The wait is over. Author Horane Smith’s 15th novel, The Queen that Wears the Crown, has now been published.

His previous book, Morant Bay:Based on the Jamaican Rebellion, was published in 2017, and the Jamaican-born author and former journalist explained, “I took a hiatus to prepare for retirement and to concentrate on my manuscripts to determine which one should be published next.”

“I’ve a reservoir of unpublished works and the hope is to get all of them into print after finding the right publisher,” he said from his Toronto home, where he has lived since 1990.

He told The Jamaica Observer that The Queen that Wears the Crown has an interesting history. It was his first novel written in Montego Bay in 1977 under a different title, The Village Queen. Smith said it was submitted to Kingston Publishers (now LMH Publishing) which recommended it for their upcoming new writers’ series back then. However, he migrated to Canada shortly after and never followed up on it. “I placed it at the bottom of other manuscripts I had written,” he said.

“Two years ago, my wife asked me whatever happened to that book, as she was the one who typed it on her Smith-Corona typewriter, shortly after we met,” he noted. “She recalled how it was a gripping tale, and I also remembered some of my friends in Montego Bay, where I lived at the time, lining up to read each page as I wrote it. Based on that level of interest, I decided to look at it again with fresh eyes.

“After reading The Village Queen I decided to use the same characters but reworked the plot to include contemporary issues like human trafficking and the deportees being sent here from the US, Canada, and the UK. BayMar Publishing was quick to accept the revised work. I truly believe it has the potential to go places.”

The Queen that Wears the Crown, which has been called “a thrilling mystery in a lush Caribbean landscape” (Independent Book Review) with characters that are “lively and appealing” (Booklife Publishers Weekly), is set in a small Jamaican town in south-eastern St Elizabeth, where Smith was born, and extends to Brooklyn, New York, and Toronto Canada.

In this fictional town of Parrot Valley, reminiscent of the landscape in the area where Smith was born, secrets run deep, and danger lurks in every shadow. It’s a tale of one woman’s fight for justice after three young girls go missing. When a deportee, who is the suspect, turns up dead, it complicates matters for social activist Carmen Young. Her efforts to find the girls uncover a truth darker than she can ever imagined. As the missing girls’ trail goes cold in Jamaica, the scenario in Brooklyn, New York, and Toronto Canada, remains the unseen and unsuspected piece of the puzzle.

Determined to bring justice to them, Carmen discovers a web of lies that ties the crime to her own life, putting her upcoming marriage and future in jeopardy. With her fiancé charged for murder and a trusted friend turned into her worst enemy, there’s a race against time to unravel the truth. As dark secrets and hidden motives come to light, Carmen realises that the real enemy is closer than she ever imagined.

“The Queen that Wears the Crown is a tense drama where betrayal, deception, and the pursuit of justice come at a deadly cost,” Smith said.

He told Bookends that the novel intends to raise awareness of the seriousness and increasing incidence of human trafficking worldwide. “A couple of years ago, I heard a Jamaican police official decrying the number of cases of human trafficking rearing its ugly head in Jamaica. People need to be aware of its far-reaching consequences as human depravity reaches a new low with crimes of this nature. The problem of deportations is not going away, either,” he added.

Smith is well-known for his popular novel, Lover’s Leap:Based on the Jamaican Legend, and its sequel Dawn at Lover’s Leap, which was a finalist in the USA Booknews Bestbook Awards for Historical Fiction. Morant Bay: Based on the Jamaican Rebellion completed the trilogy in the Lover’s Leap series.

Lover’s Leap was also used as the basis for a study into Caribbean slave-master relationships done by an Egyptian English Literature professor and published in the well-respected literary journal Orbis Literrarum, an international journal devoted to the study of European and American literature.

“One of my early readers compares the intrigue and magnetism in Lover’s Leap, my best-selling novel, to that of The Queen that Wears the Crown,” he noted.
Smith is also the first recipient of the BURLA Award for Oustanding Contribution to African-North American and Caribbean Literature. He has also been recognised by the Jamaica-Canada Diaspora Foundation for his contribution to Jamaican literature. His other popular works include Port Royal, Reggae Silver, Seven Days in Jamaica, Marooned in Nova Scotia: A Story of the Jamaican Maroons in Canada, and By the Rivers of Babylon.

BayMar Publishing is a small Canadian press committed to bringing stories from a diverse array of authors to life.

The Queen that Wears the Crown is available now online, at major bookstores, at horanesmith.com and www.baymarpublishing.com.