Spotlight & Giveaway: A Widow’s Guide to Scandal by Hallie Alexander

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Hallie Alexander to HJ!

Hi Hallie and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, A Widow’s Guide to Scandal!

 
Hello, HJ readers! I’m so excited to be here today.
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

A Widow’s Guide to Scandal is a big-feels with soft edges, forced-proximity, friends-to-lovers story about a widow afraid to ask for help so her friends don’t know how bad her situation is, and a carpenter who offers too much help to hide from his own problems. They strike a deal hoping for balance, but that’s about when he falls off her roof and breaks his ankle. Now, he can’t leave and she can’t let him know she’s working for his enemy!
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

His heart was leaping from his chest, trying to make its way to her, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop it.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• The Golden Girls were the inspiration for Henrietta’s loud, brash book club friends.
• Mouse (an older woman operative) was never supposed to be in this book but she showed up and I couldn’t silence her.
• One-Hand An’s character came about because I misheard a historical name in a podcast on bad-ass women of the past. To be fair, those dudes mangle foreign names/words all the time! But more importantly, a woman like her *could* have existed based on my research.
• All this is to say, Scandal is very feminist, but the good guys are very cool with it.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

Marcus and Henrietta grew up together. She was shy, smart, and well-behaved, and he was, well, not. At fifteen, she dared herself to kiss him. He was so stunned by her, he didn’t react. They both lived with this regrettable truth until they meet again in this book and get a second chance to right that wrong.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

I laughed any time I put Marcus, Henrietta, and the doctor in the same room. Those are three big personalities, each at the peak of their own social status, though the three rarely overlap. They’re like a Venn diagram of competence.

“I say, let’s bleed you first to expel the bee toxin.” The doctor’s soothing voice came with a slight Scottish burr. Probably educated in Edinburgh. Come here to fix all the colonial maladies, starting with bee stings and ending with rebellion.
“Is that necessary?” Henrietta asked as if she’d missed the gentleman’s title. Marcus found Henrietta inspecting what the doctor laid out from his case, vials and instruments alike.
Dr. Nealy pushed his round spectacles up his sloping nose and eyed her suspiciously. “If it were not necessary, I would not have suggested it. As it is, I haven’t suggested marmalade on toast, have I?” He rolled up Marcus’s sleeve.
“I was stung on the other hand,” Marcus told him. To Henrietta, he said, “I am not partial to marmalade.”
Henrietta crossed to stand beside Marcus. “How can you not like marmalade?”
“Toxin from the bee offsets your humors, which is a whole-body phenomenon. As the blood from your hand has already moved through your heart and back again by now, it makes no difference which arm I bleed. This arm is convenient for me.” Dr. Nealy paused and looked to Henrietta. “Would you please move?”
“Marmalade is not sweet enough.” Marcus was losing his patience and braced himself to rise from the settee before any bleeding could begin. “As you have paid little mind to my ankle, I’ll remind you it is broken.”
The doctor pressed him back into the seat.
“Not you, me.” Henrietta gasped. “Honey!” She came around the settee like a vulture circling its supper. “My mother used to put it on bee stings. That’s sweet enough.”
Dr. Nealy made an incision on Marcus’s arm. Marcus hissed. The doctor set a metal bowl beneath his arm to catch the purged blood. “If you broke your ankle, I’ll be the one to make that determination. Honey is the salve of witches.”
Marcus’s patience dripped away with his blood. Logic, no matter how antiquated, was sure to work with this dupe. “I’ve seen Henrietta’s mother fall into the irrigation pond. If it weren’t for my expedience, she would have drowned. Ergo, she’s not a witch.”
Too late, he remembered he’d used her familiar name without permission. Did he need it? He’d known her since she was five or ten. Who could remember?
Henrietta laughed. “You remember that?”
Dr. Nealy harrumphed. “Mrs. Caldwell, if you don’t mind, I’m trying to assess your husband.”
“Oh, he’s not my husband. Mr. Caldwell is dead.” Pink blossomed on Henrietta’s cheeks. “This is Mr. Marcus Hardwicke, a friend. That is, you see—”
There was no coming back from the indecent corner Henrietta was talking herself into. A widow alone with a man only meant one thing.
“—he was here to—my friends were here—”

Readers should read this book….

Because underneath all that sexy fun trouble Henrietta and Marcus get into, it’s really a book about friendship. Even when times looked bleak, they both had their friends to back them up and make them laugh.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I’m currently working on Book 2. I hate to say more because I’ve rewritten large swaths of it and who knows what it will look like by the time it’s published!

Coming this September, I have a novella in LOVE ALL YEAR, a holiday anthology for #OwnVoices celebrations. Mine is a Gilded Age Purim (Jewish) romance between a prizefighter and social pariah.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: A copy of A Widow’s Guide to Scandal (Kindle only).

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: What other American Revolution romances have you enjoyed?

 
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Book Info:

The first installment in debut author Hallie Alexander’s steamy Sons of Neptune Series introduces readers to a band of heroic rebels at the brink of the American Revolution.

Henrietta Smith was fifteen when she stole a kiss from Marcus Hardwicke. Over a decade later, she’s still waiting to be kissed back…

Henrietta learned the hard way that when you get what you pay for you might end up with a British soldier quartering in your home threatening your friends, an enormous dog tracking mud through your house and stealing the chickens, and Marcus Hardwicke disrupting your uncomplicated life by trying to improve it. And to think she just wanted her roof fixed.

Marcus, wickedly handsome carpenter and rebel rogue, fell off Henrietta’s leaking roof. He can’t leave until his broken ankle heals, giving him plenty of time to consider his past mistakes, including Henrietta’s indelible kiss from a lifetime ago. But Henrietta could lose more than her home if she doesn’t encrypt British secrets, and the latest puts Marcus in the crosshairs.
Book Links: Amazon |
 
 

Meet the Author:

Hallie Alexander’s debut historical romance, A Widow’s Guide to Scandal, was published in 2020 by Soul Mate Publishing. It was a finalist in the 2019 Cleveland Rocks Romance Contest. She writes steamy, feminist historical romances that take place in America with heroines who become the heroes of their own story as their swoon-worthy partners work to deserve their love. She is a Northerner living in the South with her husband, three children, and Doodles of Mayhem™, Bruno and Willow.
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