Excellent historical mystery

Cover Her Body

By Eleanore Sullivan

ISBN: 978-1-936214-55-6

Trade Paper, a 2012 release

From Yesteryear Press.

During its history, the United States has periodically seen the rise of religious movements of various kinds.  Sweeping westward, religion followed the colonization of the land by emigrants from Europe. In the early nineteenth century, one such revival brought colonies of survivalists from Central Europe seeking relief from the persecution of powerful main-stream religions. One such small group came from Wurttemberg, Germany in 1817, with help from Quakers in England. They called themselves the Society of Separatists. Under the leadership of a single charismatic leader named Joseph Belmer, they became a strict religious group, tightly bound, with many rules of conduct that people today would find oppressive and questionable.  That is the background for this excellent historical crime novel.

The author is a descendent of the founder of Zoar, where the members of the Society of Separatists established their village on five thousand acres of owned land on Northeastern Ohio. When the novel opens it is 1830 and the village has completed the digging of a portion of the Ohio and Erie Canal. Redemption and self-denial are fundamental beliefs of the society, such that no one travels alone, children are housed in dormitories and life is strictly regulated.  A free-thinking woman like Adelaide, principal character in the well-written novel, is seen as a disturbing influence. When she finds a young village woman dead in the nearby river, an apparent suicide, the village is thrown into turmoil and the specter of outsiders is immediately raised. Adelaide, trying to adhere to the society’s principles but still determined to do the right thing by her dead friend, represents a danger to the leaders of the community.

Subsequent events and the persistence of Adelaide lead to greater disruption and a series of decisions that are able to calm the villagers yet create moral dilemmas. The sense of place is strong and the characters always meet the test of believability. Readers will come away from this novel with new understanding of the role of some women in a very specific society, but with lessons for our broader, modern society in which we all live.  Strongly recommended, I look forward to more life lessons of tolerance and thoughtful beliefs from this author.

Unusual terrific novel of crime on Midwestern prairies

Big Wheat
By Richard A. Thompson
Poisoned Pen Press 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59058-820-8

World War I is done and Charlie Krueger’s older brother is never coming home. Charlie, his sister and their mother must cope with an increasingly abusive drunken father and husband. The summer of 1919 wanes and vast acreages of the Middle West prairies are thick with ripening grain. Up the long reaches from the banks of the Platte and the Missouri come the contract threshing crews and their machines, most followed by raffish bindlestiffs to supplement a farmer’s friends and relatives. The crews are often peopled by men of questionable backgrounds and are occasionally eyed with suspicion by local sheriffs who rarely chase criminals beyond their county boundaries.

When Charlie Krueger has a final confrontation with his father, he leaves behind a sorrowful mother and sister and the local girl he thought he’d love forever. He becomes a bindlestiff, traveling from farm to farm, learning the threshing business and nurturing his love for machines.

The machines are new, complicated and prone to breakdowns. Charlie hooks up with a marvelously conceived traveling machine repair crew that becomes his new family. But lurking in the background is a killer, a killer who believes Charlie saw his latest brutal deed. He seeks to find and murder Charlie. Meanwhile, the sheriff of Charlie’s home county has developed leads which point him toward Charlie as a murderer.

This then is the roiling plot which moves the story forward. Carefully constructed and set against the vast reaches of the plains states, the novel evokes a time and place and the attitudes of the people and the land in a powerful and moving way. Readers will smell the dust, drip sweat and shrivel under the burning sun right along with the threshing crews. They’ll feel a clutch in the night as the sheriff and the murderer draw closer and they’ll empathize with the casual corruption and the surmounting goodness of the characters the author has created.

A fine, exciting and unusual well-written novel I am pleased to recommend to all readers of crime fiction.