Blue Bicycle Books

Come hassle them, they’re local!

Join Katie Crouch, Embassy Wife (FSG, 368 pp., hb., $27), Gervais Hagerty, In Polite Company (Morrow, pb., 368, pp., $17).  and Grady Hendrix, The Final Girl Support Group (Berkley, 352 pp., hb., $26) in the Blue Bicycle Books courtyard for a reception, talk and signing Sunday, Oct. 3 at 4 pm

Can’t make it? Order signed copies to be shipped: The Embassy Wife, The Final Girl Support Group, and In Polite Company.

About Embassy Wife:

Persephone Wilder is a displaced genius posing as the wife of an American diplomat in Namibia. She takes her job as a representative of her country seriously, and comes up with an intricate set of rules to survive such problems as: how to dress in hundred-degree weather without showing too much skin, how not to look drunk at embassy functions, and how to eat roasted oryx with grace. She also suspects her husband is not actually the ambassador’s general counsel, but a secret agent in the CIA. Ever the embassy wife, she takes Amanda Evans, under her wing.

Amanda Evans has just arrived in Namibia, mere weeks after giving up her Silicon Valley job, as her husband, Mark, has accepted a Fulbright. But once they arrive in the sub-Saharan desert, it becomes clear that Mark, who lived in Namibia two decades earlier, had other reasons for returning. Their marriage, which seemed solid in the safety of home, feels tenuous in the glaring heat of the Kalahari. When Amanda’s daughter becomes involved an international conflict, lines are drawn in the sand.

About The Final Girl Support Group:

In horror movies, the final girl is the one who’s left standing when the credits roll. The one who fought back, defeated the killer, and avenged her friends. The one who emerges bloodied but victorious. But after the sirens fade and the audience moves on, what happens to her?

Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre twenty-two years ago, and it has defined every day of her life since. And she’s not alone. For more than a decade she’s been meeting with five other actual final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, putting their lives back together, piece by piece. That is until one of the women misses a meeting and Lynnette’s worst fears are realized—someone knows about the group and is determined to take their lives apart again, piece by piece.

But the thing about these final girls is that they have each other now, and no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.

About In Polite Company:

Tourists think they see the real Charleston, but Simons Smythe knows there’s more to her hometown than sweet tea and Southern hospitality. Behind the walled gardens, inside the fabled historic homes, live Charleston’s elite. Simons was born into this powerful aristocracy that has quietly ruled the city for centuries.

Simons’s family has a banner year ahead; Her older sister will give birth to her second child, and her younger sister will make her debut—a series of cocktail parties and balls to introduce her to society. And in one year, Simons plans to marry Trip. She hopes that’s enough time to fall back in love.

Simons produces the news at a local TV station, a job that increasingly tests her loyalty to her family and friends. On her days off, Simons surfs the waves of Folly Beach, crabs the salty rivers of Edisto Island, and follows her wayward heart to King Street bars. The one touchstone in this confusing time is her elegant and secretive grandmother, Laudie, who—repeatedly and mysteriously—urges Simons to “be brave”.

In this sparkling novel, Simons unlocks riddles from the past, flirts with a new future, and discovers that some rules are made to be broken.

About the authors: 

Charleston native Katie Crouch is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Girls in Trucks, Men and Dogs and Abroad. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Slate, and Salon. A MacDowell Fellow, she teaches at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont.

Grady Hendrix has written about the confederate flag for Playboy magazine, covered machine gun collector conventions, and scripted award shows for Chinese television. His novels include Horrorstör about a haunted IKEA, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, which is basically “Beaches” meets “The Exorcist”, and We Sold Our Souls, a heavy metal horror epic out now from Quirk Books. He’s also the author of Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom of the Seventies and Eighties, and the movie Mohawk, a horror flick about the War of 1812, and the upcoming film, Satanic Panic. You can discover more ridiculous facts about him at www.gradyhendrix.com.

Gervais Hagerty grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. She earned her B.A. in psychology from Vanderbilt University. After a post-college stint in Southern California, she returned to the East Coast, where she worked as a news reporter and producer for both radio and television broadcasts. In 2013, she earned her M.B.A. from The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, and soon after became a professor teaching Leadership Communications. She lives in Charleston with her husband and daughters. In Polite Company is her first novel.