What is Evie Hawtrey reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Evie Hawtrey, author of And By Fire: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

I’ll tell you what I am not reading—a mystery. Why? Because when I am writing (especially first-drafting) I avoid novels in the same genre to keep my characters’ voices as pure and authentically mine as possible.

So currently I am reading Volume I of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encylopeaedia. It’s non-fiction and illustrated. The description on the back earnestly explains: “the photographs, drawing and texts published in this book are part of a collection of more than three thousand tattoos accumulated over a lifetime by prison attendant Danzig Baldaev.” I would like to meet Mr. Baldaev, but he has been dead since 2005.

The introduction to Volume I, written by Alexei Plutser-Sarno, features one of the best opening lines ever—a line that could just as easily start a novel: “Strang as it may seem, the tattoo-covered body of a vor v zakone (legitimate thief), is primarily a linguistic object.” God, I wish I’d written that. And speaking of God, tattoos on vory that appear religious really aren’t, trust me on this one.

My dive into understanding the body-language of the Russian criminal class is part of...[read on]

About And By Fire, from the publisher:

Tempered by fire and separated by centuries, two extraordinary female detectives track a pair of murderous geniuses who will burn the world for their art in this mystery perfect for fans of Sarah Penner and Dan Brown.

Nigella Parker, Detective Inspector with the City Police, has a deeply rooted fear of fire and a talent for solving deadly arson cases. When a charred figure is found curled beside Sir Christopher Wren’s Monument to the Great Fire of London, Nigella is dragged into a case pitting her against a murderous artist creating sculptures using burnt flesh.

Nigella partners with Colm O’Leary of Scotland Yard to track the arsonist across greater London. The pair are more than colleagues—they were lovers until O’Leary made the mistake of uttering three little words. Their past isn’t the only buried history as they race to connect the dots between an antique nail pulled from a dead man’s hands and a long-forgotten architect dwarfed by the life’s work of Sir Christopher Wren.

Wren, one of London’s most famous architects, is everywhere the pair turn. Digging into his legacy leads the DCIs into the coldest of cold cases: a search for a bookseller gone missing during the Great Fire of London. More than 350 years earlier, while looking for their friend, a second pair of detectives—a lady-in-waiting to the Queen and a royal fireworks maker—discovered foul play in the supposedly accidental destruction of St. Paul’s Cathedral…but did that same devilry lead to murder? And can these centuries-old crimes help catch a modern-day murderer?

As Nigella and O’Leary rush to decode clues, past and present, London’s killer-artist sets his sights on a member of the investigative team as the subject of his next fiery masterpiece.

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--Marshal Zeringue