Saturday, August 22, 2020

Five deeply flawed characters you’ll learn to appreciate

Amy Stuart is the #1 bestselling author of three novels, Still Mine, Still Water, and Still Here. Shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Best First Novel Award and winner of the 2011 Writers’ Union of Canada Short Fiction Competition, Stuart is the founder of Writerscape, an online community for hopeful and emerging writers. She lives in Toronto with her husband and their three sons.

At CrimeReads, Stuart tagged "five thrilling novels with deeply flawed fictional characters we know you’ll learn to appreciate as you turn the pages." One title on the list:
The “Detective Elouise Norton” series by Rachel Howzell Hall

Elouise “Lou” Norton is the star of Rachel Howzell Hall’s eponymous series of detective novels. A Black homicide detective in Los Angeles, Lou comes off as a confident powerhouse at work, but her struggles are laid bare on the home front. Her insecurities around her marriage and home life are frustrating to the reader at first, but ultimately lead us to ask a universal question: Why can’t our confidence in some areas of life translate well to others? By book three in the series readers will have such a profound affection and understanding of Lou, thanks in large part to Hall‘s strong character-building chops. As Kirkus writes in a starred review of the series’ second novel Trail of Echoes, Hall “gives voice to a rare figure in crime fiction: a highly complex, fully imagined black female detective.”
Read about another entry on the list.

Hall's Lou Norton series is among Sara Sligar's seven California crime novels with a nuanced view of of race, class, gender & community. Land of Shadows is among Steph Cha's top ten books about trouble in Los Angeles.

--Marshal Zeringue