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Last Dance Before Dawn:
The Nightingale Mysteries
Vivian Kelly has finally created a home and a family at the glamorous speakeasy known as The Nightingale, where no one cares who you are in the daytime. After all, in the underground world of 1920s New York City, everyone has a secret to keep, and they’re on the Nightingale’s dance floor to leave those secrets behind. But sometimes it takes more than a dance to escape your past. When a stranger from Chicago shows up at The Nightingale looking to settle old scores, Vivian and the Nightingale’s owner, the mysterious and alluring Honor Huxley, send him packing.
They soon discover, though, that the stranger was just a warning. Slowly, the people who have made The Nightingale their home realize that someone is following them. Hunting them. And that someone won’t stop until they unravel a mystery that’s been cold for years: a missing girl, a boy out for revenge, and a truck full of cash that disappeared in a job gone horribly wrong. Vivian just wants to protect the people she loves, and she’s willing to dig into the dirt of the past to make it happen.
But some questions are safer left unanswered, and now that Vivian has built a family for herself, she has more to lose than ever before.
Now experience this Edgar Award–nominated historical mystery in paperback!
Praise for Last Dance Before Dawn:
“A lively, sprawling crime story that captures the vibrancy of the Roaring ’20s.” ~ Kirkus Reviews
Book Details:
Genre: Historical Mystery Published by: Minotaur Books Publication Date: May 26, 2026 | Paperback Number of Pages: 350 ISBN: 978-1250325822 Series: The Nightingale Mysteries, Book 4 || Amazon, Goodreads, Macmillan Publishers Book Links: Amazon | Kindle | Barnes & Noble | BookShop.org | Goodreads | BookBub | Macmillan Publishers
Does the Author Decide, or Do the Characters? Guest Post by Katharine Schellman
There’s an ongoing debate among writers: are we the ones telling our characters what to? Do we make up the plots and decide what happens? Or do the characters take on a life of their own while the author follows along and writes it all down?
Ask any author, and they’ll probably have a strong opinion about which it is. (People who write books and put them out in the world, you may not be surprised to know, have strong opinions about a lot of things.) I think the answer is somewhere in between. To me, the real key is character consistency.
I don’t think my characters are deciding what to do without me. But I do think that if I’ve built believable characters, I’ll know what to do with my plots. Or, more specifically, what not to do. That’s because believable characters are consistent. And if they are going to act in a way that feels inconsistent, you have to have a really good reason for it.
If I’ve created a character who is deathly afraid of spiders and readers know that this person will absolutely lose it if they are forced to be near spiders, I can’t then write a plot where that character casually decides to walk through a room full of spiders. Readers will immediately notice the inconsistency. They’ll be pulled out of the story, and both the character and the plot will no longer be believable.
If I want my character to walk through that room full of spiders, I need a compelling reason. Is their missing child on the other side? The chance to win ten million dollars? The answer to the burning question about what really happened to their mother twenty years ago?
Whatever it is, it has to be something significant enough that a reader will think, yup, they would hate it, but they would do it.
Character consistency guides you toward the correct plot, which can feel a whole lot like the character telling you what to do. And if your character is acting inconsistently without a good reason, the book is never going to feel like it works.
I ran headfirst into this conundrum while writing Last Dance Before Dawn, my suspenseful historical thriller set New York City during the Jazz Age. In order for my plot to work, my main character, Vivian Kelly, needed to have a confrontation with a shady bootlegger who had appeared in town. I had already established that the man knew something important about Vivian’s long-lost father, information that she desperately wanted and that would move the plot forward in important ways.
The trouble was, to make the confrontation work, Vivian had to arrive alone. And there was no way her protective older sister, Florence, would let her take off on her own. I’d already established that Florence would do anything to keep her little sister safe. It didn’t make sense for the confrontation to happen just between Vivian and the bootlegger.
Since it didn’t make sense, I didn’t do it. Vivian could take off on her own, but Florence would follow. That’s exactly what I wrote.
Adding Florence into that scene suddenly made it more dynamic, more exciting, and more dangerous. Because (a fun little spoiler just for readers here) not only had I written Florence as protective, I had also established that she was highly practical. So unlike the determined but impulsive Vivian, Florence showed up armed.
That turned it into a really fun scene. The final result was much better than what I had originally come up with on my own. All because of character consistency.
So does the writer decide or the character? A little bit of both. What it really comes to do is staying true to the characters you’ve created.
If you want them to behave in surprising ways, you have to give them a really good reason to do it. And those reasons are what, ultimately, will drive the story forward.
Read an excerpt of Last Dance Before Dawn:
Manhattan, 1925
Everyone came to the Nightingale looking for something.
They didn’t have much else in common, the folks who snuck down the alley toward a single electric light that flickered like it had been forgotten for years and could burn out at any moment. You never knew who would whisper the password at the door under the light, who would make their way through the midnight velvet curtains that muffled loud laughter and louder jazz.
Maybe your family could have bought half of Fifth Avenue, or maybe you couldn’t even buy new shoes. More likely, you lived somewhere in between, with work that paid your bills and the hope, one day, of something a little more. At the Nightingale, it didn’t matter who you were in the daytime. If you could hold your booze and let loose on the dance floor and keep a secret for a stranger, you were in.
They came looking for excitement, for the thrill of breaking a law that no one liked anyway. They came to dance and drink and maybe find a new friend, the sort of friend who— after a glass or three of champagne— would meet them in a quiet corner to get a little bit friendlier.
They came because they loved the music, the way it curled through the air and carried them across the floor, the way the singer’s voice filled the room and made their hearts ache.
They came for the party. They came to escape.
If they were lucky, they could pretend that whatever waited for them back at home didn’t exist. They could lose themselves in the music and the arms of someone new. They could feel free, even if it would never last, because in that moment nothing mattered but the next dance, the next drink, the next hour.
If they were lucky, they found what they were looking for, and they left before trouble could find them.
But not everyone was lucky.
***
Vivian recognized the sound of danger before she even realized what she was hearing.
Twilight had settled on the city, humid and heavy and speckled with the glow of streetlamps. She and Beatrice Henry— Beatrice Bluebird, as she was known at the Nightingale, where she sang six nights a week— moved through it with the practiced carefulness of two women who were used to navigating New York’s streets alone. Their steps were quick, but their eyes were quicker, always on the lookout for a man who might be trouble or a cop who might be trailing them.
The Nightingale paid off the police weekly, like any other dance hall or juice joint. But everyone who worked there knew to be wary just the same.
It was that wariness that sent a prickle of warning down Vivian’s back when they were two blocks from the Nightingale’s back entrance.
“Bea— ” Vivian tossed out a hand to stop her friend in the middle of the sidewalk. A few steps ahead of them, a cat yowled as it ran out of a narrow alley. “You hear that?”
For a moment, the only sound out of the ordinary was the distant grumble of thunder. Then Vivian heard it again.
“Look a little closer, pal.” The voice was low and menacing, snaking out of the shadows and clearly not meant to be overheard. “I want to make sure you and me is on the same page.”
“Viv— ” Bea hissed, but Vivian couldn’t help herself; she took a step forward, just enough to peek down the alley.
Halfway down the narrow stretch of filthy brick walls, two men were just visible in the fast- fading light. One had his back against a wall. He was the taller of the two, but he still shrank back from the menacing bulk of the second figure. That one loomed toward him, his wide shoulders cutting off any escape as he shoved some kind of paper toward the nervous man’s face.
“—told you, when I have something, I’ll let you—”
The menacing man shoved him against the wall, the gesture nearly careless enough to hide the violence of it. The voice broke off with a grunt of pain, but it had been enough. Usually, Vivian would have stayed far away from anything that sounded like a beating and wasn’t her business. But she recognized that voice.
“Don’t interrupt,” the menacing man snarled. “My boss don’t take kindly to rude fu—”
“It’s Spence,” Vivian hissed.
Bea tried to pull her away. “It’s not our business. We can tell Silence or Benny,” she whispered, naming two of the bruisers who worked at the Nightingale keeping customers— and anyone else who needed it— in line. “They’ll come handle it.”
“That’ll take too long.” Vivian shook her head, pulling away from Bea’s cautious hand and running down the alley toward trouble. “Hey! Leave him alone!”
The bruiser barely glanced over his shoulder at her, just cocked his fist back and drove it, almost casually, into the nervous man’s stomach. He doubled over, heaving and gasping for air, as his assailant tipped his hat mockingly. “We’ll be seeing you soon, boyo. You can count on it.”
He was gone before Vivian could reach them. She stood, panting and staring at the gap between buildings where he had disappeared. A drizzling rain began to fall, plastering her hair against her cheeks. She wasn’t dumb enough to go after him.
“You okay, Spence?” she asked instead, turning toward the remaining man as he braced his hands on his knees.
“Swell,” croaked the Nightingale’s second bartender, a lanky, mouthy, handsome grump. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Apparently chasing off the fella who was about to beat you to a pulp,” she said, stung. Spence had been working at the Nightingale all summer and still hadn’t managed to endear himself to any of the other staff. But Vivian had expected at least some gratitude. Instead, he scowled at her like she was the one who had just punched him in the stomach, not the one who had run the attacker off. “But no need to say thanks or anything.”
He hauled himself upright, wincing. “I had it handled, you know,” he said, still sounding resentful. “I didn’t need a rescue.”
“Sure you did, pal,” Bea said, joining them at last. “That was a stupid thing to do, by the way,” she added, glancing at Vivian as she opened her umbrella and held it over both their heads. “Be glad he didn’t have a friend waiting to beat the stuffing out of you too.”
“My stuffing’s doing just fine,” Spence groused, pushing his wet hair off his forehead and straightening his jacket and tie.
“What was that about?” Vivian asked, laying a hand on his arm. “Spence? Are you in trouble?”
Reproduced with permission from Katharine Schellman. All rights reserved.
Last Dance Before Dawn Author Katharine Schellman:
Katharine Schellman is an award-winning author of historical crime fiction, including the Nightingale Mysteries and the Lily Adler Mysteries, whose work has been called “worthy of Rex Stout or Agatha Christie” (Library Journal).
Her books have been nominated for an Edgar and a Silver Falchion, and she has won a Zibby Media National Book Award for “Best Book for the History Lover.” A former actor, onetime political consultant, and graduate of William & Mary, Katharine lives and writes in the mountains of Virginia.
Catch Up With Katharine Schellman:
www.katharineschellman.com Amazon Author Profile Goodreads – @katharineschellman BookBub – @katharineschellman Instagram – @katharinewrites Facebook – @katharineschellman
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