Happy Thursday and welcome to my stop on the blog tour for COMEUPPANCE SERVED COLD! I’m so excited because today I get to interview with Marion Deeds with you! This book is truly amazing and I’m so excited to for you to find out more about it, PLUS you can enter to win a print copy!
Comeuppance Served Cold by Marion Deeds Published on March 22, 2022 by Tordotcom
Genres: Adult, Historical Fantasy, Mystery, Thriller
Pages: 192
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Author Links: Website, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads
Seattle, 1929—a bitterly divided city overflowing with wealth, violence, and magic.
A respected magus and city leader intent on criminalizing Seattle’s most vulnerable magickers hires a young woman as a lady’s companion to curb his rebellious daughter’s outrageous behavior.
The widowed owner of a speakeasy encounters an opportunity to make her husband’s murderer pay while she tries to keep her shapeshifter brother safe.
A notorious thief slips into the city to complete a delicate and dangerous job that will leave chaos in its wake.
One thing is for certain—comeuppance, eventually, waits for everyone.
What would you do if you spent the day with Dolly, Violet, Gabe, Phillipe, and Fiona? Where would you go to eat, hang out, relax, etc.?
We’d have to start with drinks at Violet Hat’s Shop, the speakeasy, although that’s not much of a day off for Violet! When it got a bit later, we’d hit the Jackson Street music clubs. We might get lucky and be when Ray Charles was playing!
To just kick back, I’d like to visit the 1929 Seattle waterfront, although it would be more working-class and less touristy than it is now, and catch a ferry out to the San Juan Islands for the day.
If Dolly, Violet, Gabe, Phillipe, and Fiona were to hang out with other fictional characters, who would they be and why?
Gabe and Philippe could have some fun and get into some interesting trouble if they went to Chicago and visited Jim Butcher’s wizard-detective Harry Dresden, especially in the early books when Harry was mostly detecting.
Fiona could glide right into The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett (Hammett again!) as if she belonged there. She might also catch a steamer to Australia and help Phryne Fisher, Kerry Greenwood’s 1920’s detective creation, solve mysteries.
I did wonder what it would be like if Dolly and Violet both ended up in M.A. Carrick’s second-world fantasy city Nedežra, from The Mask and Mirror, and met their wily con artist character Ren. I think Dolly would be a rival of Ren’s, but that could be fun. Violet would just open a business. That city is filled with magic; she could open a successful herbalist’s shop, and thrive.
If you buried a time capsule with three items inside, what three items would you choose and why?
Interesting question! I’m going to assume some parameters; this is my personal time capsule, and the “open date” is not hundreds of years in the future. (Although you never know, “best laid plans” and all that.) Let’s say 30-50 years.
So… an insulated travel mug with the logo of one of my two local coffee places. I want to show the future how important coffee houses were, and I don’t want to do the big obvious one (and future historians will have lots of paraphernalia from that company anyway). Before the pandemic I often wrote in these places, so either one would be a nice touchstone.
Second, a book. I think it would have to be Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and The Beautiful. I yammer on about that book a lot, but it’s because I think it’s great and everyone should read it. Why a book and not an e-reader? I think for long periods of time, a properly stored book holds up better, and can still be interpreted/translated. Not sure that’s going to be true for your e-reader in fifty years.
Third… that would be a copy of the studio photo I have of my mother and grandmother. Oh! And a face mask, probably one of the prettier ones, to remind us. Sorry, that’s four things.
What was your favorite bit of research you ended up not using?
Comeuppance Served Cold talks a lot about bootlegging, and I did some research about it in the Seattle area. It was cool, but it wasn’t really needed for the book. I did manage to include a reference to the wife of a premiere bootlegger, who used her radio show where she read children’s stories as a way to broadcast code to smugglers during foggy nights, because that was too good not to mention. It’s only one line, though.
What is your favorite quote, scene, or moment from Comeuppance Served Cold?
The opening of Chapter One was fun because I was presenting my female main character as an object of male gaze in a less-than-flattering way, and that was deliberate. There’s a later scene I love a lot, where Fiona slips away to meet the man she loves, and Dolly follows and, um, punctures their romantic moment. That was fun and showed a different facet of Dolly.
Bracketing that scene, there are two conversations between Fiona and Dolly in the car. Dolly is not a woman with a lot of women friends; her interactions are mostly transactional, and those two scenes gave her an opportunity to glimpse what a genuine friendship could be like.
About Marion Deeds
Marion Deeds was born in Santa Barbara, California and moved to northern California when she was five. She loves the redwoods, the ocean, dogs and crows.
She’s fascinated by the unexplained, and curious about power: who has it, who gets it, what is the best way to wield it. These questions inform her stories.
Deeds has published Aluminum Leaves and Copper Road from Falstaff Books, with short works in Podcastle and several anthologies. She reviews fiction and writes a column for the review site Fantasy Literature.
enter here for a chance to win a copy of Comeuppance Served Cold by Marion Deeds!
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What do you think about Comeuppance Served Cold? Have you added it to your tbr yet? Let me know in the comments and have a splendiferous day!
This sounds really good. Just added it to my TBR.