This week I finished the final two books that my panel authors will be discussion at Malice Domestic. I always enjoy finding new authors.
The first book I read was The Murderess Must Die by Marlie Wasserman.
This is a fictionalized account of a true crime. Martha Place was accused of the murder of her stepdaughter Ida and the attack with an axe on her husband William, She was poorly represented by counsel and became the first woman to be executed via the electric chair. Horrifying and Thought provoking.
The second book is one that I read when it was first released: Death at the Emerald by R.J. Koreto.
This is the third in the Lady Frances Folks Edwardian mysteries. Frances Is asked by Lady Torrance to look for her daughter Louisa, who ran away to become an actress. I really hope the author pens a few more in this series. Beautiful written and charming.
This week I read two of the five books we will be discussing at Malice Domestic. I previously read Front Page Murder.
Cry of the Innocent, by Julie Bates, takes place right before the American Revolution begins. Widow Faith Clarke runs a tavern in Williamsburg.
Start writing or type / to choose a block
She is far more worried about her tavern and inn than about the rumblings of revolt among the citizens. Then a wealthy and influential man, widely reputed to engage in the slave trade, is murdered in her spare room. A young slave, Stella, is accused of the crime. Faith is sure the slim young woman is not guilty and embarks on an investigation of her own.
So many of the themes raised in this mystery are relevant to today. The characters are wonderfully drawn. Recommended.
The second book I read is Death on the Homefront, by Frances McNamara. This is another war book, although the war in this book is World War I.
Tensions rise as the threat of the United States involvement in World War I increase. Emotions against Germans rise and those who fight for peace are considered traitors.
Emily Cabot is present when a young woman about to make a brilliant society marriage is murdered. Hazel is Emily’s daughter’s best friend. A waiter with a German surname is arrested; public emotion against the Germans is rising. A civilian run force is trying to find spies and saboteurs, and attacking anyone they feel are treasonous. At the same time, violent worker protests are threatening bombings.
Emily watches with fear and trepidation as her adult children are caught up in the events, making dangerous choices.
The first book I read this week was The Bluff by John Dedakis.
Another in the Lark Chadwick series. Lark in invited to anchor a news show at the local television station at the same time one of the students in her journalism class is hired by editor Lionel. They are assigned a land scam story in which a large number of senior have been defrauded of plots of land.
As they investigate, Lark begins to read the diary left by Lionel’s daughter Holly. Both Lionel and his wife Muriel were devastated by Holly’s death in a climbing accident.
But Lark begins to suspect the accident was really murderer.
The characters are well drawn and the mysteries are captivating. Recommended.
The second book I read is Betrayal at Ravenswick.
Fiona Figg works for British Intelligence during World War I. She is sent to Ravenswick in disguise as a man, Dr Vogel, to confirm whether a man staying there is actually a German spy. Shortly after his/her arrival, a murder occurs at the ‘Big House”. Fiona can’t help herself. Despite being told not to involve herself in local matters, she begins to investigate.
Because of her interference, she becomes a suspect and has to be extracted by way of a phony arrest.
Glad to return to her woman’s role, she continues her volunteer work at the hospital. Captain Clifford, on the scene at Ravenswyck and now also assigned to British intelligence, displays an interest in Fiona. She is able to manipulate him into finding evidence and clearing the accused innocent man.
My main problem is that the mystery at Ravenswyck disappears when Fiona returns to London and is only reintroduced towards the end. It felt like another book was sandwiched into the middle.
Next week, I will be discussing the books of my panelists. I will be moderating a panel: Historical; the Rapture of Research, at Malice Domestic on April 22. The conference, the first in=person since 2019, will run from April 21 through April 25. I am looking forward to it. I always love finding new authors and what could be better than talking about books?
Even though the U.S. banned the importation of the enslaved from Africa in 1808, slavery itself was not banned and the enslaved were not freed. Slavery continued to be critical to the economy, particularly in the south but in the north as well. The high demand for slave labor from the cotton trade (the cotton woven into cloth at New England textile factories) encouraged some plantation owners, such as Alabama plantation owner Timothy Meaher, to risk illegal slave runs to Africa. In 1860, his schooner Clotilda sailed from Mobile to what was then the Kingdom of Dahomey He bought Africans captured by warring tribes back to Alabama, creeping into Mobile Bay under the cover of night. Some of the enslaved were divided between Foster and the Meahers, and others were sold. Foster then ordered the Clotilda taken upstream, burned and sunk to conceal the evidence.
After the Civil War, the freed slaves wished to return to Africa but did not have the money to do so. They set up a town in Alabama, near Mobile, called Africatown. It is set up under the same system as the African villages with a chief, a system of laws, a church and a school.
Based on stories told by modern day descendants living in Africatown, a search for the ship Clotilde was begun. Ben Baines, a reporter, found a shipwreck but it was too large to be the schooner. A company that specializes in maritime shipwreck recovery took on the job. Although the wreckage of the Clotilda was not very deep in the water, maybe eight to ten feet, the visibility was so poor that it was hard to find. It was finally recovered in 2019.
The Clotilda is proof that the slave trade went on for far longer than it should have, by law, and far longer than most of us believe.
Inequality is not a new phenomenon. Through most of human history, recorded history for sure, most of the resources have been coopted by the few. One of the few times in history when there was a big shake up was during the Black Death. Entire villages were wiped out. Crops rotted in the fields. With such a diminished labor pool, surviving serfs were able to negotiate better wages and working conditions for themselves.
However, change usually comes about through some cataclysm or continuous revolts.
In the United States, most of the founding fathers were wealthy and quite a few were plantation owners with slaves. (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, e.g.) Although Will Rees, of the Will Rees mysteries is not poor, he and his family do struggle a bit to make ends meet. Besides farming, Rees takes his loom and weaves for farmwives for a bit of ‘cash money’. Lydia sells her eggs and cheese at market.
Rees comes face to face with the difference in wealth in Murder, Sweet Murder. Lydia receives a frantic letter from her sister begging her to come to Boston. Their father, Marcus Farrell, has been accused of murder. Although Lydia is reluctant, she has been estranged from her father for years, he is still her father. She and Rees, along with the baby and daughter Jerusha, head off to Boston.
Although Rees knew Lydia came from money, he is shocked by the wealth of the Farrell family. The large house is stocked with servants, they own several vehicles including a carriage with a matched foursome, and apparently money is no object.
The Farrells also look down upon Rees for his more humble life. He grew up on a poor farm and certainly does not make enough for servants.
But Marcus Farrell is enmeshed in the Triangle Trade. He owns sugar plantations in the Caribbean as well as a distillery in Boston and a fleet of ships to transport slaves from Africa.
Marcus Farrell, it seems, is morally bankrupt. The question is, is he also a murderer?
In Murder, Sweet Murder, I continued looking at slavery in the United States, following Death in the Great Dismal and Murder on Principle. Since the importation of slaves was not forbidden until1808 (but there was plenty of smuggling through Spanish Florida as well as other slave ships that ignored the law. The Clotilda brought 110 children from Africa in 1859.), Rees’s father-in-law was still bringing in enslaved people during the Rees family’s visit to Boston.
Lydia had already fled the family home, joining the Shakers in Maine as a young woman. This is where she met Will Rees. Now her brother James, a sea captain, is estranged from their father. James refuses to engage in ‘that filthy trade’, his words. Conditions on the ships were horrific.
It is commonly assumed that slavery was wholly a Southern institution. Nothing could be further than the truth. During the Colonial period and through the Revolution, slavery was widespread. However, after the War for Independence, states such as New York and New Jersey began passing laws to abolish slavery gradually. By 1804, all the Northern states had passed laws outlawing slavery, either immediately or incrementally.
No Southern states abolished slavery although individual owners freed their slaves.
The demand for slaves increased dramatically with the invention of the cotton gin and cotton became ‘King Cotton’. The rising demand for sugar also increased the amount of land on the plantations in Jamaica and the other islands devoted to sugar. Plantations that once grew indigo and cacao switched to sugar, as I describe in the mystery.
Both sugar and cotton exhaust the soil, so plantation owners looked west for fresh land. That, of course, amplified the conflict between the free states and the slave states and set the stage for the Missouri Compromise where Missouri entered the union as a slave state and Maine, formerly part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as a free state.
This week was my spiritualism/seances week, totally unplanned.
The first book I read was Spirits and Smoke by Mary Miley.
Miley is continuing her second series that takes place in 1930’s Chicago. In this one, a seemingly random event, the death of a banker from a ‘smoke’ cocktail turns into bank fraud, the Chicago gangs, and of course murder and spiritualism. The characters are first rate, the setting is fabulous, and the mystery was fun. One of the best books I’ve read in a long time.
I also read City of Shadows by Victoria Thompson.
The spiritualist in this book is not so benign as in the Miley Mystery. Madame Ophelia has a con going to bilk widows out of the funds their husband have left them. But not to worry. Elizabeth Bates, her brother Jake, the Old Man and other current and former con artists are on the case.
As I looked around the table at Christmas dinner, and saw people who had not spoken to one another for years, I thought of how complicated families could be.
In Murder, Sweet Murder, I set the mystery against Lydia’s family, but Will Rees’s is no less difficult.
Lydia, estranged from her father and step-mother, left her family years ago. Her father is a wealthy Boston merchant engaged in the Triangle Trade. He owns a distillery that distills molasses into rum as well a fleet of ships that run slaves from Africa.
Lydia cannot accept her father’s profession and after some problems in her personal live, runs away. She lands at Zion, a Shaker community in Maine. In Murder, Sweet Murder I bring her back to Boston, and her family. She is no more tolerant of her father’s profession now than she was then.
Rees’s father was an abusive alcoholic who died by falling off a wagon in a drunken stupor. Rees is not an alcoholic but he makes other mistakes with his children. Before the action begins in A Simple Murder, David, Rees’s oldest son runs away from home, and takes refuge in Zion with the Shakers. Rees had left David (he would say his father abandoned him) with Caroline and her husband. When Rees returns home and recovers the farm, sending Caroline’s family packing, she never forgives him.
In A Devil’s Cold Dish, Caroline does her very best to destroy her brother and his family.
As the stories go on, and Rees’s history unfolds, his family expands. But it also changes. By the time of Murder, Sweet Murder, Jerusha, Rees’s oldest daughter, wants to leave home for school. David and Simon have already left for a farm in a distant town.
Rum was the lubricant and the fuel for the engine of commerce leading up to the American Revolution and a bit beyond. It was a favorite drink of the slavers, the slaves, and pretty much everyone else. Called Nelson’s blood (as well as a number of less flattering names), rum made up part of the British sailors’ pay.
What is rum? Rum is distilled from the molasses left over from sugarcane. The cane has particular requirement and cannot be grown in the temperate lands. It must be grown with lots of sun and water. It also needs intensive labor to cut, cart and process the cane under the tropical sun. A clear and distinct link between the growing demand for sugar and slavery can be drawn because, as plantations were turned over to cane, the needs of a large work force demanded more workers – Slaves.
The slaves needed to be fed. New England ships brought dried cod, picked up the molasses for transport to the distilleries in New England. The resulting drink (called among other things, screech, kill-devil, demon water) was put in casks and sent to Africa to purchase more slaves and also to Great Britain. This was the previously discussed Triangle Trade.
Ironically, the long trips over the ocean, stored in casks, made the rum more drinkable.
Although rum was still consumed after the War for Independence, as mentioned in Murder, Sweet Murder, it was falling out of favor as the new country’s beverage. Whiskey, from rye grown in Western Pennsylvania, and distilled in the country, was considered more patriotic and as such became the drink of choice.
With the holidays, I had less time than usual to read. Still, I managed to finish 2 books and part of a third.
Staging is Murder by Grace Topping is a charming cozy. The amateur detective is a home stager whose assistant is accused of the murder. A lovely old Victorian provided the setting – and don’t we all wish we lived in such a magnificent place. This is a series and I plan to read the rest of it.
I regularly read fantasy and science fiction. One of the suggestions that came up on my Amazon feed was The Witches of Dark Root by April Aasheim. Dark Root, a small town in the Pacific Northwest, is one of the last places on earth that keeps the darkness at bay. But now the circle had cracked. Sasha, coven leader, is ill. Her four daughters have scattered. running away from home and the control of their mother. But when news of Sasha’s illness reaches the daughters, they return; first Merry, the eldest, then Maggie, the daughter with the most power, and finally the other two. I really enjoyed this supernatural suspense novel. Since several problems remain to be resolved, I plan to read the rest of the series.
Finally, I am enjoying the latest David Rosenfelt: Best in Snow. When Andy Carpenter’s golden retriever digs up a pile of snow in the park, she discovers the body of the mayor. Andy’s friend Vince persuades him to take the case (Carpenter is a lawyer) and he becomes convinced the suspect the police have in custody has been set up. Rosenfelt’s mysteries are always fun. The characters are interesting and Carpenter is amusing. This one is also appropriate to the season since it is set just before Christmas.
