I am happy and excited to report that 1382 people participated in the giveaway of Death in Salem.
Of the 20 winners, 15 were from the US, 4 from Canada, and 1 from Great Britain. I’ve put the 15 in the mail and add the others on Monday. It always takes me a little longer to mail the ones to Canada and Great Britain because I have to fill out customs forms.
The Devil’s Cold Dish will be released in less than a month. I have my first copy and it looks beautiful.
A Devil’s Cold Dish will be out in just about a month.
And my giveaway of Death is Salem will end in about a week. I have almost 700 entries for the 20 copies.
Today, April 15, I have begun a month long giveaway for Death in Salem.
In this fourth offering, Will Rees stops in Salem to pick up some imported cloth for Lydia. Of course he is immediately drawn into a murder investigation.
20 copies up for grabs.
This is to celebrate the upcoming publication of book number five in the Will Rees Canon: The Devil’s Cold Dish. So far reviews have been great.
Upon their return from Salem, Lydia and Will Rees find themselves the targets of a malicious intelligence determined to destroy them.
So happy to receive this great review from Kirkus. For the non-librarians among you, Kirkus is one of the big three review sources for public libraries, the other two being Library Journal and Booklist. With limited budgets, libraries buy based partly on reviews.
Really happy with this one.
THE DEVIL’S COLD DISH
Author: Eleanor Kuhns
Review Issue Date: April 15, 2016
Online Publish Date: March 30, 2016
Publisher:Minotaur
Pages: 336
Price ( Hardcover ): $25.99
Price ( e-book ): $12.99
Publication Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN ( Hardcover ): 978-1-250-09335-6
ISBN ( e-book ): 978-1-250-09336-3
Category: Fiction
Classification: Mystery
In the 1790s, a New England weaver tries to solve a murder made to look like his handiwork. Will Rees is always eager to see something new outside the boundaries of Dugard, in the District of Maine. Ever since he helped solve a murder in Massachusetts on his last trip away, he’s been having a hard time settling down to farming. Instead of the tedium of milking and haying, he’d rather work at his loom while he and Lydia, his wife, await the birth of their first child. His sister Caroline wants to move her family in with Rees, though the farmhouse is already crowded with Rees and Lydia’s five adopted children. Her whining demands are hard to withstand, since Rees’ hot temper is partly to blame for the accident that disabled Caroline’s husband and caused her financial distress. Even worse is the town constable’s news that a man with whom Rees had a public fight about politics now lies dead on a rocky hilltop. Although the constable is Rees’ friend, believes him innocent, and wants his help in finding the real killer, a second and even more brutal murder implicates Lydia as well. She was a practicing Shaker who gave up her religion when she married Rees, but the ignorant and superstitious among the townspeople believe whispers that Lydia is a witch. Shocked when he learns who started the rumors and slow to accept how much some of his childhood companions have come to dislike and resent him, Rees must awaken to a painful reality as acts of vandalism threaten to turn into something uglier. An angry mob demanding Lydia’s arrest forces him to take drastic measures for his family’s safety, and when suspicion falls on him for more than one murder, he learns who his real friends are. Kuhns’ fifth dispatch from the early days of a new nation, faster paced than the last installment (Death in Salem, 2015), builds mounting sympathy for its beleaguered leading couple.
Copy edits on “The Devil’s Cold Dish ” have arrived. The finished manuscript is due back to Minotaur on January 5.
What are copy edits? Mainly spelling, grammar – those little things that slip through. It is also my last chance to review the finished manuscript. Line edits, which come first, detect problems with the plot or timeline. More substantive changes can be made during the line edit phase. Copy edits are not the creative part but they help make the manuscript a finished product. Everyone knows how annoying typos are and the copy edits are designed to prevent them as much as possible.
The timing proves something else: when one is a writer you are always on duty – even over the holidays.
I am happy to announce that I received both the contracts and the edits for the Devil’s Cold Dish.
The contracts have been signed and put in the mail.
I am still working on the edits but they are almost done. These are line edits; i.e. the editor goes over the manuscript and comments/questions items. This is when the editor has the author correct the manuscript – are there too many repetitions of the same information? Does the plot need some changes? Too many characters?
I enjoy this part of the editing because it makes me think of the manuscript and the story in a new way. Confusing sections are clarified and sometimes I take the opportunity to expand on something. this is my chance to look at the story with fresh eyes – for good or ill since I can either think this book is good or terrible.
The next time I see the manuscript I will be working on copy edits which I don’t like at all. This is grammatical mistakes, any double periods I haven’t caught. If I haven’t paid close enough attention to the time line, I can be sure the copy editor will pick it up.
Although I don’t address witchcraft of the trials in Death in Salem, I write about a period 100 years later, I do use it in The Devil’s Cold Dish.I am fascinated by the persistent belief in witches.
Although the trials ended before 1700 and reparations began to be paid to surviving victims and families of the executed, belief in witches and the trials did not end then. As I have written in other posts, belief – and accusations – continued well into the 1800’s. ( And actually into modern times ). With Halloween only days away, it seems appropriate to address the topic again.
The craze in Massacheusetts came after several centuries of the trials and burnings in Europe. Belief in magic was widespread. Girls used spells to try and see the faces of future husbands and superstitions regarding illness, birth, harvest were rife. Harelips were caused when the mother saw a rabbit, birth marks because the mother ate strawberries, for example. One of my favorites: to protect a mother and child during birth put an ear of corn on the mother’s belly.
Reasons given for the explosion of belief and hangings in Salem are many. I just read several pieces on Tituba. Variously described as an Indian or a black slave, her testimony apparently drove much of the content of the stories and was a direct cause of the eventual hangings of women described as her confederates. (Although they all protested their innocence, sixteen were hanged. Tituba was set free.) A shadowy character, she has been also described as practicing voodoo. Her testimony. at least to me, reads more like the Christian belief in demons and the devil. Once she was released, however, she, like the girls whose fits started the terror, faded into obscurity.
By the late eighteen hundreds her name was used to frighten children and she is shown in illustrations in the witches’s black dress holding her broom.
Considering the amazing staying power of accusations, one has to wonder about the psychology behind these beliefs. Of course malice plays a huge role as does mysogyny. But why the belief in evil supernatural powers and submission to the Devil? I still have trouble wrapping my mind around it.
I am happy and so excited to announce that I have received the cover for the new Will Rees mystery – A Devil’s Cold Dish. The graphics arts department at Minotaur is so good. In my opinion, they have scored with every single cover.
Will and Lydia Rees return to Dugard after their adventures in Salem and find themselves in new trouble. Not only is Will accused of murder but Lydia finds her own life in danger.
Coming June, 2016
I ‘ve had a couple of questions about my most recent book, Death in Salem. Why didn’t I fully explore the witchcraft angle? Well, as I’ve said in earlier posts, Salem by 1797, was a very cosmopolitan city. It was not only the sixth largest, one of the most diverse (with the first East Indian immigrant populations in the US) but it was also the wealthiest. Salem’s witchcraft past was more an embarrassment.
House of one of the judges.
The witchcraft spell has never completely left Salem, however. On one of our tours, the guide was the descendent of one of the accused witches. Reminders of this past abound.
Graveyard includes memorials to those that were executed.
Although Salem became something other – a huge center of shipping and trading, however, the belief in witchcraft did not fade. In an earlier blog I wrote about trials that continued, right up to one in Russia in 1999. Belief that women are witches never completely disappear.
And I wonder what is behind these accusations? Belief? Greed, malice, revenge? Hatred of women. With Gamer gate and all of the Internet attacks on women we cannot discount that as a motive.
Christianity certainly plays a part.I think most of us are familiar with the quote from the Bible about not suffering a witch to live. During the middle ages and right up to modern times this has been used to execute any number of innocent people, primarily women.
I will blog in the future about my research into witchcraft and goddesses – I think the two are tied.
To answer the question I have asked, I decided, that since I did not explore witchcraft and the psychologies behind it in Death in Salem, I would do so in the next book. That book, titled The Devil”s Cold Dish, will be coming out next year. Spoiler alert: it does not take place in Salem.
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