There were a lot of interesting plot developments in this book, but until right before Rees gathers everyone together to name the killer, he is telling himself he doesn't know it is. Then he goes on to name who did the killing.
I guess it all made sense, but it still read like the ending was thrown together.
I guess it all made sense, but it still read like the ending was thrown together.
I haven't read any of this author's previous books, so that's perhaps one of the missing dimensions here, as it did seem that there was some history I wasn't aware of. I actually picked this up by mistake, thinking it was another non-fiction book about Salem ('tis the season), so I decided to give it a read anyway. I do like historical fiction, and this one was at least capable.
It tells the (continuing?) story of Will Rees, a weaver who is visiting the notorious Salem village to purchase some fabric for his wife, and, to perhaps make a little extra money to support his growing family. He encounters an old friend from the War (Revolutionary) who is now an undertaker, and who enlists him to help solve the mystery of the murder of a man, which has involved the friend's fiancee, who is initially suspected of the crime, being one of the household servants. What follows is an involved web of intrigue about the complex politics and inner workings of this somewhat fictional town of Salem, a hundred years after the notorious witch trials, which the book doesn't dwell on in great depth.
Some of the age-old rivalries and conflicts between families persist, however - in this case, between merchant/shipping and whaling families, old and new money - which was certainly nothing new in this historic town with a dark past. I think that's more what I was hoping for: a town coming to terms with what happened in its history, over the course of a century, but that wasn't really a part of the story, which was disappointing. I do read a fair bit about the Salem events, but rarely see material related to what happened in the decades following the events where dozens of people lost their lives.
Then again, perhaps that's just us from the future imposing guilt on people who lived there in the succeeding decades, whose distant relatives may have been involved, but who didn't give much thought to events that didn't really touch their lives in any significant way after the fact. The day-to-day struggles for survival were probably far more paramount, with involvement in the witch trials a century past earning little more than a footnote in many family histories, which, by most accounts, those involved wished to put solidly behind them in any event (i.e., Nathaniel Hawthorne, who changed the spelling of his name to separate himself from one of his relatives who served as a judge during the witch trials).
Don't want to give too many spoilers here, just some observations: as some other readers have noted, the story tended to lag a fair bit, but the characters were well-developed, each with a deep and often tragic history of their own, in keeping with the time period, where death and disaster never seemed to be far away. The pretext is curious: a man who had solved a crime during the war being enlisted as something of an eighteenth-century private investigator (was there actually such a thing) by a friend to solve a murder, which the local sheriff doesn't seem terribly interested in... until other people start dying.
A weaver/private investigator seems a curious concoction, which kept an otherwise average story more interesting. It also relies on thick description of the scenes to fill in some of the lags in the plot, but in this case, it's reasonably effective, as it's entertaining, at least to me, to read of descriptions of what a town of this period would have been like. Enjoyable overall, just a bit slow and cumbersome for my liking.
It tells the (continuing?) story of Will Rees, a weaver who is visiting the notorious Salem village to purchase some fabric for his wife, and, to perhaps make a little extra money to support his growing family. He encounters an old friend from the War (Revolutionary) who is now an undertaker, and who enlists him to help solve the mystery of the murder of a man, which has involved the friend's fiancee, who is initially suspected of the crime, being one of the household servants. What follows is an involved web of intrigue about the complex politics and inner workings of this somewhat fictional town of Salem, a hundred years after the notorious witch trials, which the book doesn't dwell on in great depth.
Some of the age-old rivalries and conflicts between families persist, however - in this case, between merchant/shipping and whaling families, old and new money - which was certainly nothing new in this historic town with a dark past. I think that's more what I was hoping for: a town coming to terms with what happened in its history, over the course of a century, but that wasn't really a part of the story, which was disappointing. I do read a fair bit about the Salem events, but rarely see material related to what happened in the decades following the events where dozens of people lost their lives.
Then again, perhaps that's just us from the future imposing guilt on people who lived there in the succeeding decades, whose distant relatives may have been involved, but who didn't give much thought to events that didn't really touch their lives in any significant way after the fact. The day-to-day struggles for survival were probably far more paramount, with involvement in the witch trials a century past earning little more than a footnote in many family histories, which, by most accounts, those involved wished to put solidly behind them in any event (i.e., Nathaniel Hawthorne, who changed the spelling of his name to separate himself from one of his relatives who served as a judge during the witch trials).
Don't want to give too many spoilers here, just some observations: as some other readers have noted, the story tended to lag a fair bit, but the characters were well-developed, each with a deep and often tragic history of their own, in keeping with the time period, where death and disaster never seemed to be far away. The pretext is curious: a man who had solved a crime during the war being enlisted as something of an eighteenth-century private investigator (was there actually such a thing) by a friend to solve a murder, which the local sheriff doesn't seem terribly interested in... until other people start dying.
A weaver/private investigator seems a curious concoction, which kept an otherwise average story more interesting. It also relies on thick description of the scenes to fill in some of the lags in the plot, but in this case, it's reasonably effective, as it's entertaining, at least to me, to read of descriptions of what a town of this period would have been like. Enjoyable overall, just a bit slow and cumbersome for my liking.
