WWAR NOVEMBER 2023

Dark and Stormy Book Club

WWAR October
Show Notes
On today's episode, we selected mysteries that were set in Colonial America.
Misty reported on “A Shaker Murder” by Eleanor Kuhns. It is #6 in her Will Rees mystery series.
Fresh from facing allegations of witchcraft and murder, travelling weaver Will Rees, his heavily pregnant wife
Lydia and six adopted children take refuge in Zion, a Shaker community in rural Maine. Shortly after their
arrival, screams in the night reveal a drowned body ... but is it murder or an unfortunate accident? The Shaker
Elders argue it was just an accident, but Rees believes otherwise.
As Will investigates further, more deaths follow and a young girl vanishes from the community. Haunted by
nightmares for his family’s safety, Rees must rush to uncover the truth before the dreams can become reality
and more lives are lost. Yet can the Shaker Elders be trusted, or is an outsider involved? Misty highly
recommends this series.
Ann reported on “Brutalized” by J. R. Thompson. 17th-century Dublin, Ireland, preteen Callum McCarthy
is shipped to the English Colonies, where he will endure horrors of the Irish slave trade. Intense and powerful,
JR Thompson’s Brutalized explores ideas of greed, loneliness and despair, determination, and faith.
Growing up in an area where poor Irish families are as welcome as malaria, Callum, the son of a drunkard
father and neglectful mother, already has the odds stacked against him. But when the boy is kidnapped from
his own home, he’s plunged into a living nightmare.
Upon arrival in America, a cruel man by the name of Josiah Gillcrest makes Callum his ill-treated workhorse.
Bone-chilling secrets Callum uncovers on the tobacco plantation force him to make difficult decisions. Should
he make a run for it? Kill the wicked overseer, who happens to be his master’s son? Lead a slave uprising?
The possibilities are endless.
Mystery, brutality, and deep, dirty secrets saturate Brutalized as Thompson shares truths of white slavery from
Ireland and Germany to Colonial America. Callum’s detective skills could prove useful in bringing crucial
changes to the plantation if they don’t kill him first.
Finalkly Tracey reported on the book. Bone Rattler by Eliot Pattison. Unfairly convicted and force into
indentured servitude, young Highland Scot Duncan McCallum finds himself aboard a prisoner ship bound for
the New World. A series of mysterious deaths plagues the passengers and claims the life of Duncan’s dear
friend Adam Munroe. Enlisted by his captors to investigate, a strange trail of clues leads Duncan into the New
World and eventually thrusts him into the bloody maw of the French and Indian War.
Duncan is indentured to the British Lord Ramsey, whose estate in the uncharted New York woodlands is a
Heart of Darkness where multiple warring factions―the British, rogue Scots, the French, the Huron, and the
Iroquois―are engaged in battle. Exploring a frontier world shrouded in danger, Duncan, the exiled chief of his
near-extinct Scottish clan, finds that sometimes justice cannot be reached unless the cultures and spirits of
those involved are resolved.