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DANCING DEAD
by Deborah Woodworth
Avon, March 2002
320 pages
$6.50
ISBN: 0380804271


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

By 1938 the Shaker community in Kentucky had nearly withered away. As a moneymaking scheme, they opened a hostel and the first residents were some curious folks indeed. About the same time a ghost began to appear in various deserted village buildings at night, dancing and attracting the attention of outsiders who roamed the roads hoping to catch sight of her. The outside world was interfering too much with the Shaker Community. Brother Wilhelm was appalled; he would like to return to the values and actions of a hundred years earlier. Sister Rose was resigned.

Thanks got much worse when first one of the hostel guests and then a brother were found murdered. Sister Rose, who had experience in solving murders, went to work pressured by the fact that the police had arrested Brother Wilhelm as the murderer.

The Great Depression is the backdrop for the events of this mystery and there is an ìold-fashionedî feel to the book. The author succeeds superbly in re-creating the Depression years for us, the attitudes, the emotions, the lack of luxuries but the stoic acceptance that this must be. Woodworth has a keen sense of history and has selected an era with which she appears to be quite familiar.

One of the appealing things about this took was getting a glimpse of the Shakers, albeit at nearly the end of their existence. Sister Anne lives and breathes the tenets of the religion and calmly and pleasantly reminds others of these beliefs. This is a curious and often misunderstood religion and I was delighted to see it treated with clarity and compassion.

The characters are likable if a little two dimensional. Certainly Sister Anne is well developed as is Gennie and a very engaging little girl who came to the Shakers after abuse and tragedy and is not yet willing to trust anyone very much. The other characters tend to be more stereotypical.

There is a good sense of place. The dusty little village off the beaten track in Kentucky came alive for me as the author took me through the streets, about the abandoned buildings where once a thriving community lived, and into the inhabited buildings where believers clung to the life they loved.

The plot was well done. I was intrigued by the story and did not figure out the solution until Sister Rose very nicely explained it to me. Because modern methods of detection did not exist, she had to study the victimís past and learn as much as possible about her as well as the other people staying in the hostel and use this information to understand who might or might not commit murder. Then she laid a trap into which the murderer conveniently fell.

This was an absorbing book and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Reviewed by Sally A. Fellows, May 2002

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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