Showing Scarlet Rose by Julia Madeleine

Scarlet Rose, the once remarkably beautiful, queen of the burlesque scene in 1960s Toronto, has aged into a decrepit bitter alcoholic, living on welfare and her daughter’s handouts—a daughter she forced into the adult entertainment industry at the age of sixteen to support the family. Now in 1983, Scarlet’s wealthy ex-husband has been found tortured and murdered in a hotel room, and her twenty-two-year-old daughter Fiona, must help the police find the killer.

While Fiona navigates her way through the dark recesses of her family’s history, uncovering shocking secrets that threaten to destroy her, Scarlet Rose employs the skills she learns in Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War, fixating on making a new life for herself using other people’s money. But when she befriends a lonely American woman sitting on an inheritance, greed that knows no bounds, cold-blooded murder and identity theft, might just prove to be Scarlet’s undoing.


Praise for The Truth About Scarlet Rose:

“The Truth About Scarlet Rose begins with a scene full of menace and eroticism. It is a compulsively readable crime novel that packs a lot of punches. Julia Madeleine is an accomplished author who sketches characters deftly and then draws you into their inner lives. They are inner lives worth reading about. This is a novel that is full of suspense, that is about the loss of innocence and the cost of freedom. Julia Madeleine has written a great page turner, I highly recommend it.” - Richard Godwin, Author Of Apostle Rising.

"The Truth About Scarlet Rose is a gripping, atmospheric and powerful thriller with dark shades of noir and even traces of the Gothic." - Paul D Brazill- Guns Of Brixton, 13 Shots Of Noir, Drunk On The Moon, Brit Grit.

“When Madeleine tells you cops all have “those eyes,” you believe her. The stripper mama’s boa may be soft as a baby kitten, but the truth about Scarlet Rose will be told.” –Cindy Rosmus, editor Yellow Mama Magazine

"Sure “The Truth About Scarlet Rose” has drugs, strippers and violence but believe it or not, that’s not why I find myself waking up early to sneak in one more chapter before work. I do it to spend more time with it’s central character Fiona and her whack family. At its core is a wonderfully twisted dysfunctional as hell family drama, and one hell of a great read. This is my favorite kind of whodunnit, the kind where whydunnit is just as interesting." - Josh Stallings, author of Beautiful, Naked & Dead and Out There Bad

“Julia Madeleine’s ‘The Truth About Scarlet Rose’ is a humdinger of a story, a hugely intelligent crime thriller, and a subtly, smartly paced drama with sinister overtones. The prose is mesmerizingly fluid and coolly disarming, much like her protagonists, who saunter across the page knowingly and confidently as the plot gracefully unfolds, masterfully insinuating themselves into the readers’ consciousness.

Madeleine takes the familiar tropes of the crime genre and shakes them down, devilishly navigating us through a noir reality of irrepressible modernity, and staggering us with complex characterizations of people caught up in spider-web of intrigue and danger. But her writing, her plot, her people, are imbued with an undeniable empathy, and it’s this which is her most striking accomplishment as a crime novelist. Madeleine is a rising star in the crime firmament, and rightly so.” – Frank Duffy, author of Mountains of Smoke