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Death of a Mill Girl is a tale of the days before the construction of the great red brick mill buildings that today look blindly out on the Amoskeag Falls of the Merrimack River and the Victorian industrial city of Manchester, New Hampshire. Albert Sanborn, a young peddler comes across the body of a young woman lying in some tall grass in a field belonging to Josiah Beede, lawyer and protege of President Andrew Jackson, near the town of Warrensboro. When Beede returns from court sessions in Concord, the next day, he is accosted by his neighbors, Jacob Wolf who owns the farm next to his, Israel Tomkins, self-styled premier citizen of Warrensboro, and Stephen Huff, the town constable. Beede, known as the boy hero of the Battle of New Orleans had spent time in Washington, and was, by far, the most sophisticated citizen of the town, so he is asked to try and find out who raped and murdered the beautiful red-haired young woman and left her in the field. Sanborn has been locked up in Samuel Skinner's storeroom. Skinner asks Beede to find a more acceptable location to keep the peddler while he investigates, so Josiah takes Albert home to help Randolph on the farm. Randolph is a freed slave, once the property of Adrienne, Josiah's dead wife. Beede discovers that the dead woman is Sharon Cudahy, an Irish Catholic who had worked in the Kerrigan Mill on the edge of Manchester. Alice Patterson, Sharon's friend from the mill, makes the identification, and Beede goes south to take Alice back to her job and to try and find out who killed Sharon. Squire Tomkins daughter, who is considering spending a year in the mill, accompanies them. Sharon was not allowed to live with the other girls because it was feared that, being a Catholic, she would contaminate them. Even though most of the New Englanders were Congregationalists, Kerrigan, the mill owner, forced them to go to Episcopal services on Sunday. Beede's housekeeper didn't trust Randolph because he was "a darkie" I was more fascinated with the descriptions of life in 1836 New England and the conditions in the mills, even during these early days, when wealthy farmers would send their daughters to work for a year in order to learn useful skills. But the scenes inside the mill would make hell seem like a day at the beach. Linsley claims he purposely left some anachronisms in the narrative, but I was too caught up in the story and the characters to be bothered by them. This is the first book in a new series. I hope it has a long run.
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, August 2002
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