Katrina Carrasco (The Best Bad Things) blends deeply researched historical fiction with riveting queer adventure in Rough Trade, the spectacular second installment of her episodic crime series about the undeniably charming antihero Alma Rosales.
It's the summer of 1888, and Alma's crew is working the Tacoma docks of Washington Territory. They're stevedores, taking on the backbreaking work of loading and unloading ships that come into port. At least, that's their cover story. Smuggling opium is their real trade. Or, it would be if a longshoremen's strike weren't preventing their access to the Ferndale's hold, leaving Alma's crew to watch scabs unload the ship under the watchful eye of an unfamiliar customs inspector, helpless to prevent the discovery of 500 pounds of contraband.
In the months that follow that drug bust, several new players wander onto Alma's docks and threaten the tidy little business she runs under the protective care of seductive socialite Delphine Beaumond. Among those new faces are Ben Collins, an undercover reporter hoping for a scoop he can sell to news magnate William Randolph Hearst, and Bess Spencer, Alma's former partner at the Pinkerton Women's Bureau of investigators, from a lifetime ago. But the real fuse lights when dead bodies start turning up under suspicious circumstances, and with signs of injection. If Alma doesn't act fast, she risks a swarming police presence that could irreversibly upset the life she's only recently built for herself in Washington, after escaping tragedy elsewhere.
Carrasco writes with a brisk pace and cheeky playfulness that offset the rugged terrain and dicey stakes intrinsic to running opium through the shipyards of a Pacific Northwest outpost. Alma carries a queer and irresistible swagger as she shapeshifts into her public persona, Jack Camp, the roughest man in town. And her sexual tension with both Bess and Delphine gin up a satisfying heat. So much of the fun in this novel pivots on the divide between public and private presentations--Alma's as well as those of the journalistic interloper Ben Collins--highlighting how simple it becomes to defy the law when one's gender and sexuality are already at odds with it.
Rough Trade is an addictive treat sure to please fans of Sarah Waters and HBO's Our Flag Means Death. --Dave Wheeler, senior editor, Shelf Awareness
Shelf Talker: Detailed historical research bolsters dynamic crime fiction in this spectacular queer adventure about opium smugglers in 19th-century Washington Territory.