★ 02/19/2024

Carrasco’s outstanding sequel to The Best Bad Things delivers even more grit, queerness, and 19th-century swashbuckling than its predecessor. High society smuggler Delphine Beaumond has shifted her opium trade operations from Port Townsend to the emerging city of Tacoma, Wash., in 1888. Her accomplice and lover, Alma Rosales—who now lives mostly as her male alter ego, Jack Camp—runs the team that off-loads opium at the docks and prepares it for distribution via the Northern Pacific Railroad. Police put eyes on the port after two dead men sporting track marks wash up nearby, placing new pressure on Alma to keep the trade flowing and everyone out of jail. Then Bess Spencer, Alma’s former Pinkerton colleague—and first love—shows up in Tacoma, throwing her into a tailspin. Meanwhile, Ben Collins, the new-in-town lover of one of Alma’s male dock workers, offers to join the crew when an illness leaves them shorthanded, but Alma can’t decide if he’s on the level or spying for the cops. Each of the main characters walks a tightrope between caring for their friends and protecting their self-interest, and the booming port city’s political drama provides a heated backdrop for the cat and mouse game between law enforcement and the smugglers. Carrasco presents Alma/Jack as more explicitly trans this time out, raising fascinating questions about the era’s gender dynamics, which she fleshes out with vivid depictions of men’s cruising bars and Ben’s internal struggles about his sexuality. Readers who love to root for the rogues will gobble this up. Agent: Stacia Decker, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Apr.)

""The mystery smolders; desire and queerness suffuse the pages."

—Sarah Weinman, The New York Times Book Review

“Carrasco’s characters display emotional depth and intelligence amid escalating danger in a lawless atmosphere… This is a fast-paced and racy thriller that intriguingly explores gender roles and sexuality repressed and (covertly) expressed during its late-1800s setting.”

—Joelle Egan, Booklist

"An addictive treat sure to please fans of Sarah Waters and HBO's Our Flag Means Death... Detailed historical research bolsters dynamic crime fiction in this spectacular queer adventure about opium smugglers in 19th-century Washington Territory.

—Shelf Awareness

""Rough Trade is at times a brilliantly twisty thriller, a tightly-examined glimpse into life on the early edge of American mythmaking, and a roustabout adventure that centers the people who kept the economy going both above and below the board and the table at the turn of the twentieth century."

— The Lesbrary

"[O]utstanding... Readers who love to root for the rogues will gobble this up."

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Katrina Carrasco’s Rough Trade is the kind of high-octane queer adventure that the historical record can point us to in scraps of diaries and newspaper accounts of ‘female bandits,’ but rarely do we get to luxuriate inside the lives of these bad-ass queer ancestors in such glorious fiction.”

—HUGH RYAN, author of When Brooklyn Was Queer

“Rough Trade is a thrilling, fascinating game of shifting alliances and betrayals. The blazing heart of the novel is queer joy—queer spaces of the past brought to life in roaring, Technicolor glory, an unforgettable found family of rebels and outlaws, and timeless questions about the radical choices and sacrifices necessary to live an authentic life. I loved this book.”

—KIM FU, author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

“Cunning and wildly compelling, Rough Trade is as lush as the smell of good tobacco, and just as dangerously addictive.”

—LEV AC ROSEN, author of The Bell in the Fog

“In Rough Trade, Katrina Carrasco gives us the queer body as a source of joy. It’s a delight to read of unexpected freedoms in our queer past."

—NICOLA GRIFFITH, author of Menewood

"Rough Trade is beautifully immersive. Stevedores, silk-clad ladies, and newspapermen grasp for power, and for each other, as this sharply drawn novel builds to a gripping conclusion that’s just as tense and clever as Alma. I loved it.”

—KATHARINE BEUTNER, author of Killingly

“Clever and twisty, stark and swift. If the gender-fluid, leads-with-their-jaw antihero doesn’t get you and how can they not?—then the blood-thumping plot will.”

—KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN, author of Sharks in the Time of Saviors

“Deliciously illicit, whiskey-soaked, and awash in impossible choices, Rough Trade grabs the reader with all the strength of its crate-hauling stevedores. Katrina Carrasco excels at creating characters we both love and hate as they drink, fight, and screw their way through Tacoma’s criminal (and queer) underworld. You won’t be able to put down this powder keg of a book until you find out just how it all goes down—or blows sky high.”

—CARRIE CALLAGHAN, author of A Light of Her Own and Salt the Snow

Narrator Stacy Gonzalez brings to life the docks, bars, and streets of 1800s Tacoma in Washington Territory in this queer historical romp. Alma Rosales has set up a good life for herself as opium smuggler Jack Camp. But when two men are found dead in a bar her crew frequents and several newcomers--known and unknown--come to town, Alma's situation is threatened. Gonzalez's deep voice smoothly delivers voices that range from Alma's clipped cadence to the warm drawl of her old ex-Pinkerton friend and the polished purr of her wealthy sometimes-lover. Full of action, historical detail, and a vividly imagined setting, this is an excellent addition to the growing canon of queer westerns. L.S. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

2024-02-03
Carrasco revisits the world she created in The Best Bad Things (2018).

When this story begins, Alma Rosales has left her past behind and reinvented herself as Jack Camp, smuggler. In partnership with her former lover, she controls the flow of opium from Canada throughout the West Coast from her base in Tacoma. When a double homicide threatens to put her operation at risk, Alma thinks she has the situation in hand—until it’s clear that she does not. Then two newcomers arrive in town. One is her former partner from the Pinkerton’s Women’s Bureau. The other is a journalist whose interest in the opium trade might become a problem. Carrasco introduced readers to Alma in her last novel, and the sequel is a similar mix of gritty historical fiction and crime. She repopulates the past with the queer people and queer culture that have often been erased from history. Carrasco does a terrific job of conjuring a port city at the end of the 19th century. Her description of the physical world her characters inhabit is evocative, but the carefully rendered setting only underscores their one-dimensional nature. It’s entirely possible that readers who enjoyed The Best Bad Things will want to know what happens next for its characters, but readers encountering them here for the first time may find them intriguing without being convincing. The author’s penchant for lingering over physical details also makes it difficult to appreciate this book as a mystery. The pace is just very slow—so slow that it’s not easy to stay invested in the story’s outcome.

A novel that straddles a couple of genres without quite satisfying the demands of either.