Same Sweet Girls
"Same Sweet Girls" was the self-given name of a group of six southern college women - and they all enjoy the sarcasm the name holds. None truly sweet, and now nearing their 50s, none the same, they cling to the friendships that have helped each of them through their lives. Chapters that are voiced by three of the six women take the reader through the loves and losses, childhood and child problems, ego and self-esteem issues, and the illnesses of mind and body that affect them all.
In much the same vein as the "Ya Yas" and the "Sweet Potato Queens," this novel is hilarious and heartbreaking in the same breath, writing of the enduring and sustaining power of friendships. Writes author Cassandra King to her character Lanier: "You've got to help the rest of us outÖI got this for you to put your life lessons in. Think of all the important lessons you've learned over the years from your screw-ups and record them for posterity." The reply: "Kiss my fannyÖI'm not going to do it! It's not only that I'm a lousy writer, but I never learn from my mistakes. No matter how many times I mess up!"
A state's first lady, a gourd artist, a nurse, a bubbly socialite, an alumni director and a secretive seductress join to offer a light hearted read that occasionally touches on subjects that can easily shoot off into a serious discussion, if followed. Set on a lake, in a mountain cabin and at a state mansion, "Same Sweet Girls" opens the doors of every habitat to the powers of friendships and the tie that it offers to all of us.
Cassandra King is the author of two other novels, "The Sunday Wife" and "Making Waves" and is a resident of the low country of South Carolina. She belongs to a Same Sweet Girls group of her own.
The Devil's Gentleman
True crime historian Harold Schechter takes us back to New York City at the turn of the 20th century, the Gilded Age of New York, as he meticulously covers the true story of a sensational murder and attempted murder that involved one of the well-known and elite families of the era.
Harry Cornish, the hardy athletic director of the exclusive downtown Knickerbocker Club, nearly perished from ingesting a small amount of a stomach remedy tainted with deadly poison, anonymously sent to him through the mail. It is his cousin, given a much larger dose, who dies the agonizing death the poison inflicts. Though evidence points to Roland Molineaux, the son of a wealthy and respected Civil War hero, his high society standing deters the police from making a committed arrest. It is the newspapers and their reporters who follow the leads and gather the evidence that eventually brings his indictment. That a man who rivaled Roland Molineaux for his now-wife's attention died under similar circumstances comes to light and the handwriting samples associated with the mailed poison point to him as well.
The trial is a media and public happening and the lurid details of the lives of both Roland and his wife, the beautiful and high-spirited opera singer Blanche Chesebrough, become fodder for a scandal that refuses to settle down. Through the lamp-lit halls of the most exclusive city homes to the faintly lit ones of its brothels, the testosterone laced chambers of the exclusive athletic clubs to the dingy drug hovels, New York's high society is rocked off its foundation by the explosive murder case that drags its ugly head through Manhattan's courts.
In its telling Schechter introduces us to such characters as Julian Hawthorne, son of famed author Nathaniel, whose talent, though not reflective of his father's, occasionally points an accusing finger in the right direction. What the eventual verdict dictates is shocking.
Hailed by "The Boston Book Review" as, "America's principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers," Schechter is a fiction writer known for his book "The Serial Killer Files." He is a professor of American literature and culture at Queens College and City University of New York.