All Aboard!
‘The Seven Swans: Machineries of Progress’ by Mel Anastasiou is your ticket to adventure!
When the wheels of romantic progression grind to a halt, the Seven Swans kick-starts things by flinging Spencer Stevens back to the early days of the steam railway. There, he’ll solve a mystery involving stolen Saxon gold, perilous deeds, and George Stephenson’s Rocket.
It’s full steam ahead, with this excerpt from Issue 19, Summer 2018!
The Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries in Time, Volume 6
The Machineries of Progress
by Mel Anastasiou
Imagine that it’s a June morning in Hertfordshire. The trees wave greenly overhead, the canal runs close by the derelict pub you’re renovating, and you have fallen headlong into love with a woman whom you’ve not seen since you and she were twenty. And then imagine that you are a Canadian expat over sixty. And picture this: despite everything they tell you when you’re young, age does not cool your hot lover’s blood in the slightest. As well, Holly Odell, née Wilkerson, is married and lives on the far side of the Pond.
Not sorry for me yet? I wouldn’t be, either. For I deserved my hopeless condition. I had managed to arrive at my age broke, alcoholic, and friends with only two beings, viz:
1. Byron Standard-Clarke, who had recently run off with my ex-wife Angelica.
2. The Seven Swans, a sixteenth-century public house that repeatedly slung me back through time to solve mysteries and develop my character and romantic instincts.
I had recently asked Byron for help in my struggle to win back my long-lost love, Holly. Byron gave me a secret, powerful Question. He’d asked this same Question not long ago of my now ex-wife Angelica, and so obtained her affections for himself.
I thought hard before I used Byron’s Question, for Holly’s spouse, Morgan Odell, over there in the States, just might be a good husband. However, her eyes looked sad in her Facebook photos. And although there might be many reasons for unhappiness that had nothing to do with being married to the wrong person, I am not such a good person that I couldn’t help hoping she and Morgan were on the rocks. So, I texted her the Question that Byron said moved mountains in a person’s life. Here it is:
“What are you going to do, Holly?”
Find out what happens next in Issue 19, Summer 2018!
Enjoying ‘Machineries of Progress’? Grab a copy of our Mystery Newsletter for more from Mel!
Mel Anastasiou writes mysteries, including the Fairmount Manor Mysteries and the Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries, available at pulpliterature.com. Mel won a Literary Titan Gold Book Award For her novel Stella Ryman and the Fairmount Manor Mysteries, also longlisted for the Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. And Book 3 in the Stella series is coming soon! Mel’s latest novel, The Extra: A Monument Studios Mystery is now available. Find illustrations, writing tips, and news about her books and novellas at melanastasiou.wordpress.com, or visit her on Twitter.
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