Spotlight & Giveaway: Miss Aldridge Regrets by Louise Hare

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Louise Hare to HJ!

Hi Louise and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, MISS ALDRIDGE REGRETS!

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

It’s 1936 and Lena Aldridge is a struggling jazz singer in London’s Soho. Her dreams of a West End career are fading when suddenly she’s offered the opportunity of a lifetime: a starring role on Broadway and a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary’s next sailing to New York. It seems a little too good to be true, but when there’s a murder at the sleazy club she sings at, Lena decides it’s a good time to get out of London. It’s only after the ship has set sail, too late to turn back, that she realizes the murderer has followed her onboard…
 

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

This was my role of a lifetime and, indeed, not every player would make it to their curtain call.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• If I book a restaurant in advance, I love to spend the days beforehand looking at the menu to see what I want to eat. When I was researching the Queen Mary, I found copies of the menus from 1936 and so I really enjoyed choosing what Lena and her dinner companions were going to eat!
• The songs in the novel were chosen for various reasons. They had to have been recorded before Lena stepped foot on the ship, but I mostly tried to fit the titles to the mood of each section of the novel.
• A very early working title was ‘Passage’ – partly because of course the ship is charting a passage across the Atlantic, but also because Lena herself is passing as white. As a title, it didn’t really stand out though.
• My next idea was to go back to the music. It took me a while to decide (months!) but I’ve always loved the song ‘Miss Otis Regrets’.

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

Lena falls for Will because he’s the only person she doesn’t have to put on an act for. She can be herself around him. I think for Will, he’s just been trapped in a routine onboard the ship and when he meets Lena she shakes him out of his comfort zone.

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

I loved writing all the scenes between Lena and her best friend Maggie. Even though they’re often dealing with dark topics, there’s a lot of humour. These take place in London before Lena boards the Queen Mary and this scene, where Maggie turns up at the nightclub where Lena works in order to confront her cheating husband, was one that made me chuckle as I was writing:

“I thought we had a deal?”
Maggie shrugged. “Why should he get to have all the fun?”
“Well, he certainly won’t be now.” I tried to ignore the death stare from Serena Mayhew who had clocked Maggie’s arrival and was now whispering in Tommy’s ear. “You’re not going to do anything daft, are you?”
“Don’t worry, Lee, I won’t do anything that gets you into trouble,” she drawled, lighting a cigarette.
“Too late for that.” I handed my empty water glass across the bar for Vic to refill. “He already sacked me, about half an hour ago.”
“Good.” She put a hand on my arm to lighten the blow. “You need to get out of here. You’re worth more; you know you are. I’ve got a lot on my plate at the moment, but once this is all over, we can spend more time together. Get back to how things used to be. Go on holiday or something. I hear the South of France is lovely this time of year.”
She was right; we hadn’t spent time together recently. She’d been grieving the babies she’d lost and the husband who didn’t seem to care. On days out that I’d arranged, she’d been listless, and so I’d stopped asking and waited for her to let me know when she was ready. Now Maggie seemed stronger, determined to wage war. Almost back to her old self. I’d have been pleased about it if her timing hadn’t been so terrible.
“Behave, won’t you,” I warned her.
“I know what I’m doing,” she said.
“Glad someone does,” Vic muttered, passing me the glass of water.
I took a gulp and looked away. Should I tell her about Charles Bacon? New York seemed an impossible dream. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to leave. This feud between Maggie and Tommy wasn’t going to get sorted out overnight, and America, well, it was just so far away . . .
“Now,” Maggie said to Vic, “are those drinks for my husband and his floozy?” She pulled the tray along the bar, snatching it away from one of the pretty young girls Tommy hired to do bar service.
“Erm . . . yes?” Vic looked worried, with good reason.
Here was the thing with Tommy. He was lazy and he was a terrible boss, but he was very particular about certain things. He wasn’t a lush by any means, but he liked a drink or two of an evening. Always an old-fashioned when he was at the Canary. And he always had the bitters served to him separately, the bottle laid out beside the glass so that he could add to his own particular taste.
“I’ll take that.” Maggie waved away the waitress and threw off her fur coat recklessly; I had to catch it before it hit the floor. “I’ll show him service with a smile.”
“Maggie, don’t you dare,” I warned.
“What do you think I’m going to do? Throw it in his face?” She belted out a laugh. “No, though he does deserve it. They both do.”
Vic almost leaped on top of the bar, slamming his hands down on the tray. “Do whatever you like once we are closed, Mrs. Scarsdale, but these people have come for the music. If they wanted to see drama, they’d be at the theater.”
Maggie stared him down for a moment, then threw her hands up in surrender and smiled sweetly. “Fine. Like I said, I’m not here to cause a scene. I’ll take another drink for my trouble, though.”

Readers should read this book….

Because it’s a glamorous murder mystery full of characters you’ll love and also love to hate.

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

My next novel is a sequel which follows Lena after she arrives in New York. It opens with a woman falling from the window of a Harlem brownstone – did she fall or was she pushed?
 
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: Berkley can offer one print  copy of MISS ALDRIDGE REGRETS by Louise Hare to a winner with a valid US shipping address.

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: I loved writing Lena because she’s such an interesting and flawed character. She makes a lot of mistakes and doesn’t always do the right thing. Do you prefer reading novels with complicated women or do you like your heroines to be more likeable?

 
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Book Info:

The glittering RMS Queen Mary. A nightclub singer on the run. An aristocratic family with secrets worth killing for.

London, 1936. Lena Aldridge wonders if life has passed her by. The dazzling theatre career she hoped for hasn’t worked out. Instead, she’s stuck singing in a sticky-floored basement club in Soho, and her married lover has just left her. But Lena has always had a complicated life, one shrouded in mystery as a mixed-race girl passing for white in a city unforgiving of her true racial heritage.

She’s feeling utterly hopeless until a stranger offers her the chance of a lifetime: a starring role on Broadway and a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary bound for New York. After a murder at the club, the timing couldn’t be better, and Lena jumps at the chance to escape England. But death follows her onboard when an obscenely wealthy family draws her into their fold just as one among them is killed in a chillingly familiar way. As Lena navigates the Abernathy’s increasingly bizarre family dynamic, she realizes that her greatest performance won’t be for an audience, but for her life.

With seductive glamor, simmering family drama, and dizzying twists, Louise Hare makes her beguiling US debut.