SIMPLY DEAD

1796. Abduction, murder, and sundry domestic problems keep a Maine weaver too busy to pursue the trade that feeds his family.

Will Rees has no more ambitious plan than to live quietly with his wife, Lydia, now that they've returned to their farm after having sheltered with the Shakers when Will was falsely accused of murder and Lydia of witchcraft (The Shaker Murders, 2019, etc.). But Constable Rouge and his midwife sister, Bernadette, end that plan when they beg for help in finding Bernadette’s daughter, Hortense, another midwife who never returned home after her last delivery, leaving her cart sans horse on the side of the road near Gray Hill. After volunteers search for her and Will uses his tracking skills to discover that Hortense was almost certainly taken by two men who also stole the horse, a faint cry leads him to the missing girl, barefoot and lightly dressed. Will and his cart horse, Hannibal, struggle through a snowstorm to get Hortense back to the farm, where she awakens screaming in fear. She describes having been taken to a cabin by two boys named Jem and Jake, but Will thinks she’s holding back further information. When his daughter Jerusha is attacked by two lads, Will runs them off. Following a second attempt to kidnap Hortense, Will and Rouge question the closemouthed families who live in the hills. They have little luck until Hortense finally admits that she was taken to care for Sally, the mother of the boys. When the Shaker elders who’ve been sheltering Hortense approach him to solve the murder of a women likely mistaken for her, he and the faithful Hannibal return to the mountains over freezing, snow-blanketed roads into woods that harbor hungry wolves, predators who are kindly compared to the dangerous humans Will encounters.

A fine mystery with satisfying characters that powerfully evokes the privations of the period.