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Derry Women #12
Wind Chill: The Many Secrets of Ursula's Irish Stew
Even Ursula is shocked when she discovers the secret of her Irish stew. But just what is that secret...?
St. Patrick’s Day is swiftly approaching the US Naval base perched on the lava fields of Iceland. Derry woman Ursula has never given her stew recipe much thought, but when she and her best mate Reenie are roped into serving it to the troops, she has no idea of the uproar it will cause.
These two spirited women face adversary with grit and pluck in a darkly humorous tale of colliding worlds.
St. Patrick’s Day is swiftly approaching the US Naval base perched on the lava fields of Iceland. Derry woman Ursula has never given her stew recipe much thought, but when she and her best mate Reenie are roped into serving it to the troops, she has no idea of the uproar it will cause.
These two spirited women face adversary with grit and pluck in a darkly humorous tale of colliding worlds.
312 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 24, 2021
45 people are currently reading
65 people want to read
About the author
Gerald Hansen
29 books64 followersMember of the Mystery Writers of America and the Crime Writers Association, best-selling author Gerald Hansen was a Navy brat. He started school in Thailand, graduated high school in Iceland, with Germany, California and his mother's hometown of Derry, Northern Ireland in between. He attended Dublin City University, and also lived in London and Berlin. The first of his Derry Women Series, An Embarrassment of Riches, was an ABNA semifinalist in 2011. His Derry Murder Mysteries series has been a great success. He also has a travelogue series, Around the World with Jet Lag Jerry. He loves spicy food, wearing Ben Sherman and traveling around the world (still). He lives in NYC.
Author pic by Marcin Kaliski
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 26, 2021
Aunt Daphne, the elderly woman who could go into a rage after too much whiskey at Christmas, almost steals Ursula’s top spot in Wind Chill, but, not quite. Daphne is the ground work of Ursula’s Irish Flood family backstory.
Before it was Ursula’s Irish stew, it was the Flood Irish stew, and the secret was top secret with only one woman able to know it, and only passed down, well, I won’t spoil that secret here. Connected to passing the secret is the scene with Ursula learning from Aunt Daphne’s telling of family history of 13 living in a one-room thatched-roof cottage with a mingin dirt floor, window tax, no bog roll for the humans, in the same room with chickens, two pigs and a cow relieving themselves wherever they stand, and eating thin soup made in a hanging pot “…over an open fire in the middle of the one room thronged with animals.” Not a pretty picture, but told with laugh-out-loud humor and horror.
Wanes run amok, unexpected whopper bills, Celtic queens, Fenian bitches, British aggressors are all not-so-secret ingredients in Gerald Hansen’s Derry Women Series, but this one set in the top-secret world of an American Naval Air Station in Iceland had me laughing out loud enough to wake up others in my wee abode. Dark humor and history abound in Hansen’s Wind Chill, The Many Secrets of Ursula’s Irish Stew. #Enjoyed
Before it was Ursula’s Irish stew, it was the Flood Irish stew, and the secret was top secret with only one woman able to know it, and only passed down, well, I won’t spoil that secret here. Connected to passing the secret is the scene with Ursula learning from Aunt Daphne’s telling of family history of 13 living in a one-room thatched-roof cottage with a mingin dirt floor, window tax, no bog roll for the humans, in the same room with chickens, two pigs and a cow relieving themselves wherever they stand, and eating thin soup made in a hanging pot “…over an open fire in the middle of the one room thronged with animals.” Not a pretty picture, but told with laugh-out-loud humor and horror.
Wanes run amok, unexpected whopper bills, Celtic queens, Fenian bitches, British aggressors are all not-so-secret ingredients in Gerald Hansen’s Derry Women Series, but this one set in the top-secret world of an American Naval Air Station in Iceland had me laughing out loud enough to wake up others in my wee abode. Dark humor and history abound in Hansen’s Wind Chill, The Many Secrets of Ursula’s Irish Stew. #Enjoyed
March 17, 2023
Smart and unusual
A sly peek into the Derry minds and the inadvertent difficulties these two Irish Lucy types get into is all quite charming and believable. Loved it.
A sly peek into the Derry minds and the inadvertent difficulties these two Irish Lucy types get into is all quite charming and believable. Loved it.
March 18, 2025
Living in Buffalo, NY, I thought this might be a fun March read, with the wind chill and a St Patrick’s Day theme. I felt that the story was weak in a lot of ways: scientific inaccuracies, unlikely character portrayals, poor editing, and some extraneous chapters at the end that added nothing to the story. Nonetheless there was enough humor to make me giggle at times, and it generated some nostalgia for the fashion and music of the 1970s. I wouldn’t read another by this author, but it was a decent light read.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews