Tag Archives: mysteries

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.

 

The Shaker Murders -reviews

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The new Will Rees, number 6, will be released Feb. 1. The reviews are beginning to come in and they are good.

So happy!

As a librarian, I know that libraries, with their limited budgets, purchase primarily books with good reviews and starred reviews are even better.

Here is the review from Publishers Weekly:

Authentic period detail and nuanced characterizations lift Kuhns’s fine sixth whodunit set in late-18th-century Maine. In 2016’s The Devil’s Cold Dish, weaver Will Rees and his family suffered a series of calamities, which included his being accused of murder and their being forced to sell their home. Now they hope for a respite from turmoil and violence by joining the Shakers, but that proves short-lived after the body of one of the Shakers is found in a bathtub. To Will, the signs of intentional violence—a bloody wound on the dead man’s head—are clear, but the Shaker leadership insists that the death was accidental and refuses to call in outside authorities. After Will finds the murder weapon, a poker with traces of blood and hair on it, the church elders, knowing of his experience as an investigator, allow him to look into newcomers to the community as possible suspects. The stakes rise when another body turns up, this one even more clearly the product of foul play. Kuhns makes the most of the cloistered Shaker community setting in this top-notch outing. (Feb.)

 

And from two library journals:

Booklist

The Shaker Murders. By Eleanor Kuhns. Feb. 2019. 224p. Severn, $28.99 (9780727888372); e-book (9781448301720)

 

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.

And Kirkus

A traveling weaver and crime solver finds danger in a Shaker village.

It’s 1796. Will Rees has taken refuge in the community of Zion, Maine, after being forced to flee from his farm in Dugard, where he’d been accused of murder and his wife, Lydia, of witchcraft. Although he proved himself innocent (The Devil’s Cold Dish, 2016), his wife is still in danger. So he’s given his farm to his eldest son and taken a heavily pregnant Lydia and their six children to Zion. Even though they haven’t signed the Covenant, they must live as celibate Shakers. Rees shares his quarters not with Lydia but with Jabez, whose body is soon found drowned in a laundry tub. Rees knows Jabez’s death was no accident as soon as he sees the bloody wound on his head. When elders Solomon and Jonathan finally agree to let Rees ask questions, they express the hope the killer was an outsider. Rees is sure it is one of the brethren and is worried for the safety of his family. But he hasn’t told Lydia that he’s given their home away because it’s unsafe for her to return. The next to die is mentally challenged young Calvin, who may have seen the killer while sneaking out at night to visit the horses. Rees has a hard time controlling his temper while questioning the brethren because he knows they’re hiding secrets from him. When he finally admits to Lydia that they have no home, she reminds him that she inherited a farm nearby that the Shakers think should belong to the community. Desperate to find the killer and a home for his family, Rees resolves to follow every clue, especially when a young girl vanishes from Zion. Is she another victim of a ruthless killer?

An absorbing look at the early Shaker communities, whose very lifestyle set them up for eventual failure, through the eyes of an imperfect man doing his best for his family.

The only journal remaining is Library Journal. I hope that review is as good.

 

The Luddites

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A friend called me a Luddite the other day after a fit of yelling about computers.. (I am actually good with computers. But after my laptop crashed in June, I still haven’t gotten my finances straightened out. According to Quicken, I am $14,000 in the hole. Hence my rant about computers in general and online banking in particular.) But I digress.

The name-calling prompted me to research the Luddites. Yes, it was a real group – of weavers and other textile workers in the early nineteenth century. New weaving and spinning machines were coming into the factories.The owners said that the machines were more efficient – they probably were – and would make cloth cheaper – and they did. (The word ‘shoddy’ came into being shortly thereafter. Coincidence? I doubt it.)  The weavers were not opposed to the new machinery; that was not the issue. The problem was greed.

Weavers spent seven years in an apprenticeship before they could set up shop. Now they feared that the time and effort put into this craft was wasted. They had reason to worry. As the factory owners fired the men, they hired women and children, who they paid much less, to work instead.This was the beginning of six year olds working 14 hour days in a factory.

So the men protested. They blackened their faces and broke into the factories to destroy the new and expensive machinery. They purported to follow a fictional character called Ned Ludd(a stocking weaver) or another fictional personage King Ludd. Thus the name.

The British Government sided with the factory owners and made breaking machinery a capital crime. Soldiers were sent to quell the protests. A large number of men (both members of the protests and not) were swept up and accused of being Luddites. Those that were found guilty were either executed or transported. That ended the protests very quickly.

The situation was slightly different in the United States. The first textile factory came into  being in Massachusetts in 1814. Lowell, who had seen the textile machines in Great Britain, wanted to do the same in the U.S. (The city of Lowell is named for him.) He built his first factories beginning in 1816. But the  United States had a smaller population and there was not a large number of unemployed men so there was not the same labor pool. To solve the problem Lowell hired young women, who became known as mill girls, between the ages of 15 and 35. He of course paid them less than men. (To his credit, he chose not to employ children.) The mill girls were housed in company owned boarding houses, were strictly chaperoned and offered other ‘improving’ activities so the jobs had decent working conditions. This changed as the century wore on. The mill girls unionized, went out on strike a few times, and finally joined forces with another union.

Since my character,  Will Rees, is a weaver he is going to be affected by the increasing industrialization. In fact, will lose his profession in less than twenty years. He will be in his middle fifties by then, however, a fairly advanced age for the time, so he will have missed this huge change by only a few years.

 

Goodreads Giveaway coming

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To celebrate the publication of my new book, The Shaker Murders, which is coming out in February, I am giving away copies of the book that comes before it. In the Devil’s Cold Dish, Rees and his family are targeted by someone who wants to destroy them. Rees is accused of murder and then Lydia is accused of witchcraft. As Rees’s hometown turns against them, mobs of angry men descend on his farm to capture Lydia and hang her. He spirits his family to safety and then returns to Dugard. On the run, he attempts to identify the person behind the harassment.

Helen of Troy

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Helen of Troy should really be called Helen of Sparta since she was born in Sparta and was a Spartan princess. She was also a Mycenaen – part of the culture that swept into Bronze Age Crete. This period is probably fifty years after the period I am writing about but I did research into it anyway. We know a bit more about the Spartans and they were supposed to have been influenced by the Minoan civilization.

With that said, most of the Mediterranean cultures were influenced by this great civilization – maybe not in accordance with the wishes of the leaders since in Sparta laws were passed forbidding perfume, cosmetics and jewelry. However, girls were also educated at state expense and encouraged to be physically active. They also married later than many of their peers in other countries so maternal and infant mortality was less. They were also the scandal of Classical Greece since the women had so much more freedom than the poor wives in Athens. Although named for a Goddess, Athena, the women were kept closeted in their homes weaving with no company but slaves and other women. Even in Sparta, though, patriarchy ruled and the women had much less influence than those in Crete.

But I digress.

I think everyone knows the basic story:  that Helen was the most beautiful woman of her age. She was married to Menelaus, brother to Agamemnon. She was either abducted or chose to run away with Paris. (It doesn’t much matter if she was innocent. For most of the intervening centuries she has been considered a harlot.)They fled to Troy and a great war was fought that lasted more than ten years.  The war is the basis of the Iliad. As everyone knows, Troy was considered a myth until Schliemann excavated it.

Here’s what I did not know about Helen.

Another familiar myth is Leda and the Swan. Zeus takes the form of a swan to rape Leda. The child created by this union was Helen. Her beauty was frequently ascribed to her divine paternity. Because Zeus took the form of a swan, Helen was born from an egg. I am not kidding. Besides the painting that shows her rising from an egg, an artifact reputed to be a piece of the eggshell was a sacred object.

Since everybody in these stories are related, Helen’s half-brothers were the twins Castor and Pollux and her half-sister was Clytemnestra, wife to Agamemnon.

 

The Minotaur

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I’m sure most of us know something about Theseus and the Minotaur. Here’s the backstory. The Greeks revered Zeus. Poseidon wanted to be honored too so he sent a white bull to Minos, the King of Crete. Minos’s wife Parsiphae fell in love with the bull. She tasked Daedalus (yes, the inventor with the wax wings whose son was Icarus) to build a special wooden box in the shape of a cow. Once inside the box, she had intercourse with the bull. Nine months later she bore a half-man, half-bull. The Minotaur.

The myth reeks of patriarchy and a desire to, in modern parlance, throw shade on Cretan beliefs.

First, in Crete Zeus was not the primary God. He was an upstart, more akin to a harvest God, who died and was reborn.

We also don’t know if Crete had a King. Certainly it was a goddess centered, matrilineal culture. Many archeologists have assumed Crete had kings, but for decades these archeologists were men. Men, moreover, who lived with a strongly patriarchal structure. It is possible the Priestess’s consort acted as a wanax, or governor. Kingships came with the Mycenaeans.

Third several ancient cultures revered the bull or, in Indo-Europe the horse. One of the rites was mock intercourse with this symbol of fertility by the Queen/Priestess. This act was supposed to guarantee good crops, lots of livestock and of course healthy children for the coming year.

But what about the Minotaur?

Well, many many ancient and not so ancient cultures employ masks in religious rites. Animals are a frequently the subject.  Is it so far a stretch to believe that the Minotaur is a masked man involved in a religious rite?

Besides painting Theseus as a hero (which I dispute but more about that later), this myth spins Crete as decadent and deserving of conquest. By the Myceneans, naturally.

Bull-leaping and Theseus

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Bull leaping is probably one of the most well-known -if not the most well-known – image of the Minoan civilization. Most people believe the account written in the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. It is important to remember the Greeks (the Mycenae and forward) borrowed a lot from other cultures. The civilization on Crete was very important. With that said, the Minoan civilization was Goddess centered while the Mycenae were patriarchal and that made a huge difference in how the invaders viewed the rites and rituals they saw.

In the Theseus myth, Minos exacts a tribute from Athens of 7 young men and 7 maidens to face the bull and perform bull-leaping. Minos’s daughter Ariadne falls in love with Theseus and gives him a ball of string to find his way through the labyrinth under the city and kill the Minotaur, (The creation of this beast is another story). Theseus does so, thereby freeing himself and the other tributes from Crete. He takes Ariadne with him but abandons her on another island. Great guy.

While tributes may have been pressed into service as bull-leapers, the bull-leaping was an integral part of the religious ceremonies. The bull was a sacred animal and the Cretan youth performed. Secondly, there are no labyrinths underneath Knossos and it is thought the pattern of building residences – all interlinked and connecting rooms – gave rise to the myth of a labyrinth.

And although labyrinth now means maze, the labys (the root of the word) was the iconic Cretan double axe. It had nothing to do with mazes.

Lastly, there is a lot of speculation about Minos. Was he a king? Perhaps after the Mycenae arrived, a kingship was established. Was he a consort of the High Priestess who, it is now thought, was the earthly representative of the Goddess. The Priestess chose a – or many – consorts. There is now some thought that he or other men served as a wanax and kept the wheels of the government running.