Contraband Hearts (A Porthkennack novel) by Alex Beecroft | Spotlight, Excerpt, Guest post & #giveaway @Alex_Beecroft

His future depends on bringing the smuggler to justice. His heart demands to join him.

Customs officer Peregrine Dean is sent by his patron to investigate rumors of corruption in the Porthkennack customs house. There he is tasked by the local magistrate to bring down the villainous Tomas Quick, a smuggler with fingers in every pie in town. Fired with zeal and ambition, and struck to the core by his first glimpse of Tomas, Perry determines to stop at nothing until he has succeeded.

Tomas Quick is an honest thief—a criminal regarded by the town as their local Robin Hood. He’s also an arrogant man who relishes the challenge posed by someone as determined and intelligent as Perry. Both of them come to enjoy their cat-and-mouse rivalry a little too much.

But the eighteenth century is a perilous time for someone like Perry: a black man in England. Two have already disappeared from the wrecks of ships. Tomas and Perry must forsake their competition and learn to trust each other if they are to rescue them, or Perry may become the third victim.

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Excerpt...

Chapter One

Perry Arrives on the Scene

July 1790

My dear mama,

I am finally arrived in Porthkennack. I have this moment alighted from the coach and come into a fine new inn by the name of the Hope and Anchor. You will be happy to know that I have secured a room here until I can find something nearby more commensurate with my salary. I may be corresponded with, therefore. Please write, and tell me all the small doings of the family. Even though the journey was short and it has been but six days since I departed from London, it has been ample time to realize that I miss you all.

Speaking of time, as soon as I set down my luggage, I sent my regards to Mr. Gwynn at the customs house, asking when he required me to report to him, so I am writing this with one hand, while with the other I attempt to shift my travel-worn coat and neaten my bedraggled wig in anticipation of a summons. I hope you can read the terrible writing! I—

Oh, that thunder at my door must be the man already. My apologies. I will pick this up when I return.

“Yes, yes.” Perry put down the inn’s spluttering pen and rose to flick up the latch on his door. His room was barely large enough to house a coffin—he had been writing with his travel slope balanced on his knee, sitting on the cot-sized bed—but he hoped not to have to endure it long. “I’m coming.”

“Mr. Peregrine Dean?” The man at his door backed off when Perry opened it, his eyes rounding, and his face passing through a sequence of expressions that had become familiar to Perry over the course of his working life.

“That’s right,” Perry said, sternly. “And you are?”

The newcomer scratched a short-shorn head of brown hair beneath a brown leather tricorn. The fair skin that showed at his wrist contrasted with the deep baked tan of his face, which nevertheless glowed across the cheeks and the bridge of the nose, either with a blush or with sunburn. His figure was both large framed and plump, his jacket brown as his eyes. A red neckerchief was tied jauntily around his throat in place of a stock, and his stunned expression was already in the act of turning into a smile.

“I’m Jowan Ede, riding officer, and your partner.” He held out his hand, and said—still grinning, “I didn’t think you’d be a black man.”

Perry sighed internally. No doubt Jowan hoped for an explanation, a pedigree even. He could go on hoping for it, or earn it the way any friend or colleague earned the intimate details of one’s life. “I didn’t expect my partner to come and fetch me. That was kind of you.”

“Oh, well.” Jowan shrugged a shoulder as if embarrassed. “We can be efficient as you like, up at the customs house, and it ain’t every day we get a recruit come in from London. Lord Petersfield, taking an interest in little old us? It’s obliging, ain’t it? We’ve got to be obliging back.”

Perry’s back still ached from the constant jogging of the coach. His spirits were already oppressed from having been shut up in tight confines with five other people for six long days, yet now they took a further dip. He had hoped that the supervisor of Porthkennack would have had the sense not to mention to his staff that Perry had been sent not only to fulfil a riding officer’s duties, but also to keep an eye open for corruption, on behalf of the authorities in London.

To cover his consternation, he attempted once more to brush road dust from the sleek black strands of his wig. But the summer had been hot, the coach had thrown up a cloud of choking dirt as it rolled, the windows down so they could breathe, and the pomade with which the wig had been dressed had been sticky. Now the wig looked like a mouse that had got into the flour bin. A punctilious appearance being ruled out, he would have to be friendlier if he was to present himself as an innocent colleague and not a snitch.

“What do you think?” he asked. “You must know Mr. Gwynn—will he be most insulted by a bare head or a dirty wig?”

“He won’t rightly care.” Jowan’s grin had made itself so much at home on his face it had drawn pale lines in his suntan. A good-humoured man, then. One who could be talked round. “Though I wouldn’t keep him waiting any longer.”

“I shall pretend the colour is the latest fashion.” Perry slapped the dirt from his coat and donned it, jammed his gritty wig back on his sweating head, and closed the door behind him. “Lead on.”

Author Guest post...

Content Warnings for this Book

I hate it when I’m happily watching along with a movie or TV series and suddenly, without warning, I’m hit in the face with a scene of sexual assault or rape. If that happens, I am upset and angry and unsettled for the rest of the week.

I don’t think that means that fiction ought not to contain scenes of sexual assault. It happens in the world, and fiction’s whole point is to help you to deal with things that happen in the world. I don’t believe that anything should be banned from fiction. But that doesn’t mean you could pay me to watch Game of Thrones.

If I know there’s rape in something, then I want a warning, so that I can decide whether it’s worth watching/reading anyway. If it’s dealt with mostly off the page and it isn’t prevalent, and it’s treated with the correct level of horror and sympathy, and the character deals with it reasonably realistically but also overcomes it and is not killed or destroyed, then maybe. Maybe I’ll get over it and enjoy the thing anyway.

If it seems to me to be continual and there for titillation, I won’t engage with that piece of fiction at all. I don’t need that unpleasantness in my life.

There’s no rape in this book. But there is slavery, and I know that for some people that’s a similar thing.

When I started thinking about the book, my intention was to avoid the subject of the slave trade as far as was possible—just because I knew its inclusion would make it hard for some people to enjoy the story. But when I began to research what life would be like for a black person at that time, it slowly began to seem to be a thing that would impact his life no matter where he was. I felt it would be almost unfair to Perry, and disrespectful to the real people who lived and worked as part of Britain’s black community at that time, to make his environment artificially safe to the point of historical inaccuracy.

Instead, I focused on trying to make sure that Perry never has a moment when he is not one of the heroes of the book. I tried to make it clear that slavery was a great evil without simultaneously descending into some kind of torture porn.

The book has been read by two sensitivity readers and they seem to have been happy with it, but I know that in matters like this, everyone’s mileage may vary, and it’s better to be warned.

It took me about a year to write the book and then another year for it to be edited and prepared for release, and in that time my opinions have somewhat shifted. I used to be all about historical accuracy—famous for it, in fact. But nowadays I am swinging round towards the idea that perhaps some readers have had enough harrowing in their real lives and what they want to read is something that doesn’t require them to maintain the same vigilance. They want to relax and be affirmed.

I’ve also come around to the view that perhaps, as a white person, this was a subject I wasn’t really qualified to tackle. In what I believed was a well-intentioned attempt to write diversity, I may have fallen over my own feet. I hope not, but I await the reviews with interest. I’m sure I’ll find out.

Alex Beecroft is an English author best known for historical fiction, notably Age of Sail, featuring gay characters and romantic storylines. Her novels and shorter works include paranormal, fantasy, and contemporary fiction.

Beecroft won Linden Bay Romance’s (now Samhain Publishing) Starlight Writing Competition in 2007 with her first novel, Captain’s Surrender, making it her first published book. On the subject of writing gay romance, Beecroft has appeared in the Charleston City Paper, LA Weekly, the New Haven Advocate, the Baltimore City Paper, and The Other Paper. She is a member of the Romantic Novelists' Association of the UK and an occasional reviewer for the blog Speak Its Name, which highlights historical gay fiction.

Alex was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and grew up in the wild countryside of the English Peak District. She lives with her husband and two children in a little village near Cambridge and tries to avoid being mistaken for a tourist.

Alex is only intermittently present in the real world. She has led a Saxon shield wall into battle, toiled as a Georgian kitchen maid, and recently taken up an 800-year-old form of English folk dance, but she still hasn’t learned to operate a mobile phone.

She is represented by Louise Fury of the L. Perkins Literary Agency.

Connect with Alex:

• Website: alexbeecroft.com
• Blog: alexbeecroft.com/blog
• Facebook: facebook.com/AlexBeecroftAuthor
• Twitter: @Alex_Beecroft
• Goodreads: goodreads.com/Alex_Beecroft

To celebrate the release of Contraband Hearts, Alex is giving away a $10 Amazon gift card and an ebook from her backlist, your choice! Leave a comment with your contact info to enter the contest. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on May 5, 2018. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Thanks for following along, and don’t forget to leave your contact info!