The Lost Quilter by Jennifer Chiaverini

This is the first Chiaverini novel I have read, and I am pleased to make the acquaintance of her Quilter's Series. She is obviously an accomplished quilter and a quilt historian in her own right, and she very effectively sews together solid tales by using bits and pieces of historical fact and quilting lore to start off her works.

In this particular book Chiaverini uses historial tidbits from the Historic Charleston Foundation and the Edisto Island Museum to create a story around a slave woman who is sold south to South Carolina after being caught as a runaway along the Underground Railway in Pennsylvania in 1859. She fashions a Birds in the Air quilt out of scraps from her owners' castoff clothes and her own rags and hides in the stitching hints as to how to find the Elm Creek Farm again the next time she runs. She leaves a son, her offspring with her master, in the care of the Elm Creek Farm owners.

Before she is able to return she is sold by her master in Virginia to his relatives on Edisto Island near Charleston, SC and eventually is allowed to marry and have a baby daughter. The Civil War stops any plans that she and her spouse, Titus Chester, can make to run north, but does not slake the desire or the secret planning that goes on to regain freedom.

The book is well researched and manages to hold interest both for the historic details and the dramatic storyline. This is an effective way to personalize and humanize the atrocities of slavery so that we never forget what happened to those who were enslaved.

Liz Nichols

Death of a Witch by M.C. Beaton

British author, M.C. Beaton has spun another tale about Scottish bobby, Hamish Macbeth, and the small Highland village of Lochdubh. This tale is also appropriately read in the fall when we are thinking about the ghosts and goblins of Halloween.

The hero is called to investigate the murder of a woman considered by many to be a witch, Catronia Beldame. Beldame has been giving local men a potion that is supposed to enhance a certain part of the anatomy, but actually just creates an itchy rash. Hamish is about to investigate the potion complaints when Catronia turns up dead. Is she killed by a jealous wife, an angry client, or someone who knows something more about her past?

Vying for Hamish's attention and assisting in assessing the murder clues are Priscilla, the daughter of the local innkeeper, and Hamish's former girlfriend, Elspeth Grant, a journalist for one of the area newspapers.

It's fun as an American to read the Scottish dialect in this book and to try to beat Hamish at solving the case.

Liz Nichols

Michael Gregorio's A Visible Darkness

This is one of the darkest tales I've read in a long time, probably since I read Gregorio's last mystery a year or so ago. Gregorio's protagonist, Magistrate Hanno Stiffeniis from a small city in Prussia, is ordered to investigate why Prussian women are being murdered along the Baltic coast while they are employed in mining for amber.

Gregorio weaves a psychological thriller mixed with Gothic mystery and the reader is left to decide whether the women are being killed for the amber they frequently smuggle to other communities in Prussia in 1808, or are there other reasons these women are being brutally murdered and mutilated? Are the French to blame? A mysterious Prussian doctor? A student at the Kantian school in Konigsburg? Stiffeniis has promised to solve the mystery within two weeks to be home in time to see the birth of his new child. He needs to figure out why the murder suspect knows so much about him and his family.

This book will take a strong stomach. It begins with a graphic description of a putrid cow dung problem in Stiffeniis' town, and continues with extremely graphic details in both sight and smells, about a mutilated body. The gore doesn't let up throughout the book.

Michael Gregorio, which is a pen name for a husband and wife team Michael G. Jacob and Daniela De Gregorio, are on top of the game in this taut and graphically written Gothic mystery.

Liz Nichols