The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Stranger I Wed (The Doves of New York) by Harper St. George

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

The Stranger I Wed (The Doves of New York) by Harper St. George https://amzn.to/3UIihVh New to wealth and to London high society, American heiress Cora Dove discovers that with the right man, marriage might not be such an inconvenience after all. . . . Cora Dove and her sisters’ questionable legitimacy has been the lifelong subject of New York’s gossipmongers and a continual stain on their father’s reputation. So when the girls each receive a generous, guilt-induced dowry from their dying grandmother, the sly Mr. Hathaway vows to release their funds only if Cora and her sisters can procure suitable husbands—far from New York. For Cora, England is a fresh start. She has no delusions of love, but a husband who will respect her independence? That’s an earl worth fighting for. Enter: Leopold Brendon, Earl of Devonworth, a no-nonsense member of Parliament whose plan to pass a Public Health bill that would provide clean water to the working class requires the backing of a wealthy wife. He just never expected to crave Cora’s touch or yearn to hear her thoughts on his campaign—or to discover that his seemingly perfect bride protects so many secrets... But secrets have a way of bubbling to the surface, and Devonworth has a few of his own. With their pasts laid bare and Cora’s budding passion for women’s rights taking a dangerous turn, they’ll learn the true cost of losing their heart to a stranger—and that love is worth any price. About the author Harper St. George was raised in the rural backwoods of Alabama and along the tranquil coast of northwest Florida. It was a setting filled with stories of the old days that instilled in her a love of history, romance, and adventure. By high school, she had discovered the historical romance novel which combined all of those elements into one perfect package. She has been hooked ever since.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm Vox's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen, that makes it official. Welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate you guys being here.

As always, we have the most amazing authors on the show. Today we have an amazing young lady on the show. She's the author of over 18 plus books, let's call it. Because probably by the time you might hear this, she'll have another one out. We have Harper St. George on the show with us today. She's a multi-book author and her newest, hottest book has just come out April 23rd, 2024. It's called The Stranger I Wed, The Doves of New York. She'll be joining us on the show to talk about her new book and her insights.

And if you're not a fan of hers, you probably will be when we're done. Upper St. George was raised in the rural backwoods of Alabama along the tranquil coast of Northwest Florida. It was a setting filled with the stories of old days that instilled in her a love of history, romance, and adventure. By high school, she discovered the historical romance novel, which combined all those elements into one perfect package, and she has been hooked ever since. She lives in the Atlanta area with her family, etc., etc. Welcome to the show.

How are you, Harper? Hi, Chris. Welcome to the show. How are you, Harper? Hi, Chris. I'm doing good. How are you? Thanks for having me on the show, by the way. Thanks for coming, and congratulations on the new book. Give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to look you up on the interwebs?

HarperStGeorge.com, and I'm on Instagram a fair bit at HarperStGeorge. Those are my two major, and Facebook, of course. Instagram and Facebook. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside your new book? So the new book, The Stranger I Wed, is in a nutshell, it's about a young woman from New York in the Gilded Age. So this is the book set in 1878. The Gilded Age is roughly 1870 to 1900. Some people put it at 1910. Anyway, she inherits a lot of money, but to claim her inheritance, she has to marry a titled husband. So she sets off to England to find one. There you go. Sounds like my

first five marriages. That's a joke. We do a callback on the show. So this is a new book. My understanding is this is a spinoff or a new standalone series that it's launching? It's a new book, and it's the first book in a new series. It is a spinoff from another series of mine called The Gilded Age Heiresses. Those are four books in that series. So you'll see some of those characters pop up in this book, but this is a whole new sort of family dynamic to follow.

There you go. All new family dynamics to follow. Tell us a little bit about yourself. People like to hear the history and narrative of our authors that we have on the show. What influenced you when you were growing up? What made you want to become a writer? When did you start writing or kind of acknowledging that like, hey, I have a talent for this sort of thing? So I've always loved reading and I've always loved history, which I didn't find many people growing up like me who was into histories. I love to hear my grandfather tell me stories of when he was growing up. So I started the writing in seventh grade, eighth grade. I had the same teacher both years, same English teacher. And if you can imagine being in seventh and eighth grade,

prime middle school years where everything is embarrassing. And she made us write. After we did our work, we would have to write a short story. And every Friday we would go to the carpet, sit in a circle, and share the stories that we'd wrote for the week in front of middle schoolers, which is possibly the cruelest audience imaginable. So we had to read to them. And I actually got some good feedback. And it was the first time I saw people maybe lean forward a little bit or tell me they cared about the characters. They wanted to know what happened next from week to week because of my short stories. I think I was always a novelist. So they became chapter one,

chapter two, chapter three. So I kept them interested through the whole school year. So that was when I first was like, maybe I could be a writer. Maybe I like to tell stories. There you go. Those early influences. People don't realize how big of a difference that can make. Absolutely. Yeah. There you go.

So what tells you you've written, I think we said, what, 18 plus titles? Is it mostly all historical fiction or? 18 full-length novels, a few shorter works in there. So probably, I don't know, 2021 total. Yes, mostly historical. I did co-write an MMA sports romance series. There were three titles in that with my critique partner, but historical is my true love. So I always keep returning to that.

What draws you to the historical? The way you can make up a lot of stories. We have so much history. I do a lot of research and there's so much of recorded history that just doesn't end happily. Or we don't know why somebody did what they did. We only know what we can surmise from the research that we gather so i like to be able to fill in the blanks and i like it to usually in happily that's sort of the hallmark of a romance perhaps you know the happily ever after so i just keep going back to that how come it's always the happily ever after how come it just doesn't end badly all the time?

Wait, people probably don't want that, huh? Well, we have so much of that in history as it is. And I feel like as a society, that's what we're taught are good stories. The ones that end badly. The ones you can learn something from. But I feel like you can learn just as much from the things that people do right. Or the mistakes they make. And the way they're able to correct it to get that good ending.

There you go. As we always say on the show, stories are the owner's menu of life. It's kind of how we learn, and we figure stuff out in life, and all that good stuff. Exactly. There you go.

How did you develop the characters in this new series, this new book? You said they're a spinoff, so who's coming over from where? So, The Gildeded age i don't know if i'm sure some people listening know what the gilded age is some don't so let me just give a quick rundown it's basically after the american civil war you had all of these men primarily in families making tons of money from the steel industry, railroad, iron, even breweries. We

were seeing factories pumping out products and these men were sort of raking in the money from that. And they had a lot of wealth, like more wealth than people had really seen in the world up to this point in history. And you had suddenly these people with money and they were not able to break into the upper class of society, which were the asters, the people who had been here since the country's founding and didn't like the new money families who could sometimes be crass and crude in their ballrooms. My stories hinge on the true history, which was when they would marry their daughters to British aristocrats or really all over Europe, not just the UK. And they would have titled husbands.

And then their daughters would suddenly be invited to all of the ballrooms around. So they were called cash for class marriages. And there were about 300 of these marriages from 1870 to 1910. These marriages infused the Great Britain with about $100 billion throughout that time. So it was quite advantageous to the aristocracy. There you go. And they go through,

of course, we can talk about the middle and the ends of the books. What book did this, did any of the characters come out of a book when you said it was

maybe extendable from one of your other novels or is it totally stand-alone? Yeah, so the Gilded Age Heiressesresses that's my first gilded age series is all about the fictional crenshaw family who made their money in railroad and iron and they go to england to have their daughters marry titled husbands so you see those characters the two daughters and the son who married into the family. There you go.

And what intrigued you with some of the characters? How did you develop them? What was some of the favorites you had and why did you choose them? So I went back to the true history. I don't know if you've heard of Consuelo Vanderbilt. She's from the very big and noteworthy Vanderbilt family. Her grandfather was one of the original men of industry from the Gilded Age. And she married a Duke from England.

This was in around 1895. And very famously, there was a story of her walking down the aisle in tears because she'd been in love with someone else. But her mother was so focused on making this marriage happen. She pretended that she was sick and she would die if her daughter didn't go through with the wedding. So she went through with the wedding and it was famously unhappy. They ended up divorcing when divorce was a little more socially acceptable in the 1920s. And so this story really piqued my interest. And one of the characters in my book

is sort of very loosely based on her story. There you go. Interesting story. It's these romance novels. Women love them. The historical things, of course, given the romantic settings and stuff. Did you get a chance to travel at all to maybe go to different places and take advantage of some of that research money? I know.

Yeah, I did actually. Right before the pandemic hit, I went to England. So I spent a lot of time in London and Whitechapel. There's some scenes in the book that happened in Whitechapel. So I got to tour there and see the real, you know, alleyways. And, you know, what's amazing to me is how here in the U.S., if something's 50 years old, it's old and we have to tear it down and build something new. But over there, everything is pretty, well, not everything, but a lot of it. You could see the street layout's the same.

The building's there from when it was there in the 1800s. So that's really cool. And I went to York and Edinburgh. So got to see a lot of it. We have a lot of authors who write novels on the show. And they're like, yeah, I take advantage of putting the settings in different places that i want to vacation yeah and we're going there for research for the book and so i was gonna i could laugh at that i'm like i need to do a novel because i keep writing about local stuff and business local

stuff and like like i need an excuse to be like yeah I need to go there for about a year and really marinate and I think but you're right America is kind of weird I mean my state Vegas we tear everything down and throw up new stuff all the time constant change but the romanticism of Europe I mean thank God a lot of us survived World War two and and you think about was lost, too. You know, there is sort of romanticism when you go back there and you see places that, gee, some of them are like probably 1,000 years old or 500 years old.

Oh, absolutely. You think about the amount of people that went through them and everything else. What's the feedback you get from your readers? I'm sure you have a huge fan base that rabidly loves your books. What do you hear is their favorite thing that they love about your readers? I'm sure you have a huge fan base that rabidly loves your books. What do you hear is their favorite thing that they love about your books? They love the history that I put into the books because I do a good bit of research, so you're always learning

little history nuggets from the books. And of course, the chemistry between the hero and heroine. You know, when are they going to kiss? When are they going to hold hands? What's going to happen? Ah, the suspense. I know. Is there any murder in the book?

There are some deaths. Oh. There is. The book I'm writing now is the second book in the series. There is a murder in that book. Ah, there you go. Not to give too much away, but yeah. That was the next question I had for you.

What's up on deck in the future? Are you going to be writing a second book for this series or one of your others? Yeah, so this series is all about the Dove sisters. They're three girls, and they're all illegitimate, which is why to inherit their money, their father is sending them to England far away from his, you know, quote-unquote real family, so they won't be embarrassments to him. And so they will

be marrying different men over there to inherit their small fortunes. And so each book will center on one of the sisters. So the next book is Eliza and the Duke. Eliza's the youngest sister. This should be exciting for your fans so they can enjoy these things. They're already asking. Where's the next book?

Yes. Because I know they consume these, like the beach read sort of romance books and stuff like that. They consume them so fast, right? And they love the series. They love to some people even wait they'll buy the books and then wait till they're all out to read them because they want to just be able to go through so the netflix binge sort of sort of element where they like to binge read the books and jam them out yeah i don't know if netflix is a good thing

or a bad thing because we all do that now. We want that instant gratification. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting how people consume. We put out two, three, four shows a weekday, so that's 10, 15, 20 a week. And I assume, like people tell me they hop around. Some people say they hop around, but I assume if they want to listen to a romance novel like yourself that we have on the show, they'll kind of scour through all the romance ones and skip through the others. But they consume like 96% of our shows, all of them. Wow.

So I think some people just press play and just let it ride. Just let it go. So it's easy to be emotional. But yeah, we call ourselves the Netflix of podcasting because you can binge just about anything you want with the 2,000 shows we have up. And you have an eclectic mix of people who come on your channel too. Yeah, it's pretty much about everything. You know, you can find, like I said, we're like Netflix. You can find just about whatever you want, politics, romance. But it's interesting.

People think I'm funny for some reason. I don't know how much I'm paying them to think that. But for some reason, they believe it. You keep bringing them back. And they keep coming back. So God bless them. We love our audience. Final thoughts as we go out and pitch to people on the book to pick it up at a local bookstore.

Final thoughts. You will definitely like this book if you like history and romance and a little bit of suspense because you never know what's going to happen. Suspense is always good. Give us your dot coms as we go out so people can find you on the interwebs.

HarperStGeorge.com, Instagram at HarperStGeorge and on Facebook at HarperStGeorge. There you go. Well, it's been wonderful to have you on the show, Harper. We really appreciate it. Please come back for your future books. Thank you so much for having me. There you go.

Thanks for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, FortressCrispFoss, LinkedIn.com, FortressCrispFoss, and all those crazy places around the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.