Thoreau in Phantom Bog
-
-
4.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $3.99
-
- $3.99
Publisher Description
Henry David Thoreau’s impassioned activism in the Underground Railroad leads him away from the banks of Walden Pond into a morass of murder…
In the spring of 1848, Thoreau returns to Plumford, Massachusetts, in search of a fellow conductor on the Underground Railroad, who has gone missing along with the escaped female slave he was assigned to transport. With the help of his good friend, Dr. Adam Walker, Thoreau finds the conductor—shot to death on a back road.
When the two men discover that Adam’s beloved cousin Julia has given the slave safe harbor, their relief is counterbalanced by concern for Julia, who has put herself in grave danger. Another conductor has been murdered in a neighboring town and a letter has been found from someone claiming to have been hired to assassinate anyone harboring fugitive slaves. With all of them now potential targets, the need for Thoreau and Adam to apprehend the killer is more urgent than ever…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Someone is targeting Massachusetts conductors on the Underground Railroad in the pseudonymous Oak's solid third Henry David Thoreau mystery (after 2014's Thoreau on Wolf Hill). In the spring of 1848, Julia Pelletier offers to help Thoreau, her transcendental philosopher friend, in his effort to hide runaway slaves, in part to make up for the profits that her brutish husband, Jacques, made from human trafficking in the West Indies. She soon finds herself in the middle of a whodunit when Ezra Tripp, a fellow member of the underground, is found shot dead. Julia's involvement only deepens when she harbors runaways herself, and she comes under suspicion from both a Southern slave catcher and the local constable. The murder of another member of the organization raises the stakes. Thoreau is again an able investigator, and the pre Civil War setting is well integrated into the story, even though a subplot involving Julia's complex love life crosses into melodrama.
