by Rumer Haven
Blowing a kiss to the grave, I exit to the city streets, brimming with life in the here and now and there and then.
Acknowledgments
Time is a fickle mistress, yet she’s been good to me and this story. So, cheers to the years and what the clocks knew that I didn’t. I do know now to whom else I’m grateful.
My husband, who initiated the London move that inspired this story. Who’d have guessed when I started scribbling this manuscript as a floundering American expat that its first edition would be published the year we became British citizens. Thank you, Ryan, for giving me the time and space I needed to become what our journey encouraged me to be. This second edition now commemorates our eleven-year Londonversary!
Mom, Dad, and the rest of our family, who made it so damn difficult to leave US soil in 2008 and keep me crying at O’Hare Departures to this day. It is tremendous to love and be loved that much. Not everyone is blessed with a strong sense of home, but I know where my compass points.
The London expats to whom I dedicate this story, especially (in the order we met) Emily, Jessica, Wendy, Christine, Kat, and Sarah. You get it, and I’m grateful for all the hours of free therapy.
Bev, Shani, Elizabeth, and Lisa, whose insights helped shape this story at various stages. Gillian, Wendy, and Avril, whose workshop offered warm guidance and support. And Arthur, Ann, and the Friends of Brompton Cemetery, for their generous collaboration in promoting this book.
Crooked Cat Books, who published the first edition. Thank you, Laurence, Stephanie, and Miriam for your faith and efforts and for such a gracious transfer—paw to paw—from the Crooked Cat to the Fallen Monkey. And Gina and Coreen, for yet another stunning book design.
Thanks as well to those I don’t even know personally: reviewers of the first edition, whose feedback was taken to heart in this second publication. Penelope Farmer and Rumer Godden, whose hauntingly lovely tales gave inspiration. Wordsworth, Whitman, and Yeats, too, for their words and philosophies.
And Charlotte Pidgeon, whose name lives on while she rests in peace..
About the Author
Rumer Haven is probably the most social recluse you could ever meet. When she’s not babbling her fool head off among friends and family, she’s pacified with a good story that she’s reading, writing, or revising—or binge-watching something on Netflix. Hailing from Chicago, she presently lives in London with her husband and probably a ghost or two. Rumer has always had a penchant for the past and paranormal, which inspires her writing to explore dimensions of time, love, and the soul. Her novel What the Clocks Know won 1st Place in General Fiction for the 2017 Red City Review Book Awards.
Visit Rumer at:
www.rumerhaven.com
@RumerHaven
Also by Rumer Haven
If you enjoyed What the Clocks Know and want to read more history-n-mystery by Rumer Haven, be sure to check out her novels Seven for a Secret and Coattails and Cocktails—two Roaring Twenties tales that will take you back to 1920s Chicago.
Both titles are available from Amazon in paperback and e-book format.
Seven for a Secret
It’s the year 2000, and twenty-four-year-old Kate moves into a new apartment to find a new state of independence in a new millennium. Almost immediately, she starts crushing on a hot guy who lives in her building. Deciding to take a break from her boyfriend Dexter, Kate believes the only thing now separating her from the fresh object of her sexual fantasies is the thin wall between their neighboring apartments.
A former 1920s hotel, Camden Court has housed many lonely lives over the decades—and is where a number of them have come to die. They’re not all resting in peace, however, including ninety-year-old Olive, who dropped dead in Kate’s apartment and continues to make her presence known.
For Olive has a secret she’s dying to tell. One linking her to the sex, scandal, and sacrifice of a young dreamer named Lon. As the past haunts the present, Kate’s romantic notion that the thrill-of-the-chase beats the reality-after-the-catch unexpectedly entwines her modern-day love life with Lon’s Jazz Age tragedy.
With a little supernatural and a lotta’ razzle-dazzle, Seven for a Secret is where historical fiction meets contemporary rom-com—from the Roaring Twenties when the “New Woman” was born, to the modern Noughties when she really came of age.
Coattails and Cocktails
A body clearly shaken, but not stirring...
Summer, 1929. Murder isn’t on the menu when Chicago tycoon Ransom Warne hosts a dinner party at his country estate. But someone’s a victim—and everyone’s a suspect—when drinks and desires lead to disaster.
Hollywood starlet Lottie Landry has returned home to celebrate her engagement. She’s famous for her on- and off-screen romance with co-star Noble, but, privately, she’s having second thoughts. As her former guardian, Ransom doesn’t approve of the match. Yet his own affections raise questions when his wife, Edith, suspects him of having an affair—just as Noble suspects Lottie. Stirred into the mix are Lottie’s friends Helen and Rex, a young journalist and football hero who can feel tension building in the Warne mansion like a shaken champagne bottle.
And once the cork pops, a body drops.
Coattails and Cocktails is where Agatha Christie meets The Great Gatsby, a whodunit spiked with new love and old baggage, public faces and private vices. Filled to the brim with romance and mystery, it’s sure to intoxicate.
