Very happy to announce I am part of the Local Authors Fair in Newburgh this Saturday (October 19).
In the Safe Harbors Lobby at the Ritz; 6 – 8.
I am joined by Julia Dahl, Carol Hollenbeck, Dr. Vickie Caruana and more.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
A Circle of Dead Girls
A Circle of Dead Girls is set against the beginnings of the circus in the new U.S.
The circus itself, of course, is very old. Acrobatics began with the Ancient Egyptians and, independently, in China. By the Middle Ages, traveling troupes went all through Europe and England, performing at fairs and other events. But when the Puritans came to power in England, such frivolity as the circus was forbidden. The circus did not begin again until 1768 when a retired military instructor, Sergeant-Major Philip Astley, decided to display his equestrian prowess. It proved surprisingly popular and a few years later he decided to add jugglers, acrobats and other performers, ending each show with a pantomime.
A student of Astley, John Bill Ricketts, was the man who brought the circus to the United States. He’d planned to open a riding school/circus in France but with the increasing hostilities between England and France chose to go to the United States instead. Following the lead of Astley, Ricketts opened a riding school in Philadelphia first in 1792. Philadelphia was the capital of the United States at that time. When that was established and his reputation made, he built an arena for his circus in 1793.
By 1900 the circus was the most popular form of entertainment in the country.
In A Circle of Dead Girls, I posit the beginnings of the traveling circus that makes a stop in Maine. And from there lies a tale . . .
New Review
So happy to receive the following review – in a UK source no less.
Simply Dead’ by Eleanor Kuhns
Published by Severn House, 30 April 2019. ISBN: 978–0–727 –8884–6 (HB)
Researching a historical novel is a straightforward matter of looking at books, documents and the internet. Making it feel right is a whole different skill, and it’s a skill Eleanor Kuhns has in bucketloads.
North-eastern America in the late 18th century is almost an alien world: one-roomed houses with dirt floors, three-mile walks to school for the children, values and customs far removed from the more relaxed approach we now adopt. Life was hard for ordinary people trying to scrape a living off the land. All this and more comes richly to life as background for Kuhns’s Will Rees series.
Rees and his family live close to a Shaker community which is possibly the most dangerous of its kind in the country. Not only does the murder at the centre of the narrative take place there; mention is also made of murders in previous volumes in the series, which Rees has been involved in solving.
that he is a lawman; that role falls to Constable Rouge, who also runs the local bar and res- taurant. But Rouge is something of a bull in a china shop; Rees usually thinks before he jumps. He is called in to help search for
Hortense, a young midwife who has apparently been abducted en route home from delivering a baby; he finds her, hurt and distressed, and it soon becomes apparent that she isn’t telling the whole truth about what happened to her.
Hortense takes refuge in the Shaker community, and shortly afterwards another young woman is found strangled, possibly in mistake for Hortense. Rees now has two mysteries to solve, and as if that wasn’t enough, his eldest adopted daughter is attacked.
That rich background really comes into its own as Rees travels up the nearby mountain and into the forest in bitter winter weather in search of answers. There are wolves, a wise woman, and several families made aggressive by solation and the conditions they live in, and Kuhns has the knack of drawing the reader in to feel part of the story.
The sharply drawn, well-rounded characters add to the sense of involvement: Rees himself, sometimes sensitive, sometimes clumsy, always well meaning; Lydia, his intelligent, self-possessed wife; Jerusha, his headstrong daughter; clumsy Rouge; emotional Bernadette, Hortense’s mother, Pearl the feisty teenage Shaker: they all come to life, as do the gentler members of the community who conceal iron strength under a calm exterior.
I was left feeling I’d visited late 18th century Maine, not just read about it. More than that – I wanted to go back for more, to get to know these people better, and explore their world further. It all felt right.
Death in the Great Dismal
In the ninth entry in the Will Rees Series, Will and Lydia travel to the Great Dismal Swamp to help a friend. Several murders occur – of course since these are murder mysteries.
This is a peat bog and in some places the peat is fourteen feet deep, Although we went in September, it was still really buggy. It is hard to imagine people living here, raising families and, on the drier places, trying to farm.
A Circle of Dead Girls
I am very happy to announce that A Circle of Dead Girls, Will Rees number 8, will be released March 3, 2020.
The Circus has come to town. Rees arrives for the performance but the sight of his old nemesis, Magistrate Hanson, sends him home again. On his way, he meets a party of Shaker Brothers searching for a young girl. Her body is found in a nearby field.
Who killed Leah? The circus trick rider? The strong man? One of the Shaker Brothers? Maybe even the Magistrate.
The white plague
In my Will Rees mysteries, he meets people who are ill with tuberculosis several times. The frequency of deaths from this disease in my fiction in not an accident. It was an epidemic and still has not been eradicated. In 2017, there were more than 10 million cases of active TB which resulted in 1.6 million deaths; it is therefore the number one cause of death from an infectious disease. Most of these deaths, and most of the new infections, occur in the developing world.
I was mostly familiar with TB as ‘consumption’, a disease that afflicted Victorian poets. Although TB was common in both the poets, the upper classes and the slum-dwellers, it was not a new disease during Victorian times. It has been around for millennia. Bison remains from 17,000 years ago display the effects of the disease. (No one is sure if TB jumped to humans from the bovine like smallpox or whether it developed independently.) TB scars have been found on Neolithic skeletons and on the spines of Egyptian mummies.
So, it has been around a very long time. Despite that, it was not identified as a single disease until 1820 and the bacillus that caused it was not discovered until 1882 (by Robert Koch. He received the Nobel prize but failed to recognize that one of the transmissions of TB was via infected milk.)
Before the advent of antibiotics, and even with the best care in the sanatoriums set up for this purpose, 50% of the patients died within five years. In 1815, one in four died of the illness in England.
Antibiotics beat back the disease, but new drug resistant strains raise the possibility of a new epidemic. Even now, in modern times, about one quarter of the world’s population is infected with TB.
Diabetes circa 1800
As Rees investigates murders, he invariably meets people who are ill. Illness and death was a constant companion. Illnesses: measles, mumps, diphtheria carried off infants and children; about one in five. Tuberculosis was epidemic. Women succumbed to childbirth. Simple accidents caused death, if not by the accident itself by sepsis.
Diseases we think of as modern, such as cancer or diabetes were present but not identified by name.
How do we know diabetes existed. About 3000 years ago the Egyptians described an illness with excessive thirst, urination and weight loss, the symptoms of Type I diabetes. In India they discovered they could use ants to detect the disease because the ants were drawn to the sweetness. And the Greeks called the disease diabetes mellitus ; diabetes for siphon or pass through and mellitus for sweet.
Early treatments included a diet of whole grains, milk and starchy foods, rancid animal meat, veal and mutton, green vegetables. Other treatments recommended exercising, reducing stress, wearing flannel – seriously. As one might expect, the true causes of Diabetes and possible treatments were not identified until modern times. In 1889, Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski found that removing the pancreas from dogs led them to develop diabetes. In 1910 Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer named the missing chemical, without which the body could not survive, insulin. That means island because the cells in the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas produce it.
The first human subject took an insulin injection in 1922. So, although this illness has been with us a long time, its identification and the treatment is recent.
Why am I so interested in diabetes? Read Simply Dead and find out.
Lumbering in Maine
Simply Dead is set against the mountains and the lumbering industry in Maine.
In the spring, logging camps were set up in the woods and the massive trees were cut down with nothing more than human sweat and axes. Lumber was important for building, yes, but this was also the era of sailing ships and tall masts were a requirement.
The loggers would ‘drive’ the logs down one of the many rivers to Falmouth. The men would ‘roll’ the logs down the rivers by standing on them. I describe this more fully in my book. The lumber drive would end in Falmouth with a celebration. (I’ll bet. Talk about dangerous work!)
Paul Bunyan and his blue ox are part of the American myth and he is based on the real lumber men. In Bangor there is a statue of Paul Bunyan.
Demonstrations of log rolling are a feature of some of the Maine shows.
The Shaker Murders and Giveaway
I have arranged a giveaway on The Shaker Murders.
I am hoping to prepare readers for my newest book, Simply Dead, which will come out August 1. The giveaway will begin June 7.
In the depths of winter, with a blizzard coming on, the constable Simon Rouge asks Rees for his help in finding his niece Hortense. Her cart had been found abandoned on the road and now she had been missing for almost two weeks.
The search for Hortense, and the unraveling of the secrets behind her abduction, lead Rees into the mountains of Maine.
Other murders, including the deaths of two Shaker Sisters, occur before Rees finally unmasks the killer.
Chocolate
While we were in Costa Rica we stopped at a chocolate plantation. I’m sure everyone know the story; how a chocolate drink was served to the Spanish conquistadores and from there went on to become one of the most popular foods in the world.
Cocoa pods on a tree.
The seeds inside are coated in a sweet jelly like substance. That has to be taken off.
Once the jelly like substance is removed, the beans are fermented. After fermentation, the beans are dried.
Then the beans are cleaned and roasted. The shell is removed. The tool used to do that at this plantation was a large mortar with a pestle to crush the shell.
The inner seeds, the cacao nibs, are then ground to cocoa mass, unadulterated chocolate in rough form.
These nibs are heated and reduced to a liquid. Adding sugar, cinnamon, nuts and more -yum.
The higher the amount of the chocolate (you will see 70% for bittersweet for example) the stronger the chocolate flavor.