The Demons of Wall Street Book Tour
Welcome to the 1-Week Virtual Book Tour for The Demons of Wall Street (Nora Investigations #1), an Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Novella by Laurence Raphael Brothers.
About the Book:
Nora Simeon hates demons.
But as an investigator for the secretive Commission, the organization that regulates financial sorcery in New York City, she deals with the creatures a lot more than she'd like. Her latest case has her on the track of a rogue demon, escaped from magical bondage as an analyst for a leading investment bank.
On the demon's trail, Nora crosses paths with a beautiful young man named Eyre. He's too pretty and complaisant to be human, and too kind to be a demon in human form, but what else could he be? Together they become embroiled in the secret corruption at the heart of the financial industry. But before Nora can untangle a twisted skein of sorcerous murder and intrigue, she has to untangle her feelings for Eyre. And before she can do that, she has to find out who and what he really is.
Publisher Website:
Purchase Links:
Mirror World Publishing e-book
Mirror World Publishing paperback
Amazon e-book
Amazon paperback
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Guest Post:
Hardboiled Pathology in the Demons of Wall Street
Blog post by Laurence Raphael Brothers
In my romantic-noir urban fantasy novella The Demons of Wall Street, the protagonist, Nora Simeon, is honestly not that nice a person, especially to begin with. I hope everyone sympathizes with her and grows to like her better as the story progresses and her inner character is revealed. But if you met her as a stranger in some casual situation (at least as she was at the start of the story), I doubt you’d come away with a favorable impression, because she has erected a strong barrier of personality meant specifically to push people away. This makes her seem almost masculine at first, and toxically masculine, too.
I want to claim that this isn’t because I can’t write plausible female characters, but because I was contemplating the classic hardboiled protagonist and wondering where they could possibly come from in real life. This is the two-fisted detective who fights strangers easily, and can shoot a bad guy down if necessary (hopefully in self-defense) without any apparent upset or emotional consequences at all. The standard hardboiled male character is often abusive towards themself and toward others, exploiting women without ever loving anyone, isolated from humanity and yet secretly yearning for contact. You can find any number of Dashiel Hammett characters like this, damaged in various ways, from the Continental Op to Sam Spade, and generations of subsequent PIs, cops, and criminals in other writers’ stories have shown similar characteristics. Without getting too psychological, it seemed to me that if such a person existed in the real world, they must have experienced severe and lasting trauma at some point, with the severity of the trauma corresponding to their degree of divergence from ordinary human empathy and conventionally prudent aversion to violence.
Hence Nora. Raised in extreme and indeed inhuman conditions by a mother who was grievously disappointed in her, to defend her own sense of self from further attack Nora was forced to flee her home as a teenager. She has since then come to rely on hostility, abrasiveness, and attacking anyone who might be attracted to her as successful strategies for coping. But such techniques naturally have a distorting effect on the people who employ them. Though amazingly strong and tough in some ways, she is terribly vulnerable and weak in others. Over time, I envisioned Nora’s situation growing gradually worse without any intervention, eventually devolving into clinical Borderline Personality Disorder or worse, into increasingly severe psychosis. And I was wondering how such a person could possibly be rescued from this fate, whether any conventional therapist could be successful, even if the subject wanted therapy.
Without spoiling the story too badly, let’s just say that Eyre turns out to be Nora’s perfect partner, the ideal complement to her own positive and negative qualities. Eyre, however, is a person who has their own problems, their own needs and weaknesses, which Nora is likewise ideally suited to repair with her own strengths. Such a match is made in heaven, or at least in the author’s mind, and since I cited Dashiell Hammett’s damaged characters to begin with, of course I should call out his most famously charming and wholesome characters here. Nick and Nora Charles from The Thin Man are the other inspiration for Nora and her partner in The Demons of Wall Street, and it’s my ambition, as the series develops, for them to evolve into a truly romantic, permanently engaged couple. Of course such a delightful state can’t be achieved without a few contretemps along the way, especially for people as unusual as Nora and Eyre, but that’s storytelling for you. I hope as the series progresses you will come to know and like these two as much as I do!
Meet the Author:
Laurence Raphael Brothers is a writer and a technologist. He has published over 25 short stories in such magazines as Nature, the New Haven Review, PodCastle, and Galaxy's Edge. His WWI-era historical fantasy novel Twilight Patrol was just released by Alban Lake. For more of his stories, visit https://laurencebrothers.com/bibliography, or follow him on twitter: @lbrothers.
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