Tom McBride

The Jaded Lady of Janesville, Wisconsin Tom McBride

Janesville, Wisconsin is a southern Wisconsin city with a distinguished industrial and political history. Now it's the scene of a strange new mystery novel. Anna Marie Loy comes to Janesville in the late 1930s to flee from a scandal in Liverpool, England. Janesville is a thriving town of over 22,000 people, and the proud home of both new Chevrolet sedans and Parker Duo-Fold pens. Anna Marie settles there and soon enough gets married to a city worker, is interviewed by the local Gazette, gets blamed for the sudden illness of a prominent dentist, and meets an elderly professor, also British, in Madison. Anna Marie may leave Liverpool for Janesville, but her demons drive her wherever she is. These phantoms include her fetish for jade, her obsession with her late father, and her vexed feelings about the human male. In a perfect storm, as her native England is being devastated by the Nazi Blitz, Anna Marie's ghosts assemble in one cold December room, with murderous results.