Alexandra MacKenzie
Alexandra MacKenzie grew up in a small town in Washington state, where she loved to tell stories to entertain her friends, and where she often daydreamed her way to unusual worlds of fantasy, history, and mystery. In college she studied art history and natural science illustration. In her fiction, she uses her strong visual sense of the world to bring her characters and settings to life. Alex is the author of the fantasy novel Immortal Quest: The Trouble with Mages (Edge SF 2010) and the illustrator of In My Nature: A Birder’s Year at the Montlake Fill (Constancy Press 2009). She is owned by two dachshunds and is also an avid birder who spends as much time as possible out in nature. Visit Alexandra at her bloghttp://mizmak.blogspot.com
WHY I WROTE SEATTLE SLEUTH
Why 1921? Why Seattle?
One day as a teenager rooting curiously through a family cupboard, I found a cracked gas mask, yellowed army field manual, and a battered tin box containing three buttons from a German uniform. They were my grandfather’s, who fought in World War I. Fascinated, I read everything I could about that “war to end all wars”, the first time I found history come alive for me. I haven’t stopped exploring olden times since.
Seattle in the 1920s was a rollicking time – labor unrest, rum runners, police corruption, a flourishing red-light district – what’s a writer not to love? You can still get a sense of what the city looked like today thanks to historic Pioneer Square, the Pike Place Public Market, the mansions and parks on Capitol Hill. I wanted to capture a time and place that readers today could connect to through my characters, whose struggles come from war and disaster, and whose triumphs come through friendship and strong hearts.
Phil Shaw, world-weary veteran of the war, and Ray Taylor, fiery-tempered crime reporter, work to solve a mystery where labor vs. big business ended in murder…or did it? They may be in over their heads in a world of speakeasies, tough longshoremen, and corrupt police as they struggle to find the truth.
Alexandra’s book:
1921. A war lies behind him … a new battle lies ahead. Philip Shaw is a Great War veteran and widower struggling to put his life back together. He grasps at a chance to make a difference by investigating the death of a newspaper editor – did the man die in an accidental fire, or was it murder? Shaw joins forces with fiery crime reporter Ray Taylor to dig into police corruption, a rivalry between a powerful shipbuilder and a sly politician, and the seedy world of Seattle’s wide-open red-light district. Will they find the answers in the speakeasies, among the rum-runners on the waterfront, or at the mansions of the rich? Before they can solve the mystery, level-headed Phil Shaw and hot-tempered Ray Taylor will have to learn to work together – without killing each other first!
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