MURDER ON PRINCIPLE

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.