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.)
July 21, 2021
In the fall of 1800, Will Rees, a weaver and farmer in Maine, and his wife have recently returned from a rescue mission into the pro-slavery state of Virginia, bringing home Ruth, wife of Tobias, the village cabinetmaker, and others. Constable Rouge seeks Rees' help in retrieving the body of a visiting southern gentleman. As investigations begin, Tobias urges Will not to look too hard for the killer, setting up a conflict between Will's truth-finding principles and his anti-slavery principles. When the doctor's assistant examines the body, he finds evidence of small pox, which Rouge contracts, deputizing Will as constable. Then the victim's sister arrives with slave catchers intent on finding a young woman and her son. When one of the slave catchers is also found murdered, pressure to find the killer grows, with the prime suspects being members of the small Black community. The tenth in the series (after Death in the Great Dismal, 2021), this continuation of the story of Will Rees and his family stands on its own, probing issues of race relations and religion in our early republic.
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June 1, 2021
As Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams battle for the presidency, slave catchers roam as far as Maine to ply a sordid but legal trade. Weaver Will Rees, who's lent a hand to Constable Rouge in the past, can't refuse when Rouge asks for help investigating the murder of a man found in the woods by Brother Jonathan, Elder at Zion, during his search for a cow missing from the Shaker herd. Rouge, who runs an inn, knows the dead man as Randolph Gilbert, who's hunting escaped slaves. Rees has been no friend of slave catchers ever since he and his wife, Lydia, journeyed south to help his friend Tobias, a free Black man, rescue his wife, Ruth, who had been abducted by slave catchers and sold in Virginia. When they all returned to Maine, they brought with them Sandy, an escaped slave who could pass for White, and her baby, Abram. Soon Gilbert's boss, a vengeful young Southern lady, turns up with more slave catchers and a burning hatred for Sandy. Gilbert was strangled and stabbed but also had smallpox, a grave danger to the small community. The local doctor's nephew has recently returned from Edinburgh, where he learned to vaccinate with cowpox, and Rees inoculates his family with the aid of a friend who currently has cowpox. When Rouge falls ill, he begs Rees to take over his job. After a second slave catcher is murdered, Rees is caught between his abhorrence for the slave trade and his reverence for the law. A complex mystery that focuses on the institutional racism still sadly ingrained in the nation's psyche.
COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
June 7, 2021
In Kuhns’s tense 10th outing for Will Rees, a weaver in late 18th-century Maine, repercussions follow from a recent trip south Rees and his wife made in 2021’s Death in the Great Dismal. In Virginia, they rescued a Black woman, an old friend of theirs, from slavers—and freed two other slaves, a young woman, Sandy
, and her infant son, who accompanied them back to Maine. When a stabbed and strangled body is found on the Rees farm, Constable Rouge
identifies the victim as Randolph Gilbert, a Virginian looking for Sandy and her child, who belonged to Gilbert’s sister, Charlotte Sechrest. The stakes rise when Sechrest shows up with some slave catchers and has them search the Rees home for her quarry. Sechrest, who notes Rees resembles the man described as having taken her slaves, accuses him of her brother’s murder. When Rouge falls ill from smallpox, he makes Rees acting constable, putting the weaver in a difficult position. The intricate plot builds to a satisfying resolution. This sobering look at the cultural divide over slavery in the early days of the Republic deserves a wide audience. Agent: Mitchell S. Waters, Brandt & Hochman.