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DEATH OF A MILL GIRL
by Clyde Linsley
Prime Crime, November 2002
283 pages
$5.99
ISBN: 0425187136


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Josiah Beede, after twenty years of living a public life, as a trusted confidant and advisor to Andrew Jackson, has retired to a farm in New Hampshire and is looking to live quietly. Alas, it is not to be, as a roaming peddler finds the body of a young woman in a field near Beede's house. The girl was sexually abused and murdered, and is unidentified. Beede, also an attorney, is asked by the leaders of the small town he lives near to investigate the crime.

Linsley does not fall into the trap that many other authors of historical fictions fall into; namely, the need to give a history lesson during the course of his prose. Instead, he creates a vivid picture of life in rural 1830's New Hampshire that lives and breathes, with all of its beauties and blemishes. Often, writers of this kind of fiction do a kind of politically correct revisionism as well, and Tinsley avoids this as well. Tinsley does a great job of showing the ugliness and stupidity of prejudice-whether it's white on black or Protestant on Catholic, by not clobbering the reader with a brick. He simply shows it in its stark ugliness as a way of life, and allows the reader to draw his/her own conclusions.

The mystery itself is rather straightforward, without red herrings or side plots to distract the reader. The plot simply follows the investigation Beede conducts from point A to point B to point C.

Beede himself is the greatest strength of this novel. A "hero" of the Battle of New Orleans, he downplays his own accomplishments, but not out of a sense of modesty. He believes he was simply in the right place at the right time, and was incredibly lucky. The unhappiness of his marriage (he is widowed) has left him with a sense that he cannot make any woman happy. He is a good man with flaws-even if the flaws are creations of his own psyche.

I hope this becomes a series. I for one would enjoy reading the future adventures of Josiah Beede.

Reviewed by Greg Herren, November 2002

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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