My Mistress' Eyes Are Raven Black

May 31, 2021
Roberts’s impressive historical thriller (after The Holy Ghost Speakeasy and Revival) follows a hotel manager who takes occasional assignments from the federal government’s Bureau of Investigation. In 1920, Stephen Robbins’s job managing New York City’s Algonquin Hotel grows dull, and his romantic relationship has gone cold. The Bureau sends him to Ellis Island to investigate the disappearance of a pregnant Irishwoman, Ciara McManaway, shortly after her arrival. Lucy Paul, a nurse from the American Medical Society conducting a probe of the island’s medical practices, tells Robbins several immigrants disappear at Ellis each week. Several staff members espouse the beliefs of the racial purity movement, and those who vanish (Jews, dark-skinned people, and unwed pregnant women like Ciara) are deemed by them as dangerous to America’s strength. At the morgue, Robbins finds corpses that are a shade of pink as if they have been boiled; after Lucy is endangered by what they find, Robbins realizes how strong their bond has grown. The novel’s fast-paced style echoes hard-boiled detective fiction, but its nuanced, thought-provoking portrait of the country’s hostility toward immigrants transcends the bounds of genre. It should widen Roberts’s fan base and renew interest in his debut novel, A Short Time to Stay Here, which also featured Robbins. Agent: Emma Sweeney, Emma Sweeney Agency.

July 21, 2021
Stephen Robbins is a finder. In 1920 New York, his nameless associate from the Justice Department directs him to track down an Irish woman who disappeared shortly after arriving at Ellis Island. Ciara McManaway has a powerful connection, a U.S. congressman eager to find where the niece he was supposed to claim has vanished. But as Stephen traces her steps through the bureaucratic maze of the island, he discovers that no one there can necessarily be trusted. Roberts pulls no punches laying out exactly how immigrants were treated by officials, often viewed as curiosities or cattle, down to the cages that once lined the registry room. As the mystery surrounding Ciara deepens, with a suspected pregnancy and her belongings left behind, Robbins must grapple with both the demons of his past and now a love affair and a possible conspiracy to restrict immigration at the island, a conspiracy that may have led to murder. This straightforward procedural illuminates stereotypes and assumptions about who deserved to immigrate to America during this dark chapter of history.

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