Tag Archives: mysteries

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Wishing everyone a belated Happy Thanksgiving.

Upcoming event: Pane Discussion at the Poughkeepsie Public Library

This past week I read one book, Shutter, by Ramona Emerson.

This was very good, but also rather creepy.

Rita Todacheene is a Navaho but also a forensic photographer working for the Albuquerque Police Force. She is unusual in that the Navaho are forbidden to interact with the dead in case they invite in witches.

But Rita sees ghosts. In some cases, the ghosts lead her to the person who murdered them. Rita does not dare tell people she sees ghosts; the usual response is that she is hallucinating. And for many years, she is able to ignore the ghosts.

But at a particularly grisly accident scene, the ghost of a young woman, Erma, will not allow Rita to turn away. Instead, the ghost pursues Rita, pestering her to investigate the so-called suicide when Erma knows she was murdered.

Creepy but unputdownable. For mystery readers who enjoy a touch of the supernatural.

Currently Reading

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This week I read two really good books.

The first is by Victoria Thompson. She previously wrote the Gaslight mysteries. City of Lies is roughly the same period but very different.

Elizabeth is a grifter, a con woman, now going by the name Betty Perkins. When the current con. goes badly, she has to run for her life. Chased by two heavies, she takes refuge in a protest by a band of suffragists. They are quickly arrested and Elizabeth finds herself in a workhouse in Virginia. All of the woman embark on a hunger strike, including Elizabeth. She is greatly changed by her experience and her growing connection to Mrs. Bates and another young woman.

But the mark is still waiting for her to appear so that he can wreak his vengeance.

Highly Recommended.

The second book is a collection of short stories by Elly Griffiths.

The stories include some with Ruth Galloway and Max Mephisto, but others are cozies and a few are barely mysteries at all. But they are all captivating and show Griffiths is a master of the short story as well as the novel. Highly recommended.

Currently Reading

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Island of the Mad by Laurie R. King is number fifteen in her long running and popular Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes mystery series. In this outing, Mary is asked by a school friend to find her aunt Vivian. Vivian has spent many years in Bedlam. When Mary and her friend pay a visit to Bedlam and visit Vivian, she seems happy and sane. She says, to Mary’s surprise, that she’s ‘safe’ in Bedlam.

But on a visit to her family, she disappears.

Mary, after visiting the family home and meeting the Lord of the Manor, that there is something else going on. Mary writes to her husband, Sherlock. He joins her in her search for Vivian.

To glean what information she can. Mary disguises herself and allows herself to be confined to Bedlam.

Another captivating and complicated mystery. Highly Recommended.

Currently Reading

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Lost Birds, the newest mystery by Anne Hillerman, has a lot going on.

Joe Leaphorn, working as a private detective, is searching for the history of a woman who was adopted by a white couple., before the law forbidding such adoptions was passed. Her only clue to her past is a photograph with a Navaho child’s blanket. The Lost Birds of the title refer to those children adopted out and who are now missing from their culture.

At the same time, Leaphorn receives a call from a man who met him as a child. Bowlegs’ wife is missing but before he can give too many details, the call is interrupted by an explosion. Leaphorn is not even sure if Bowlegs survived. Bernie Manuelito becomes involved in this case when she is called to the scene; a school with a newly built addition. A school, moreover, where Bowlegs’ wife worked.

Bernie is distracted by other cases and her mother’s increasing frailty. She cannot live on her own and Bernie’s sister is unable to fulfill that responsibility.

Complicated as the cases collide. The underlying theme is these missing children who lose their heritage. Hillerman continues her father’s legacy of showing this exotic and amazing culture. Captivating.

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Forty Acres and a Soggy Grave by Frankie Bailey is the fifth of her Lizzie Stuart Mysteries. In this, the last so far, Lizzie accompanies her fiancé, John Quinn to a weekend with some of his old friends. Lizzie is quite nervous about meeting them – will they like her? But she quickly senses undercurrents swirling around the group, from Mitch and his extra young girlfriend, to the rumors that Bree is involved in smuggling undocumented migrants.

When one of the migrants if found hiding in the horse barn, and then Mitch’s girlfriend is shot right in front of Lizzie, she knows she is deep into something she doesn’t fully grasp.

Another wonderful mystery delving into the intersection of race and gender, now complicated by feelings about immigration. Highly recommended.

Forget me Never by Susan Witting Albert is the 29th China Bayles mystery. In this outing, China investigates the death of her friend Olivia Andrews. She hosts a true crime podcast and now she claims she has a bombshell story about an upstanding citizen of Pecan Springs. One morning, while out running, she is hit by a car. At first the death is ruled accidental but as China digs, she quickly realizes it was murder.

Another murder follows and all signs point to the second husband of a wealthy widow who died, it was thought murdered, twenty years previously. Is he the citizen of Pecan Springs? And who is he?

The usual gang appear and as usual the herbs and information about them is front and center.

Nancy Drew

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Why am I blogging about Nancy Drew? I am beginning a new series set in the late 1920s and into the thirties. Like most girls, and certainly almost all women mystery writers, I started my career by reading the Nancy Drew mysteries. Nancy, and her friends George and Bess, are so much a part of the culture, I, at least, can’t imagine the world without them. I thought I should reread a few.

What I didn’t know was that the first Nancy Drew was published in 1929, only nine years after women won the right to vote. The Secret of Shadow Ranch was published in 1931.

There are few descriptions of clothing or anything else that might be too era specific so the books can stretch across decades without sounding dated. And Nancy is brave, smart and independent, a new role model for girls who wanted something else besides the domestic sphere. Later revisions have, of course, adapted some of her traits and history.

Her spunky personality is usually ascribed to Mildred Wirt who wrote many of the early mysteries.

These books are targeted to girls 3rd to 6th grade. I read them mostly in the fourth and fifth grades and had a number of favorites. (I am now rereading The Sign of the Twisted Candles which I loved.)

To an adult, the mysteries are lightweight, the writing pedestrian at best, but I can see the appeal to a girl. The mysteries have some danger, but Nancy always escapes it. I loved stories with secret rooms and here we are. Plus, Nancy does everything well, money is never a problem, and no one tells her what to do. Not even her father, Carson.

I imagine the young women in my new series will know of Nancy Drew even if they have not read her books.

Currently Reading

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Counterfeit Lady: City of Fortune by Victoria Thompson.

I read all of Thompson’s Gaslight series, featuring midwife Sarah, who delivered babies, and solved murders, throughout turn of the century New York City, and loved them.

The Counterfeit Lady series were a break from her former series, and I wasn’t sure about them. But I have read them all, and they are lots of fun. City of Fortune is my favorite so far.

For those of you who haven’t read this series, Elizabeth is a conman from a family of conmen (conpeople? conpersons?), who, in the first book, is swept up in the suffragette movement and jailed with a Mrs. Bates. Through her, Elizabeth marries Gideon Bates and turns over a new leaf. Her cons now aim to help people and right injustices.

In her current book, Thompson shines a light on the racing world. Elizabeth, Gideon and Mother Bates are invited to watch the races from the private box of a Mr. Nolan and his daughter Irene. Their horse’s loss results from skullduggery by a rival, Daniel Livingston. The jockey is thrown and badly injured. Enter a beautiful and mysterious Señora, who closely resembles Irene’s deceased mother.

The resulting cons aim to settle old scores with some despicable people as well as assist Irene in marrying the man she loves (the injured jockey). Some of the scenes are laugh out loud funny. I have already pre-ordered the next in the series.

The Shaker Murders and Giveaway

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I have arranged a giveaway on The Shaker Murders.

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.

Simply Dead High-Res Cover

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.

 

Reviews

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Today was a banner day for me. I received two wonderful reviews of The Shaker Murders, one included in Library Journal.

Author Eleanor Kuhns Weaves A Mystery

by Severn House
Feb 08, 2019 | Filed in Reviews

Traveling weaver, Will Rees arrives in Zion, Maine, a Shaker community, amidst a series of bizarre accidents. As Rees investigates, he begins to experience nightmares where his family is in jeopardy. In this sixth book in the Will Rees series, author Eleanor Kuhns has readers racing along to learn if Rees can uncover the truth before those haunting dreams become a reality.

Lifelong librarian and award-winning author Eleanor Kuhns’s latest novel in her Will Rees series, The Shaker Murders (Severn House), was inspired in part by a fortuitous trip to Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, a tiny religious community that was established in Maine in 1783.

If Kuhns hadn’t created this popular series when she did, there’s a fair chance there would be no Shakers left to share their traditions firsthand. Due to the sect’s adherence to celibacy, the practice of marrying out, and expulsion from the community for violating rules like refusing to shave one’s beard, today Sabbathday Lake is home to only three remaining Shakers.

“All I knew about the Shakers was that they made furniture,” Kuhns tells Library Journal. “In the tour, I learned they were celibate, and they took in orphans.”

Kuhns was so intrigued by what she saw, she bought every book in the gift shop and embarked on a period of research that yielded more than a few surprises.

“Who knew that their herbal business was so successful that in today’s money, it would be a billion dollar industry or that they were accomplished inventors with hundreds of patent applications?” Kuhns says enthusiastically.

The more research Kuhns conducted, the more she wondered about the people who joined the Shaker community. Kuhns learned that some converts were driven by faith, others saw it as an escape from societal conventions like marriage, and then there were those who used the sect to hide out – fertile motivation for an author of mysteries.

Returning readers of Kuhns’s mystery fiction have come to expect to learn a few things along with seeing a murder get solved. “Every book features at least one job that was important to the times. In Death of a Dyer I describe dyeing, in Cradle to Grave it is barrel making, and in Death in Salem I focus on sail and rope making,” Kuhns says.

In The Shaker Murders, Kuhns introduces the reader to the art and cultural history of weaving. “One of my hobbies is weaving, so I made my main character a weaver,” Kuhns says, adding, “I knew how to thread and set up the treadles and follow a pattern, but after I started working with Rees, I studied the history of weaving, an unbroken line from the Bronze Age to the Industrial Revolution.”

In The Shaker Murders, the craft of weaving offered her protagonist, Will Rees, some connective material to move the story along. “Weaving gives Rees the chance to interact with women as well as men. That would have been much more difficult if I’d made him a bricklayer,” Kuhns adds.

Kuhns explains that in the Shaker community, women wove in the home, but some male weavers were itinerant, which enables Kuhn’s murder-solving protagonist to have a reason to leave the small town in Maine. To further aid in this, Kuhns made him a traveler, so he has more than one motivation to hit the road.

In her earlier works like Cradle to Grave, Rees solves a murder just north of Albany that involves the Shaker community there. In Death in Salem, Rees visits Salem, Mass that was, at that time, the sixth largest city in the U.S. as well as the wealthiest due to trade with India and China.

For Kuhns, one character remains with her above the others. Kuhns created Calvin, a mentally challenged man whose untimely end hit her the hardest. “I don’t think the developmental disabilities are new in modern times, so his murder is even more heinous and emotional wrenching because he is an innocent.”

When Kuhns originally sought inspiration for Rees, she found it in her late father, himself an adept craftsman. “Part of Will Rees is completely my father: his sense of justice, his honesty and his ability to work with his hands. He was also a big red-headed fellow with anger issues,” Kuhns says.

For Kuhns, the process of drawing upon her father has been educational. “Since writing about Rees and doing such intensive research into earlier times, I feel I understand my father a lot better. I hope he would be flattered.”

Traditionally, when Kuhns casts that role in her mind, she’s thought of Damien Lewis (from Homeland) and David Wenham (Faramir in the Lord of the Rings), but she jokes she may need to find someone younger as they’re getting on. With such leading men as inspiration for a character based on her father, how could he not be?

The second review came from the Historical Novel Society.

The Shaker Murders (A Will Rees Mystery)

WRITTEN BY ELEANOR KUHNS
REVIEW BY BRYAN DUMAS

Will Rees and his family are hiding in Zion, a Shaker community in Maine, and hoping to find safety, but what Will discovers is a secretive sect and two murders that threaten the security of his family in Kuhns’ sixth Will Rees Murder series. Will, his pregnant wife, Lydia, and their children fled their hometown of Dugard and are in Zion because of an accusation of witchcraft against Lydia, and Will’s own murder charges—from which he cleared his own name (The Devil’s Cold Dish, 2016). Shortly after arriving in Zion, Brother Jabez is found dead in the laundry. Will is certain it was murder, but Elders Solomon and Jonathan push it off as an accident. After Will finds the murder weapon, and a second Shaker—a simple-minded young man—is killed Will is certain that the murderer is one of the Shakers themselves. Complicating matters is the matter of Lydia’s former farm, which the Shaker community believes belongs to them but Will hopes to take for his family.

While this is a murder mystery, what really sets this book apart are the descriptions of daily life and expectations for 18th-century Shakers and their community—including guests that they welcome with open arms, if only because they hope these people will sign the Covenant and join. As in any whodunit, there are plenty of shady characters, from hired farm boys to newcomers to the community up through the elders themselves, all lending to throw Will, and the reader, off course. Though there are many references to previous books, first-time readers to this series will have no trouble jumping in. Ultimately, Kuhns uses the Shaker beliefs to craft an interesting and suspenseful ending to this delightful story.

The Shakers

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With the upcoming release of The Shaker Murders in two weeks, I thought I’d review some of the facts about the Shakers.The Shaker Murders

First, they are still in existence, but there are very few. Although there were eleven when I began my research, there are only three now. These three live in Sabbathday Lake in Maine, near Alfred. They live as the Shakers have always lived, although the schoolhouse is now a library/repository of Shaker history.

Begun by Mother Ann Lee in the 1700’s, they are in effect an evangelical offshoot of the Quakers. (The name Shakers means Shaking Quakers). Ann Lee brought her small band to the new country from Great Britain in 1774. They set up their first colony just outside of Albany, calling it Niskayuna. The remnants of it are still there although the fields are now under the Albany airport.

The Shakers were celibate and men and women were separated. It was a top down organization and each ‘Family’ was run by two Elders and two Eldresses who were themselves under the main headquarters. (Later on that was New Lebanon in New York.)

Perhaps because their spiritual inspiration came from a woman, from the first, men and women were of equal importance. Eldresses were of equal clout in running the community. (This in a time when women could not inherit from their husbands unless he specifically named her in his will. Otherwise, she was in the care of her eldest son.) To keep their numbers up, they took in apprentices as well as orphans. Boys were taught to read, write and ‘figure’ in the winter while girls were educated in the summer. (Another difference from the outside world. Illiteracy was epidemic and girls especially were not taught to read.) By the time the children grew up, they knew how to run a farm as well.

The work was divided along gender lines, with the Brothers working outside and the Sisters doing the cooking, cleaning and so on. They also made whips and brooms (the Shakers had the patents on a number of items including the round broom and the humble clothespin), sold seeds and had a very profitable business in herbs, primarily medicinal. As anyone who has priced Shaker furniture knows, it is very costly.  But it is perfect. The Shakers soon developed a reputation for perfection. They had a saying: ” Hands to work, hearts to God”. Work was valued and good work served to honor God. An imperfect job could not be offered to Him.