. 

A writer not terribly familiar in America is Michel Houllebecq, a novelist who’s a household name in France. He’s written a series of provocative novels, daring to take on what literary elites generally avoid. In all of his works, one theme is that without a solid grounding in religion, Western civilization is doomed. And yet his books are widely read, by both the French public and the literary crowd. Nicholas Merevel at Front Porch Republic takes a good, hard look at Houllebecq and his novels to see what all of this means. 

More Good Reads

Culture

How a 1990s book predicted 2020 – Ed West at UnHerd. 

The Chimera of Cancel Culture – Clint Archer at The Cripplegate.

The Unprecedented Bravery of Olivia de Havilland – Todd Purdum at The Atlantic.

Free Speech Under Siege – Michael Mandelbaum at American Interest.

China is what Orwell feared – Ross Anderson at The Atlantic.

Poetry

The Violin Soldier – Paul Gallagher at The Chained Muse.

The Air in Tasmania – David Mason at Literary Matters.

“Thermidor: An Ode to Reaction” – Adam Sedia at The Imaginative Conservative.

When searching for your truth (5 poems) – Kerry O’Connor at Skylover. 

Faith

Don't just learn from church history - look to the global church too – Tales of Being All There.

Gratitude as a Virtue – Jessica Hooten Wilson at Church Life Journal.

Writing and Literature

The Restless Bones of Dante Alighieri – Kelly Scott Franklin at Law & Liberty.

Is This the End of Writing in Cafes? – Emily Temple at Literary Hub.

In Search of Shakespeare’s Mind – Daniel Blank at Los Angeles Review of Books. Related: In Search of Shakespeare’s London at Spitalfields Life.

The Power of flawed Lists: How The Bookman invented in the bestseller – Elizabeth Della Zazzera at Lapham’s Quarterly.

American Stuff

American Disaster: In the Path of a Dirty Storm – Matthew Van Meter at Literary Hub.

1619: The Beginning of Self-Government in Virginia – Gary Porter at The Imaginative Conservative.

The Buildings That Made India

Painting: A Man Reading a Paper, oil on canvas by Adriaen Van Ostade (1610-1685).