""The mystery smolders; desire and queerness suffuse the pages."
--Sarah Weinman, The New York Times Book Review
"Carrasco's characters display emotional depth and intelligence amid escalating danger in a lawless atmosphere... This is a fast-paced and racy thriller that intriguingly explores gender roles and sexuality repressed and (covertly) expressed during its late-1800s setting."
--Joelle Egan, Booklist
"An addictive treat sure to please fans of Sarah Waters and HBO's Our Flag Means Death... Detailed historical research bolsters dynamic crime fiction in this spectacular queer adventure about opium smugglers in 19th-century Washington Territory.
--Shelf Awareness
""Rough Trade is at times a brilliantly twisty thriller, a tightly-examined glimpse into life on the early edge of American mythmaking, and a roustabout adventure that centers the people who kept the economy going both above and below the board and the table at the turn of the twentieth century."
-- The Lesbrary
"[O]utstanding... Readers who love to root for the rogues will gobble this up."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Katrina Carrasco's Rough Trade is the kind of high-octane queer adventure that the historical record can point us to in scraps of diaries and newspaper accounts of 'female bandits, ' but rarely do we get to luxuriate inside the lives of these bad-ass queer ancestors in such glorious fiction."
--HUGH RYAN, author of When Brooklyn Was Queer
"Rough Trade is a thrilling, fascinating game of shifting alliances and betrayals. The blazing heart of the novel is queer joy--queer spaces of the past brought to life in roaring, Technicolor glory, an unforgettable found family of rebels and outlaws, and timeless questions about the radical choices and sacrifices necessary to live an authentic life. I loved this book."
--KIM FU, author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
"Cunning and wildly compelling, Rough Trade is as lush as the smell of good tobacco, and just as dangerously addictive."
--LEV AC ROSEN, author of The Bell in the Fog
"In Rough Trade, Katrina Carrasco gives us the queer body as a source of joy. It's a delight to read of unexpected freedoms in our queer past."
--NICOLA GRIFFITH, author of Menewood
"Rough Trade is beautifully immersive. Stevedores, silk-clad ladies, and newspapermen grasp for power, and for each other, as this sharply drawn novel builds to a gripping conclusion that's just as tense and clever as Alma. I loved it."
--KATHARINE BEUTNER, author of Killingly
"Clever and twisty, stark and swift. If the gender-fluid, leads-with-their-jaw antihero doesn't get you and how can they not?--then the blood-thumping plot will."
--KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN, author of Sharks in the Time of Saviors
"Deliciously illicit, whiskey-soaked, and awash in impossible choices, Rough Trade grabs the reader with all the strength of its crate-hauling stevedores. Katrina Carrasco excels at creating characters we both love and hate as they drink, fight, and screw their way through Tacoma's criminal (and queer) underworld. You won't be able to put down this powder keg of a book until you find out just how it all goes down--or blows sky high."
--CARRIE CALLAGHAN, author of A Light of Her Own and Salt the Snow
