Welcome to my stop on the Great Escapes Virtual Book Tour for Bad Boy: A Jason Davey Mystery by Winona Kent. Stop by each blog on the tour for interviews, guest posts, spotlights, reviews and more!
Bad Boy: A Jason Davey Mystery by Winona Kent
Bad Boy: A Jason Davey Mystery
Musical Mystery
5th in Series
Setting – UK: London and Derbyshire
Publisher : Winona Kent / Blue Devil Books (September 26, 2024)
Print length : 278 pages
Fresh from a 34-day, 18-city tour of England, professional musician and amateur sleuth Jason Davey accepts an invitation from a fan, Marcus Merritt, to meet at Level 72 of The Shard to sign one of his band’s programs. Marcus hands him the booklet, then leaps to his death from the open viewing platform. Thus begins a week-long quest, during which Jason is tasked with retrieving a stolen collection of scores by England’s most famous composer, Sir Edward Elgar.
Marcus shared Elgar’s love of eccentric puzzles and games, and the challenging clues he’s assembled for Jason seem to mirror the 14 themes in Elgar’s renowned Enigma Variations. Jason’s journey takes him to Derbyshire and then back to London, and a four-hour walking tour of Soho’s lost music venues where, in Denmark Street, he faces a life-threatening battle with two adversaries: a treacherous Russian gangster who is also hunting for the stolen collection, and Marcus’s sister—who holds the key to a decades-old mystery involving a notorious London crime lord’s missing daughter.
Bad Boy is the fifth book in Winona Kent’s mystery series featuring jazz musician-turned-amateur sleuth Jason Davey.
Author Guest Post
The Empress of Canada
There’s a place in my novel Bad Boy where my main character, Jason, is given a vintage postcard of an ocean liner. It’s part of the clue-gathering expedition he’s been sent on, to retrieve a stolen collection of manuscripts by the English composer, Sir Edward Elgar.
The ship is very familiar to Jason, because, in an earlier novel, Cold Play, he had a gig working aboard her, as an entertainer. She was called the Star Sapphire, and every week, she sailed up the west coast of Canada, from Vancouver to Alaska.
Because the Star Sapphire was an old ocean liner, I gave her a history. Originally christened the Royal Sapphire, she was launched at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on May 9, 1960. 27,984 Gross Tons, 650 feet long, Eighty-six and a half feet wide. Two sets of geared turbines, twin screws, a published service speed of twenty-one knots. Fitted with stabilizers and a bulbous bow to reduce the negative effects of pitching and rolling in heavy seas. Hull rated Winter North Atlantic.
Jason’s postcard shows her in her original livery: a smart white, with a navy stripe running around her hull, and a blue two-toned funnel bearing the logo of her parent company, British Canadian Steamship lines.
When I wrote Cold Play, and when I brought the Sapphire back (albeit briefly) in Bad Boy, it was because I had—and still do have—a soft spot in my heart for the real ship she was based on.
I’m old enough to be one of those lucky people who travelled by sea from Canada to England, back in the days before airline travel became the norm. Lucky, too, because my dad was the manager of a travel agency, and because of that we were given hefty discounts on our accommodations. We actually crossed the Atlantic four times by sea between 1960 and 1971, on five different ships. One of those ships was the Queen Mary—the famous one that’s now drydocked in Long Beach, California (I loved the Queen Mary, too, so much so, that I arranged to have my main character, Jason, conceived aboard her in the summer of 1967. But that’s another story…)
My favourite of all the ships was the last one we sailed aboard: Canadian Pacific’s Empress of Canada, in the summer of 1971. We didn’t know it at the time, but as we left Liverpool, bound for Montreal, at the end of August, we were on one of her final voyages. She was taken out of service later that year.
But it wasn’t the end of her days. In January 1972, she was sold to a tiny little startup company called Carnival Cruise Lines. Rechristened the Mardi Gras, she became their first ship, sailing around the Caribbean from her home port of Miami.
My Empress of Canada had a long and varied career, having been in service for 42 years. Sadly, in 2003, she was sold for scrap, and on November 12, 2003, she embarked on her final voyage, from Piraeus to Alang, India, arriving on December 4, 2003, after which she was systematically broken apart on a beach crowded with the hulls of other aging ships, each quietly awaiting a similar fate.
I’m still moved to tears when I write about this, because I really did fall in love with the Empress of Canada in the summer of 1971. But because I’d followed her story, over all those decades, I knew I could do something to help immortalize her after her death. So, I reinvented her as the Star Sapphire, and I gave my love of her to Jason, who was able to tell us about her final voyage in Cold Play.
I actually created a virtual cruise site to accompany Cold Play. It shows the real history of my favourite ship in pictures. You can find it here:
https://www.winonakent.com/sapphire.html
And, whimsically, eight novels after Cold Play, in Bad Boy, I decided to bring the Sapphire back again. It’s just a quick mention, a little postcard. But it did mean a lot to me.
And to Jason.
About Winona Kent
Winona Kent is an award-winning author who was born in London, England and grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan, where she completed her BA in English at the University of Regina. After moving to Vancouver, she graduated from UBC with an MFA in Creative Writing and a diploma in Writing for Screen and TV from Vancouver Film School.
Winona’s writing breakthrough came many years ago when she won First Prize in the Flare Magazine Fiction Contest with her short story about an all-night radio newsman, “Tower of Power”.
Her debut novel Skywatcher was a finalist in the Seal Books First Novel Award and was published by Bantam Books in 1989. This was followed by a sequel, The Cilla Rose Affair, and her first mystery, Cold Play, set aboard a cruise ship in Alaska.
After three time-travel romances (Persistence of Memory, In Loving Memory and Marianne’s Memory), Winona returned to mysteries with Disturbing the Peace, a novella, in 2017 and the novel Notes on a Missing G-String in 2019, both featuring the character she first introduced in Cold Play, professional jazz musician / amateur sleuth Jason Davey.
The third and fourth books in Winona’s Jason Davey Mystery series, Lost Time and Ticket to Ride, were published in 2020 and 2022. Her fifth Jason Davey Mystery, Bad Boy, was published in 2024.
Winona also writes short fiction. Her story “Salty Dog Blues” appeared in Sisters in Crime-Canada West’s anthology Crime Wave in October 2020 and was nominated as a finalist in Crime Writers of Canada’s Awards of Excellence for Best Crime Novella in April 2021. “Blue Devil Blues” was one of the four entries in the anthology Last Shot, published in June 2021, and “Terminal Lucidity” appeared in the Sisters in Crime-Canada West anthology, Women of a Certain Age (October 2022). “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog”, will appear in the upcoming Sisters in Crime-Canada West anthology, Dangerous Games (October 2024).
A collection of Winona’s short stories, Ten Stories That Worried My Mother, was published in 2023.
Winona has been a temporary secretary, a travel agent , a screenwriter and the Managing Editor of a literary magazine. She’s currently the national Vice-Chair and the BC/YT rep for the Crime Writers of Canada and is also an active member of Sisters in Crime – Canada West
Author Links
Website: www.winonakent.com
Facebook: @Winonakentauthor
Twitter/X: @winonakent
Instagram: @winonakent
Purchase Link – Amazon US Amazon UK
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Bad Boy TOUR PARTICIPANTS
September 26 – fundinmental – SPOTLIGHT
September 26 – Literary Gold – SPOTLIGHT
September 27 – Deal Sharing Aunt – AUTHOR INTERVIEW
September 27 – Baroness Book Trove – SPOTLIGHT
September 28 – Maureen’s Musings – SPOTLIGHT
September 28 – Sapphyria’s Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT
September 29 – Boys’ Mom Reads! – CHARACTER GUEST POST
September 30 – Socrates Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT
October 1 – Ascroft, eh? – CHARACTER INTERVIEW
October 2 – Christy’s Cozy Corners – AUTHOR GUEST POST
October 3 – Cozy Up With Kathy – AUTHOR GUEST POST
October 3 – Novels Alive – REVIEW
October 4 – Celticlady’s Reviews – SPOTLIGHT
October 4 – MJB Reviewers – SPOTLIGHT
October 5 – FUONLYKNEW – SPOTLIGHT
October 5 – Escape With Dollycas Into A Good Book – AUTHOR INTERVIEW
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Thanks so much for featuring me today, Christy! Very much appreciated 🙂
You’re welcome! Thanks for stopping!