January 1, 2019
Weaver Will Rees seeks sanctuary for his family after fleeing his home and charges of murder against him, and witchcraft against his wife, Lydia, as described in The Devil's Cold Dish (2016). What could be safer for his heavily pregnant wife and their five adopted children than the Maine Shaker community of Zion? But the day after Rees arrives at Zion, one of the brethren is found murdered. Within days, a teenager and an elderly woman also are killed, and attempts are made on the lives of the murdered woman's husband and finally on Will himself. Shaker elders want to believe the killer is a visitor and not one of their own, while Rees is doubtful. Reasoning that subsequent crimes are attempts to cover up the original murder, he is faced with solving the killings as a means of ensuring his family's future safety. This sixth Will Rees entry illuminates post-Revolutionary Shaker life, providing backstory that gives Rees nightmares, as it hints at the future for the family in this readable historical-mystery series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)
August 1, 2019
In 1790s Maine, a young midwife, Hortense, disappears after delivering a child, leading to a frantic search through the cold, snowy woods. Will Rees finds her unconscious, without coat or shoes. After she wakes up, she tells everyone she was kidnapped, but Will does not believe she is telling the entire truth and thinks she is still in danger. When Rees is proven correct, he arranges for Hortense to hide in a local Shaker community until she can travel to Canada to live with relatives. Rees' young daughter is attacked, and a Shaker woman is murdered, making Rees more determined than ever to uncover the truth. His investigation leads him to the mountains to question those who keep to themselves and do not like outsiders, where he almost loses his life in his quest to solve the mystery. An indefatigable, principled main character and an immersive early-republic setting, nicely delineating the life and times of the era, distinguish this historical mystery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)
June 17, 2019
A teenage midwife named Hortense goes missing in Kuhns’s solid seventh whodunit set in late-18th-century Maine (after The Shaker Murders). Will Rees, a weaver who’s also a skilled investigator, joins the hunt for Hortense, who disappears after helping a family with a smooth delivery. Rees finds Hortense, shoeless and almost frozen to death, in the snowy woods. When she revives, Hortense provides few details about what happened, though a reference to seeing “so much blood” suggests that she witnessed an act of violence. Rees becomes convinced that Hortense is not telling all she knows, and the matter takes a personal turn when his daughter Jerusha is attacked by two young men who initially mistook her for Hortense. For her safety, Hortense is soon sent to a nearby Shaker community, where a murder ups the ante. The plot twists rank among the author’s most clever. Historical fiction fans will be pleased.
June 15, 2019
1796. Abduction, murder, and sundry domestic problems keep a Maine weaver too busy to pursue the trade that feeds his family. Will Rees has no more ambitious plan than to live quietly with his wife, Lydia, now that they've returned to their farm after having sheltered with the Shakers when Will was falsely accused of murder and Lydia of witchcraft (The Shaker Murders, 2019, etc.). But Constable Rouge and his midwife sister, Bernadette, end that plan when they beg for help in finding Bernadette's daughter, Hortense, another midwife who never returned home after her last delivery, leaving her cart sans horse on the side of the road near Gray Hill. After volunteers search for her and Will uses his tracking skills to discover that Hortense was almost certainly taken by two men who also stole the horse, a faint cry leads him to the missing girl, barefoot and lightly dressed. Will and his cart horse, Hannibal, struggle through a snowstorm to get Hortense back to the farm, where she awakens screaming in fear. She describes having been taken to a cabin by two boys named Jem and Jake, but Will thinks she's holding back further information. When his daughter Jerusha is attacked by two lads, Will runs them off. Following a second attempt to kidnap Hortense, Will and Rouge question the closemouthed families who live in the hills. They have little luck until Hortense finally admits that she was taken to care for Sally, the mother of the boys. When the Shaker elders who've been sheltering Hortense approach him to solve the murder of a women likely mistaken for her, he and the faithful Hannibal return to the mountains over freezing, snow-blanketed roads into woods that harbor hungry wolves, predators who are kindly compared to the dangerous humans Will encounters. A fine mystery with satisfying characters that powerfully evokes the privations of the period.
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