The pub date for Murder on Principle is August 3rd, although I have heard that many people have already received the book.
I set up a giveaway on Goodreads so join in and win a free copy.
The reviews so far have all been very good to great!
So happy to see some good reviews for the next Will Rees, due out August 3, 2021
From Kirkus: A complex mystery that focuses on the institutional racism still sadly ingrained in the nation’s psyche.
From Publishers Weekly: The intricate plot builds to a satisfying resolution. This sobering look at the cultural divide over slavery in the early days of the Republic deserves a wide audience.
I really hope other readers enjoy this book too.
I spent most of my vacation working on edits for the next Will Rees: Murder, Sweet Murder.
It is a little amusing to be working so hard on the next in the series when Murder on Principle will not be published until August 3rd.
In this book, Rees and Lydia journey to Boston to investigate an accusation leveled against Lydia’s father. I wrote this one at the request of readers who wanted to know more about Lydia’s past.
I am so excited to present the cover of Murder, Sweet Murder. No publication date yet.
I have posted a giveaway on Goodreads for Death in the Great Dismal.
Rees and Lydia travel to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia to rescue their friend Ruth, a fugitive who has fled to the swamp and the protection of a village of maroons. As soon as Rees and Lydia arrive, one of the members of the village is found murdered. Rees and Lydia, as well as Ruth’s husband Tobias, are immediately suspect. To clear their names, and to leave the swamp for home, Rees investigates.
The new Will Rees, Murder on Principle
The owner of the people Rees and Lydia have escorted to safety in Maine arrives to recover the fugitives. When he is murdered, his sister and a number of slave takers arrive. Rees faces an ethical dilemma. Does he investigate and identify the murderer – who might have had very good reasons to kill the slave owner? Or does he let the murderer go free?
Murder on Principle will be released on August 3. A giveaway will be posted for the new book in July.
Read Death in the Great Dismal to prepare for Murder on Principle.
Very excited to post this interview for NFReads.
# Please introduce yourself and your book(s)!
I write a series of historical murder mysteries set in the Federalist Period (roughly 1790’s to early 1800s). I am up to about 1802 now. My protagonists are a traveling weaver, Will Rees, and his wife Lydia, a former Shaker. The first book in the series is A Simple Murder, which is set against a Shaker community in Maine. That community, I call it Zion but it is loosely based on Sabbathday Lake in Alfred, Maine, plays an important role in many of the mysteries.
# What is/are the real-life story(ies) behind your book(s)?
Many of the Shaker communities are now living museums. Sabbathday Lake still has Shakers living there so they give tours to visitors. When my husband and I stopped, our tour was given by the daughter of an orphan who had been raised by this community. She had numerous anecdotes. That was the beginning of my interest in the Shakers.
# What inspires/inspired your creativity?
I hand weave as a hobby so it is something I can describe accurate. Also, during the era before the Industrial Revolution, both men and women wove – the men as a profession.
When I visited the Shaker communities, I bought books and the self-published booklets of prayers, rules, biographies and so forth and I return to them over and over for inspiration.
I also continue to research the period since every book is at a slightly different place in history. I find sending them to other places, Salem for example, or the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia, really inspires a story.
# How do you deal with creative block?
So far, this has not been a issue. There are not enough hours in the day and I struggle to make time for my writing.
# What are the biggest mistakes you can make in a book?
Information dumps, without a doubt. Especially in historical novels where it is important to set the time and place. Always a struggle to pepper information throughout.
# Do you have tips on choosing titles and covers?
I try to find a title that us captivating and short enough to remember easily. Not as simple as it appears. Covers are the same. So far, my favorite cover is for The Great Dismal Swamp; it really illustrates a dark and spooky nature of the swamp.
# How do bad reviews and negative feedback affect you and how do you deal with them?
It is difficult since sometimes I wonder if they’ve actually read my book. But an editor once told me that they will happen. You can’t please everyone all the time.
# How has your creation process improved over time?
I am more focused now. In the beginning, I threw in just about everything I was thinking of.
# What were the best, worst and most surprising things you encountered during the entire process of completing your book(s)?
How many people write in about mistakes, perceived or otherwise. Sometimes, to my shame, they are right. Quirky little mistakes do slip through. But sometimes, they think they know something and I have researched it thoroughly and know they are wrong. Always difficult.
# Do you tend towards personal satisfaction or aim to serve your readers? Do you balance the two and how?
I try to do both. I want to write something that is meaningful to me but at the same time write a good story. I want to teach and entertain at the same time.
# What role do emotions play in creativity?
I think it is easier to write about something that engages the emotions. I feel if it matters to me, I can convey its importance to the reader.
# Do you have any creativity tricks?
I read a lot. (?)
# What are your plans for future books?
I still have several ideas about Rees’s journey on his path to fully fledged adult. Along the way, I hope to illuminate some little known facts of American History.
# Tell us some quirky facts about yourself
I am a lifelong librarian. I wrote my first story at the age of ten; it was science fiction. I love all of the textile crafts. One of the things I love about research is how many weird things I’ve learned. I try to feature a job/profession that was common in that time. Most have diminished to craft status, such as weaving, but some are no more.
I associated the Fugitive Slave Law with the Civil War. The truth is, however, the first iteration of the law was signed into effect in 1793, long before I would have guessed. It is important to remember that many of the founding fathers, including George Washington, were slave owners.
In Death in the Great Dismal,
when Rees and Lydia rescue their friends Tobias and Ruth, they were breaking the law. Although both Tobias and Ruth had both been born free in Maine, they were abducted and sold into slavery. (The slave takers frequently took any person of color, born free or not, for sale in the South. Occasionally, white children were stolen as well.)
Not only were escaped people subject to recapture, anyone who obstructed the slave takers were considered in violation of the law. Moreover, any child born to an enslaved mother was also considered to be enslaved. The prevailing custom was one drop of black blood meant that person was considered black, no matter how light-skinned. Rees and Lydia, therefore, could have been in serious trouble if they had been caught.
The full text of the Act is available from the Library of Congress (and online) in the Annals of Congress of the 2ndCongress, 2nd Session, during which the proceedings and debates took place from November 5, 1792 to March 2, 1793.
The appropriate sections are 3 and 4.
By the end of the American Revolution all of the Northern states had abolished slavery or made provision to do so. (The United States abolished the slave trade in 1808.) However, fugitives could and were returned to the Southern states per the Fugitive Slave Act by men whose profession, if you will, was capturing escapees.
This law was further strengthened in 1850 at the request of the slave states. One of the elements most annoying to Northerners was the three-fifths rule that counted every five slaves as three people and therefore gave the slave states much more representation in Congress. Although there were abolitionists prior to 1850, the revised law caused a tremendous increase in people who identified as anti-slavery.
The term Underground Railroad did not come into common use until the construction of actual railroads became widespread. An abolitionist newspaper published a cartoon in 1844 that pictured a rail car packed with fugitives heading for Canada. Use of ‘conductor’ and other railroad terms came into broader use after the 1850 law.
In Death in the Great Dismal, one of my primary characters (Cinte) makes and plays and early form of the banjo. (The modern name; it had many others.)
The banjo came to America with the enslaved peoples, some scholars think by way of the Caribbean and the slaves imported by the Portuguese. In any event, there are over 60 similar plucked instruments, including the akonting, the ngoni, and the xalam, played in West Africa that bear some resemblance to the banjo. Early, African- influenced banjos, had a calabash or gourd body covered with hide and a long wooden stick neck, Usually the banjos had three strings with a shorter, drone string.
The earliest mention in the American Colonies occurred in the 17th century. The first known picture of a man playing a banjo-like instrument (The Old Plantation, circa 1785-1795) shows a four stringed instrument as described above. Banjo-playing was perpetuated in the plantations and the slave-labor camps as I describe in my mystery.
The banjo in its modern form is a melding of the old form with European influences, a flat fingerboard and tuning pegs. The pictures show both fretted and unfretted varieties. During the 1830 and 1840s, playing the banjo spread beyond the enslaved to the enslavers, Minstrels shows featuring the banjos became popular. After the Civil War, the banjos spread to drawing rooms and other venues.
The banjo was re-popularized once again during the folk revival by such performers as Pete Seeger.
American Music owes a huge debt to the men and women brought here so unwillingly and would be a lot less rich without these influences.
In Death in the Great Dismal, I take a temporary break from Rees’s world; the District of Maine and the community of Shakers who live nearby, to send him and Lydia south to Virginia.
Rees is asked by his friend Tobias to rescue his wife Ruth from the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia. Rees and Lydia agree, somewhat reluctantly, and travel to the swamp. (The swamp still exists, bridging 100,000 acres in Southern Virginia into northern North Carolina, and has been declared a Wildlife Refuge.)
There, Tobias guides them to a small village of fugitives, who were living hand to mouth, in the depths of the swamp. Who were these people?
Well, first of all, the existence of the Maroons is true and historically accurate. The hunger for freedom was so acute that many people fled slavery, preferring to take their chances in the hostile environment of the swamp. Daniel Sayers, an archeologist, has done excavations to identify some of the sites of the villages. The village structures were built of wood and, because of the climate in the swamp, they have all rotted. There are no stones of any kind in the swamp but Sayers found remnants of post holes and pottery shards. Why were they called Maroons. No one really knows. One theory is that the name is from the French, marronage, to flee.
Although not well known until recently, the existence of these small villages is present in the historical record. Slave takers were sent regularly into the swamp to recapture escapees – with mixed success. Some of these Maroons lived so deep within the swamp, surviving and raising families, that they could not be found. The children born here grew up in their turn, and the descendent of the original fugitives did not leave the swamp until after the Civil War. They had never seen a white person.
As I describe, male slaves were regularly hired by the Dismal Canal Company to dig the canal. The overseers turned a blind eye to the maroons who worked as shingle makers, despite knowing they were fugitives, because these shingle makers helped make the quotas.
I also based my character Quaco, on an historical account of a man who, brought to Virginia on a slave ship, escaped to the swamp as soon as he arrived. He survived by hunting, and dressed himself in the skins of the animals in killed. He never learned English.
During the course of the Will Rees mysteries, midwives have made appearances in several books. Lydia herself has had occasion to require the services of a midwife and (spoiler alert) will need her again.
Midwives have a long history. There are references to midwives in Ancient Greek and Roman texts as well as in the Bible.
In the seventeenth century, however, the reliance on midwives began to diminish. Male doctors began to claim they were the proper individuals to help women deliver their babies. The men were educated while the women were ignorant. (And that was the kindest insult. They were also accused of being lazy, dirty and drunk.)
In A Midwife’s Tale; the Life of Martha Ballard, 1785 – 1812, edited by Laura Thatcher Ulrich, the midwife’s perception was much different. Most of these women had borne children themselves (although not all) and they were very experiences. Usually a younger woman would shadow an older midwife (it was not always a formal apprenticeship) to learn the necessary skills.
The male doctors, although they believed themselves far better at this, did not have the years of practice. In the above autobiography, there is a harrowing scene in which the male doctor takes the baby in a breech birth out in pieces. He had not learned to massage the mothers abdomen to turn the baby for the birth
The male doctors were also guilty of spreading puerperal fever. They would not wash their hands after dissecting corpses, going immediately to deliver babies. This has been well documented.
The account by Martha Ballard illustrates both the difficulties and the rewards of this profession. She leaves home at all hours and during all weathers to deliver babies. But she is far better paid for her skills than she would have been at any other type of ‘women’s work’,
It was her proud claim that, during all her years of practice, she lost only three babies.
When Rees and Lydia accompany their friend Tobias to the Great Dismal Swamp to rescue his wife, they do so as much to mend their own relationship as to help a friend. (Marriage is challenging and Will and Rees’s relationship was tested in A Circle of Dead Girls.)
The swamp proves to be a more challenging environment, and the community in which Ruth has taken refuge, more exotic than they could ever have guessed.
From the 1700s right up to the Civil War, fugitives from the neighboring plantations fled into the swamp to escape bondage. The swamp, which was more than a million acres at that time, (estimates range from one million to three million acres) was and is still a harsh environment. The Great Dismal has shrunk to 112 thousand acres. A Wildlife Sanctuary, it is home to deer, a large population of black bears, bobcats, more than 200 species of birds and many insects. (Insect repellent is a must.) It is a peat bog; items dropped on the thick water-soaked peat can disappear without a trace in a manner of minutes.