Necromancers and Navy Grog launches on May 15, 2026 which means I am officially in the final stretch of prelaunch chaos: checking links, refreshing pages I have no business refreshing, and pretending I am not emotionally invested in every tiny detail.
Naturally, this seemed like the right time to talk about a woman with a damaged face, a magical crime boss, and the price of being seen.
Gold Tooth Mary Hunter is one of the dangerous women at the heart of Necromancers and Navy Grog. She is a magical creature, an Irish immigrant who remade herself
in the Gold Rush era of San Francisco: first as a performer, then as a woman powerful enough to run a major part of the city’s criminal underworld.
Her beauty is her armor.
But by the time we meet her in 1881 in Necromancers and Navy Grog, that armor is beginning to fail.
Gold Tooth Mary is fiction, but the fear that drives her is not.
My great-great grandmother, Margaret Hyland, came to the United States from Ireland when she was fifteen years old. Along the way she married Alexander Hunter
When she was still a young woman, Margaret was severely injured on the right side of her face. Apparently there was an accident while pressure canning and she was struck by shrapnel when the canning equipment failed. It never fully healed. My grandmother told me Margaret wore a bandage, and perhaps a kind of half mask, for the rest of her life.
Her portrait shows the side of her face the world was allowed to see.
By the time my grandmother was a little girl, Margaret rarely left the house. She didn’t want to be seen. She died in her forties or fifties at least partially from complications from the wound. I don’t totally understand what happened but I found her death certificate via Ancestry and the wound on her face was listed as one of the causes of death. I was shocked at the time by how young she was but my grandma, Gigi, was able to confirm the address and her Uncle’s signature, ensuring I had the correct Margaret Hyland.
I love this this photo.
My grandma always talked about how beautiful Margaret’s hair was. She always bemoaned the fact her own was thin and straight unlike her grandmother’s thick waves.
I don’t know exactly how Margaret understood her own injury. I don’t know what she grieved, what she raged against, or what she made peace with.
I didn’t inherit her full biography.
But what I do have is an image and the story of a woman who slowly withdrew from the world because being seen had become unbearable.
Gold Tooth Mary is not Margaret. She is a woman who refuses to disappear. A woman who made beauty into a weapon because the world taught her beauty was power. A woman who is terrifying, vain, wounded, funny, ruthless, and far too clever to be safely pitied.
In Necromancers and Navy Grog, Mary isn’t the hero.
But she is one of the reasons I love this book and hope you will too!
This story is full of women who have learned to survive by becoming difficult to kill, difficult to own, and impossible to box in. Mick Kelly McClellan, Leona Freeman, Ah Toy, Abigail Colt, Gold Tooth Mary, the San Francisco Bay Rusalka — none of them are soft. None of them are simple.
That is the world Mick walks into when she reaches San Francisco.
Necromancers and Navy Grog launches May 15
The ebook launches May 15 on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.
The Amazon paperback is live TODAY, May 12, for those of you who like your bad magic in print!
And yes, the next one is underway!!!
I can’t say too much yet, because spoilers are rude and I am trying to behave like a professional. Well and, even though I am a plotter (mostly), things still change as you discover the story.
Next up: Mick is heading to a sprawling California ranch where a family inheritance, a murder among the heirs, and something ancient beneath the land are all waiting.
The past isn’t finished collecting its debts.
And this time, it has its eye on a nine-year-old girl.