About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

CUT TO THE HEART
by Ava Dianne Day
Doubleday, March 2002
302 pages
$22.95
ISBN: 038549470X


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Throughout the spring and summer of 1863, during the middle of the Civil War, Clara Barton was on Hilton Head island at headquarters, waiting for the war to reach her, and spending her time taking care of Colonel John Elwell, who had suffered a compound fracture of the leg.

One day, Annabelle, a Gullah conjure woman, comes to ask the Colonel to help find her son, who has disappeared. Clara, who has been kept out of the Nurse Corps because Dorothea Dix thinks she's too attractive, has determined that she will help in any way she can.

So, in addition to gathering medical supplies and items of necessity such as blankets and toothbrushes, she is keeping a notebook in which she jots the particulars of missing persons. Perhaps she will be able to tell some families what happened to their loved ones.

As Elwell recuperates, Barton and Elwell find a mutual attraction, but he is married and she will never marry. Mary and Frances Gage have been trying to educate the freed slaves, and when a young orphan becomes Clara's factotum, she brings him to the Gage's several days a week so he can learn to read and write

She realizes that she must find other work, so she volunteers at the Free Clinic in Beaufort, where she learns that several young children have disappeared, as well as a young woman, whose headless body has been shoved under the porch at the clinic.

Although Clara doesn't know it, she is being stalked by a madman. It is he who has been taking the children, and who cut the hands and feet off the young woman, for his experiments in human transplantation.

The blend of fact and fiction is well done. We never know who is an historical character and who is a figment of Day's imagination. And perhaps, during those few months, during 1863, when the Union army was trying to figure out how to get Charleston, the rebel's last port, from the Confederate military and naval forces , there were evil spirits abroad in the Sea Islands off the coast of S. Carolina and Georgia.

Cut to the Heart is not a mystery. It is more in the tradition of the true historical novel . . . not the bodice ripper but the books of such authors as Thomas Costain, from which I learned most of the history I know today. In this case, it is very hard to distinguish which characters are real and which fictional. I wonder what Clara would think of the Red Cross, which she founded as an organization to help people in need, not as the money making machine it has become today.

Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, April 2002

This book has more than one review. Click here to show all.

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]