First, I want to give a shout out to the Poughkeepsie Barnes and Noble for hosting the mystery panel yesterday. The four of us: Jode Millman, Nancy Bilyeau, Tina deBellegarde and myself engaged in a lively discussion about writing, and of course about our books. Thanks again to Barnes and Noble.
This week I read The Sacred Bridge by Anne Hillerman.
Jim Chee is struggling to decide his path forward. He loves his job but worries he has given up his dream to become a haitaii, a medicine man/shaman. He takes a hiking trip in the back country to clear his head, aiming for a sandstone bridge that is sacred to the Navahoes. While there, he discovers a body floating in a man-made lake. Because he discovered the body, he is asked to remain an extra week and investigate.
At the same time. Bernie (Manuelito) has her own problems. She is worried about her mother’s increasing forgetfulness. And, while she is traveling home, she sees the murder of a man on the highway. Trying to discover the man’s identity, and the reason behind his murder. draws her into a case of her own and a very dangerous undercover operation at a hemp farm.
Anne Hillerman describes the setting as carefully as her father did and the mysteries are very good. She is a worthy successor to this series involving Leaphorn, (the Legendary Lieutenant), Jim Chee, and Bernie Manuelito.
I am excited to announce that The Long Shadow of Murder was released today. It is the latest in the Will Rees saga.
After a long winter, Rees is driving into town for supplies when he is distracted by Constable Rouge. A body has been discovered in the woods near the Shaker community of Zion. Of course, Rouge is immediately suspicious of the Shakers but Rees isn’t so sure. He wonders if the victim’s traveling companions might not have reason to kill the man.
But as Rees and Lydia investigate, they find that everyone in town has secrets, some going all the way back to the Revolutionary War.
As usual, besides the murder, Rees and Lydia are trying to manage their busy farm and their large family with a new baby on the way.
On Saturday, I and three others of my writing friends will be on a panel at the Poughkeepsie Barnes and Noble. We will be available to answer questions and sign books. Hope to see you there.
All I can say about this book is Wow. It is not for the faint of heart.
Haymitch turns sixteen on the day of the reaping. He is not chosen but one of the young men tries to run away and is shot dead by a Peacekeeper. Because this is the fiftieth anniversary, the Capitol is choosing double the number of kids: two boys and two girls. The love of Haymitch’s life tries to go to the victim. When Haymitch attempts to go to her aid, he is ‘volunteered’ for the reaping. His companions? Louella, a delicate girl, Wyatt, an obsessive oddsmaker, and Marilee, the most stuck up girl in the Seam. Louella and Haymitch become allies, but after their arrival at the capitol, these two form a reluctant group with the other two, despite their reservations.
District 12 is the poorest and the least of all the districts. They have no mentors at first, they are assigned a costumer that is addicted to toad venom and their costumes are old, used coal miners uniforms. Haymitch defies Snow and right away is marked for death in the arena.
The arena, full of poisoned water and lethal creatures, as well as the other tributes, weeds out eighteen tributes the first day. But District 12 has formed an alliance with most of the other districts and Haymitch involves himself in a resistance movement designed to destroy the arena. That, of course, is far more challenging that he expects.
Anyone who has read the Hunger Games knows Haymitch not only survives but is the victor. I was curious to see how Collins would manage to work that out. The price of his victory, and Snow’s unending vengeance, certain explains Haymitch’s retreat into alcohol.
Gripping, unputdownable, and absolutely heartbreaking. I can’t even watch a trailer for Survivor. It’s the sanitized version of the Hunger Games. This book leaves me with the question: how desperate for power, how cruel, does a society have to be to kidnap children (and they are. The youngest is 12.) to fight other people’s children to the death? How vindictive to program the lethal creatures to target a particular kid? To set the arena for maximum death? And to take revenge on the victor when a disliked tribute wins?
The three pillars of the Shaker belief were Church, Community and Celibacy.
Besides the Sunday services, the Shakers believed that work itself was sacred and a job well done was as much a prayer to God as a Church service. One of their mottos was “Put your handsto Work, and your hearts to God.”
Essentially an agricultural community, the Shakers ran large and productive farms. (And where did they get the money for this property? Although they would accept converts who had nothing, wealthier converts were expected to donate their property (dowries, land, and money) to the community. This meant they quickly grew wealthy in their turn.
Most of the work was split along traditional gender lines. Their standards of cleanliness (not at all common in that time) meant their livestock was fat and healthy, their milk pure and disease free. Although most people have heard of the Shaker furniture, they also ran many businesses to support themselves. Many villages had their own mills, tanneries, basket making and broom making shops. They were famous for their medicinal herbs and seeds, which they sold via traveling wagons. They also engaged in a thriving international trade, especially with China. In today’s money, they made millions.
They were creative inventors as well and many of the villages had machinery far in advance of the neighboring farms. The Shakers invited the first clothes pin. And well before advances in modern chemistry, they invented a product to add to clothes to so they required less ironing.
Their attempt to create perfection resulted in the high quality of their products that we admire today.
The Sisters, besides cooking, caring for the children, doing laundry and housework, spun and wove cloth that was famous for its high quality. They had equal power to the men. Every Family had two Elders and two Eldresses, two Deacons and two Deaconesses to share the authority for the community. The Shakers believed that God was both male and female and of equal importance.
Celibacy was strictly practiced. Marriages were not allowed and married couples that joined a Family were expected to live as brother and sister. Men and Women were segregated although Unions, where the Brethren and the Sisters could meet and talk on a regular basis, became a feature of the village life.
Last week I wrote about their practice of taking in orphans. It became so well known, they found foundlings on their doorsteps. They also took in children whose parents signed them over to the Shakers as quasi-apprentices. The New York State Museum has examples of some of the contracts signed between the parents and the Shakers. When the children reached the age of twenty one, they were free to choose between remaining or leaving. Many of the children raised by the Shakers married out; the Shakers did not require the Children to ‘make a Shaker’.
Eventually, with the shift ofAmerica from a rural to an urban society the flood of new converts began to diminish and by the 1930’s the number of members had declined so severely that several villages were closed and much of the land sold off. Many of the once-thriving Shaker villages, for example, Hancock Village, became living museums. The only village still in existence today is Sabbathday Lake in Maine.
This past week I read Deadly Hours, four novellas centered around a cursed pocket watch.
In the first, Kearsley’s mystery about the pirate who participated in the sacking of Cartagena and melted his cursed gold down to make a pocket watch named La Sirene, starts the series off with the background on the dangerous timepiece. The watch is reputed to bring bad luck and death to all who own it – and it quickly seems to be working.
In the second part Huber’s Lady Darcy is drawn into an investigation by a local criminal who is terrified by the number of deaths in Edinburgh. He is ill himself and terrified he too will die. At first, Lady Darcy dismisses the connection to a mysterious, and supposedly cursed, pocket watch with a mermaid, but she and her husband are soon are its trail.
Trent’s lady undertaker in Victorian England is working on a project to relocate a number of coffins when a murder takes place in the wealthy area. After other murders occur, all seeming to take place when the pocket watch inexplicably stops, the family that owns the watch can’t get rid of it fast enough.
The final novella takes the story to World War II. When the man who owned the cover for the watch is murdered, and that cover stolen, it seems like a simple robbery. But other murders of people who know something about the watch soon follow. Somebody is determined to own that timepiece. At the same time, transmissions in code are being sent to Germany, drawing the attention of two men from M15.
All of these novellas are well-written and highly entertaining. This was like have four books, instead of one. Highly recommended.
In two weeks, the newest of the Will Rees/Shaker series will be released. In The Long Shadow of Murder, a body is discovered in the woods near the Shaker community of Zion. Suspicion immediately falls on the Shakers, although Rees is skeptical. He feels there are plenty of other suspects, including the victim’s wife and other traveling companions. Indeed, the murder has its roots in the Revolutionary War.
The Shakers were, if not the most successful commune, was certainly one of them. An offshoot of the Quakers, the name Shakers comes from ‘the Shaking Quakers.” The group’s proper name was the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing; with a name like that it is understandable they had a shorter and more easily remembered nickname.
The wellspring of the Shakers was a woman, Mother Ann Lee. She sailed to the colonies in the middle 1700s and set up a damsel community just outside of Albany, New York. (The runways for the airport are now located over the old fields.) Like the Quakers, they believed in simplicity and were abolitionists. Mother Ann Lee a former Quaker, was revered. Her position as the prophet/leader resulted in two important doctrines: men and women were equal – highly unusual in this day and age, and they were celibate. Despite that, for many years, they thrived.
How did they succeed for so long then? And they were. They took in converts. Here the unmarried woman could find a home, The disabled could find a home. The landless men, who frequently stopped at the Shaker villages for the winter, thus earning the title of Winter Shaker, had three meals a day and a roof over the heads. Although many left again come spring, some probably remained.
And they adopted orphans. Since this was a world with no safety net, and lots of death, there were a lot of orphans. Besides training these children in the skills they would need in an agrarian world – the girls learned cooking, sewing and other homemaking skills, and the boys farming – they were taught how to read and write. Since males and females were rigidly separated, the boys went in winter, the girls in summer. The Shakers thrived until the world changed. After 1900, the United States went from agrarian to industrial. Girls now could work in factories.
In 1966, the United States passed a law stating that the Shakers could no longer adopt orphans. That really impacted this group.
Yes, they still accept converts. The numbers have shrunk to 2, but one is a younger man who converted. These two live at Sabbathday Lake in Maine. This was the smallest and poorest of all the Shaker communities. My village of Zion is based on Sabbathday Lake.
Why did I choose to set murders within or near this group? Well, although most were peaceful good people, there are always some bad apples. Certainly the acceptance of anyone, and the toleration of the Winter Shakers, opened up the communities to some of these bad’uns.
I pre-ordered the new Finlay Donovan book: Finlay Donovan Digs Her Own Grave.
Like her previous books, this is a mix of mystery, humor and romance. Finlay’s neighbor, the nosy Mrs. Haggerty who documents everything going on in the neighborhood. Then a body is discovered in Mrs. Haggerty’s back yard. Although she is cleared, her house remains a crime scene. Mrs. Haggerty’s nephew drops her off at Finlay’s, leaving her to sleep in the spare room while her elderly neighbor takes the master bedroom. Finlay and her best friend Vero want to stay out of this investigation – but when Finlay’s ex Stephen becomes a prime suspect, they have no choice.
And Mrs. Haggerty has secrets of her own. Finlay watches her leave the house late at night to hand deliver notes. Wha-a-a-t?
Lots of fun.
This is another book I picked up at the Suffolk Festival. I’ve read several of the other series by Christine Trent: the Lady of Ashes series and the Florence Nightingale mysteries and enjoyed them. St. Clement’s Bluff is a change of pace.
Raleigh is devastated by her husband Grant’s death. When she finally begins to recover, and reads Grant’s will, she is shocked to discover he has left her a house on St. Clement’s Bluff. None of his family seem to know anything about it.
When Raleigh visits it, she finds an old house with its history as a stop on the Underground Railroad. The house is totally empty, except for one room that is filled with beautifully carved furniture. Raleigh begins to investigate.
She gradually meets nearby neighbors, including a fisherman, Kip Hewitt who saves her from a half-hearted suicide attempt.
Well-written, and with a clever mystery, but the real draw are the characters.
One of the common threads (pun intended) in both my mystery series is the importance of weaving. It is not hyperbole to say that without the weavers – most of them women – there would be no cloth and no clothes. Until the Industrial Revolution, when weaving was mechanized, all of the cloth was woven by hand weavers on looms.
Wool is a forgiving thread to weave. It has a little stretch. Linen is harder since the threads have no stretch at all. Silk, with his hair fine threads, is truly difficult.
The myth around the invention of silk goes like this. In about 2700 B. C. E., an emperor’s wife was sipping hot tea when the cocoon of a silkworm fell into her cup. The hot liquid dissolved the sticky coating and the threads unwound. Genetic traces and archaeological finds put the domestication of the silkworm to between 4000 and 5000 years ago, though wild silk may have been woven by then. Chinese archaeologists say they found traces of silk in the soil in a tomb from around 8500 years ago. Wow!
Millennia of selective breeding created the B. Mori moths that are blind and white. They lay eggs on mulberry leaves. The larvae feed on the leaves and then spin the cocoons. The silk is made up of two proteins – fibroin and sericin. The process of stretching and spinning these proteins through an opening near the worm’s jaw creates the solid fiber. Although finer than a human hair, silk has tremendous tensile strength.
One thing I didn’t know: silk is used in medicine. Because it decays slowly in the human body, leaving nothing behind, and is strong, silk is used for surgical sutures. It has been used for centuries as bandages. And the Chinese used it in armor. Silk help shield any wounds.
The two books I read this past week, to my surprise, addressed the same topic, – the collapse of democracy – but the presentation couldn’t be more different.
In Enemies Domestic, by John Dedakis, the United States government is threatened from within.
Lark Chadwick, newly pregnant, is chosen by POTUS to serve as liasion with the press. An obnoxious reporter, discovering Lark’s pregnancy, asks if she will have an abortion and then spins her “I don’t know” into yes. Lark is subsequently abducted by two people who plan to hold her until the birth of the baby. Lark escapes, the two are arrested, but the situation worsens. The President is arrested for treason.
Dedakis takes current events and draws them out into a logical, although somewhat implausible scenario. A terrifying dystopian mystery. Recommended.
The second book I read, And Intrigue of Witches, follows Sydney Taylor, a black woman with a mane of bright red hair.
Suddenly laid off from her D.C. job, she goes home to Robbinsville, only to be offered a job searching for an artifact. Part Treasure Hunt (think National Treasure with Nicholas Cage), part historical fiction, part fantasy, the story veers into a hundred years battle between good and evil. The Daughters of Hathor are witches, and the rightful rulers. When the Opposition is in power, dictatorship, cruelty, and violence are the result.
Magic, time travel, and of course murder are all mixed together in a novel that resists classification. The inventiveness behind the tale is breath taking. But this story will not be for everyone.
The Ancient Greeks and Romans seem to be fascinated with human/animal hybrids, like the Sphinx, the Centaurs, Sirens and the like. The Harpies are another example of these animal/human amalgams, and like the Sirens, the name is frequently used as a derogatory term for a woman.
What were the Harpies. Bird bodies, women’s faces with supernatural speed and long sharp talons. They were punishers. (One of the most famous of the punished is Phineas. He was cursed with immortality, but normal aging. As soon as he lifted food to his mouth, the Harpies descended and snatched it away. Zeus paused the punishment so Phineas could help Jason acquire the Golden Fleece.)
The Harpies retired to a cave in Crete.
The ancient peoples in Crete, commonly called the Minoans, had rituals involving dances where the women pretended to be birds. The women wore masks and dresses with long flowing sleeves designed to appear as wings.
Like the Minotaur, who I suspect was a man wearing a bull’s mask in some ancient rite, I wonder if the Harpies are the dancing women in their bird masks and fluttering sleeves. The bull, revered in Ancient Crete, became something totally different in the later Greek myths. I wouldn’t be surprised if the dancing maidens evolved into the Harpies.
