The True Story of Tom Dooley:

From Western North Carolina Mystery to Folk Legend by John Edward Fletcher

Review by jjares

The song, “Tom Dooley” is actually about an Appalachian hill resident named Tom Dula. The dialect of the locals makes the name sound like ‘Dooley.’ Tom was a former Confederate soldier who grew up in Wilkes County, North Carolina. Three families lived near each other, the Dulas, the Meltons, and the Fosters. Tom was the youngest male of three sons and three daughters (Eliza, Sarah, & Ann) in the Dula family.
Tom was quite the ladies’ man; Ann Foster’s mother caught Ann (aged 14) and Tom (aged 12) in bed together. Ann also had two cousins, Laura and Pauline. Early in 1962, Tom volunteered for service with the Confederates, even though he was only seventeen. He was captured and released from a prisoner-of-war camp in April 1865. Both of Tom’s brothers died in the conflict, and Tom received various non-lethal wounds. Ann Foster married an older man, James Melton, a farmer and cobbler. Melton also fought in the Civil War (particularly the Battle of Gettysburg) and was captured and sent to a prisoner camp until the war’s end.

When Tom returned home, he re-established his intimate relationship with Ann. He also started personal relationships with Laura and Pauline. It was proven that Ann had relations with Tom while her husband and child were asleep in other rooms of the house. Folklore says that Laura became pregnant, and she and Tom were eloping to get married when Laura disappeared on Mary 25, 1866. In fact, Laura told neighbors that she was leaving the area with Tom on the 25th.

This author’s story is that Tom was angry with Laura for giving him a venereal disease. However, Tom,  Ann, Pauline, and Laura all had to be treated for venereal disease (syphilis). Since Pauline was the first treated, she possibly gave it to Tom, and he shared it with the other Foster cousins. However, Tom’s view was that he got syphilis from Laura and was angry.

When Laura couldn’t be found, locals started saying that Tom had killed Laura. So, Tom left the area and worked for Colonel James Grayson just across the state line in Trade, Tennessee. Grayson’s name was mentioned in the song, which led to the myth that Grayson had been Dula’s rival for Laura. However, Grayson had no connection to Laura and only employed Tom for a week. After Laura’s body was found (about three months after her death), Tom was arrested for murder. Ann Melton was also arrested for aiding and abetting.

Laura had been stabbed once. Because of the lover’s triangle (Laura, Tom, and Ann Melton) and the rumors, this unusual story captured the public’s interest. It was the first nationally publicized crime of passion in America. Tom was tried first, and their trials were separated. Tom was found guilty, but there were errors in the case,  and a new trial was called. Tom was found guilty again, and he stated that no one aided him. He also said he did not kill Laura (just before he was hanged).

Ann was tried and found not guilty. Folks thought she’d suffered enough. However, looking at the facts, it appears that Ann may have been the murderer, and Tom took the rap for her. Some think Ann was jealous that Tom was intimate with Laura and thus killed her. Ann was also the person who knew where the body was. Ann was known to be promiscuous, and having relations with another man while her husband was in the house took some gall.

I think this book was poorly written.  The writer was a British-Australian and probably wrote the book from the newspaper, court, and legal briefs gathered online. The author also went into great detail about all the myths and folktales told about the lover’s triangle, which seemed unnecessary. This book needed an editor and proofreader. However, it is an interesting view into the thinking and lives of people in Appalachia in the 1860s.

The Mist-Torn Witches by Barb Hendee

Review by Cyndi J. (cyndij)

THE MIST-TORN WITCHES by Barb Hendee is the first in a fantasy series.  Two orphaned sisters, Celine and Amelie, are barely scraping by running an apothecary shop.  When someone comes in wanting their fortune told, Celine decides she can fake her mother’s gift well enough to pass as a seer.  Pretending to be a fortune teller works pretty well until she has an actual vision. Unfortunately the vision is the death of a young woman who is supposed to be marrying the brutal Prince Damek, and his minions have already threatened Celine if she doesn’t tell the woman to marry. Celine can’t bring herself to do it, and within hours she and her sister are on the run, finding protection in the realm of Damek’s younger brother, Prince Anton.

Prince Anton needs Celine’s skills too – the bizarre deaths of four young women with no clues to what happened. They need answers. Anton and his advisors figure if they know who’s fated to die next, they can set a trap for the killer, and so they need a seer who can point out the next victim.  What they didn’t know is that the killer can seemingly walk through walls and disappear without a trace.  Celine is more than distraught as her vision seemingly put the girl where she would die.  If only Celine could alter the conditions, she feels her visions can’t come true, but it won’t be that easy.

Along with all this come enigmatic hints of their ancestry from one of the servants. She’s telling them that Celine and Amelie together are the “future and the past”, but Amelie doesn’t have powers…does she?

I found this an engaging YA fantasy with romance potential, with one small scene that might not be suitable for the younger end of YA.  The writing style is very basic – to me, it rather stomps along, with very little to capture the imagination.  Nothing too exciting about the world either, it’s a standard quasi-medieval setting, and as a long-time mystery/fantasy reader I found the villain, the motive, and the murder method to be obvious very early.  For a YA reader, it would probably be harder to guess.

But nonetheless, I quite liked it. I like the two sisters (wondering though how Amelie learned how to gamble), I liked that some of the “good” guys have flaws, and I liked the contrast between the mist-torn witches and the kettle witches. Plus I’ve always liked stories that have herbal medicines and apothecaries, perhaps there will be more of that in the other books.  So I’m interested enough to find the next in the series.

Black Widower by Patricia Moyes

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

The title aside, I don’t think readers have to make allowances to enjoy this old-school police procedural from 1975. Edward Ironmonger is the ambassador of the newly independent Caribbean country of Tampica. At a diplomatic celebration of Tampica’s opening an embassy in D.C., his wife Mavis makes a fool of herself and is ushered to her room. She is later found shot dead.

Ironmonger exercises dip privileges since an embassy is that country’s territory. He calls in a British police officer to investigate. Like Moyes’ other traditional police procedurals, this novel stars her series dynamic duo Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Henry Tibbet and his wife Emmy. Extremely relatable is this pleasant middle-aged couple who are down to earth but solve murders with no-nonsense English composure.

Tibbet’s inquires reveal that the persons of interest have personal, financial, and political motives galore. As usual Emmy makes a contribution to the investigation, with the insight of other golden-age wives of sleuths such as Harriet Vane, Amanda Campion and Agatha Troy Alleyn.

So the reason to read this mid-Seventies mystery is that Moyes was a master at blending intense settings with brilliant characterization and plausible unfolding of incidents. Moyes moved to the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean archipelago in the 1970s, so her descriptions of tropical lushness and sandy beaches ring true. She must have moved in diplomatic circles because her set-piece of a dip party in D.C. hit home for me, who lived for three years on the fringes of dip doings in a European capital.

Readers of Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, and Ngaio Marsh would do well to read Patricia Moyes.

Mob Cop: My Life of Crime in the Chicago Police Department

by Fred Pascente with Sam Reaves

Review by jjares

Fred Pascente grew up in the Italian section of Chicago (called the Near West Side) with a wide range of men who emerged as heavy hitters in the Mafia. One of Fred’s closest friends was Tony Spilotro, the youngest made man in the Chicago Outfit History.

A word of explanation: The Chicago Outfit was an Italian-American organized crime family based in Chicago. It originated on the city’s South Side in the early 1910s. The Chicago group was part of the larger Italian-American Mafia. Big Jim Colosimo (aka Diamond Jim or Big Jim) created his Chicago criminal empire through gambling, prostitution, and racketeering. Their rivals were other Chicago gangs, notably the North Side Gang (Al Capone) and the Irish Mob (famously led by Charles Dean O’Banion).

Many of the youngsters Fred grew up with settled into careers in organized crime. However, Fred took a different route. He was drafted into the army and later became a Chicago cop.

The description of the Chicago police on the take and how widespread it was, was sobering. At this time, the city police were poorly paid and took bribes to augment their salaries. Finally, during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Mayor Daley gave the city police a $2000/year raise (because Vietnam protestors used the Convention to create violent riots and attack police). According to Fred (a new recruit at the time of the Convention and violence), Mayor Daley told the troops to go after the rioters. After three days of violence against the police (and not allowed to push back), the police were ready to retaliate, and they did. Fred says that history states that the police did the rioting; he disagrees.

During the week, Fred was a policeman; on the weekends, he traveled to Las Vegas with friends. He learned how to rob the casinos while playing cards. Before it was all over, Fred was one of thirty men banned from Las Vegas for life (via Nevada’s casino Black Book). Entering the city again would be a felony for any of the thirty involved.

Fred was soon chosen by William Hanhardt, the chief of detectives in the Chicago Police Dept., because of his connections. Hanhardt turned Fred into his bagman and fixer for several years.

Fred was a policeman for 26 years. He retired just before the FBI indicted him. The FBI wanted William Hanhardt and leaned on Fred. He refused to tell on his friend. Therefore, the police indicted and convicted Fred of insurance fraud (which he’d done with a Gypsy friend). The end of the case resulted in Fred losing his pension. When Fred emerged from prison, he had to start over again. He was still working at 72 when he died.
At first, I was stunned by the blase way Fred talked about crime; before long, the reading was addictive. Fred comes across as an easy-come-easy-go person with a relaxed moral compass. Amazingly, I was disappointed when the book ended.

Providence by Max Barry

Review by Cyndi J. (cyndij)

The first encounter with aliens did not go well for humans. Without any attempt at communication, the aliens killed the crew of a spaceship. Subsequent encounters were much the same, and now humans are doing their best to wipe out the entire species of the aliens they call “salamanders”.   There are losses of course, and after a particularly awful loss the Earth’s population is getting weary of the expense and questioning the war.

A new class of spaceship has been developed called Providence. Controlled completely by AI, it’s a weapon of war designed for zero human casualties. it still has a small human crew for… well, for what? Apparently it’s to watch the ship in action and to send social media clips back to Earth.  Not all the crew – Captain Jackson, Life officer Beanfield, Weapons officer Anders, and Intel officer Gilly – realize they have no role in the conflict.  Beanfield knows it, but her job is to keep everyone on an even mental keel and she’s not telling.  But Anders, who has managed to qualify for the operation while having severe mental issues, is going to throw a wrench into the mission.

It all starts to come apart in a big way when the ship goes out of communication range with Earth. Gilly notices a problem with the ship’s computer core that the AI doesn’t recognize. But fixing it causes the ship to decide the humans are interfering with its mission. In the meantime, Gilly is also seeing that the salamanders are learning from each encounter, and each time getting a little better at tactics. When Anders goes completely off the rails, they are in desperate straits indeed.  I couldn’t believe that Barry was going to be able to write them out of the predicament he put them in, but it was an exciting ending. Except maybe for what Gilly found about the salamanders, I’m still not sure what difference that made.

PROVIDENCE is not just an SF action novel. There’s a lot of character development for the crew, all of whom have flaws. Even Anders becomes sympathetic towards the end. There’s definitely jabs at the military-industrial complex and the whole social media universe.  There are some thought-provoking questions here. Is Barry trying to tell us that nothing we do really matters in the long run? Or maybe it’s just a book…

You can read this as a pretty cool space opera, or you can read it carefully looking for themes and ideas. It likely isn’t a book for everyone, but it was definitely interesting.

Orphan Trains: Taking the Rails to a New Life by Rebecca Langston-George

Review by jjares

Because I read a lot of historical fiction, I’m familiar with the ‘orphan trains’ of the 1800s to the early 1900s. I’m used to reading about them taking homes in the West. However, I wanted to learn about them from the beginning point, usually New York City. Why were there so many available to go on the trains to the West? What were their stories? Although this book is written for children, it answered my questions well.

In 1853, Charles Loring Brace, a young minister, was dismayed by the 30,000 orphaned children wandering about in New York City alone. Partly, this was caused by the significant influx of immigrants to America and the lack of vaccines to protect people from illnesses. In addition, with poor sanitation and hygiene, there was a high death rate among adults, leaving abandoned children.

Brace and other ministers allied to address the problem. The orphanages were overwhelmed, and many more children lived in the streets however they could manage. So Brace founded the Children’s Aid Society. After gathering donations, the group opened schools and lodgings. The group started with the newsboy, giving them accommodation and a way to save their pennies (earned selling newspapers), so they could continue their independence. Still, there were so many children.

Brace realized the children would be better served by letting them live on farms with families. Twenty-eight of the thirty-seven children were adopted on the first orphan train in 1854. Each child was bathed, groomed, given new clothes and shoes, and placed on the train. This book tells the individual stories of children looking for a home.

Along the train line, flyers were posted to let people know when the orphans would arrive. Prospective adults were screened and told that the children were not indentured servants but were free to leave if ill-treated or dissatisfied. Likewise, the farmers could dismiss the children if they were lazy or unsuitable.

After telling several individual stories, this book gives closing remarks on those personal lives — and they are fascinating. About 250,000 children moved westward in the largest migration of children in history. Amongst those survivors, there were two governors, a congressman, a sheriff, at least one mayor, some district attorneys, doctors, lawyers, bankers, teachers, business owners, and one nun.

This book tells stories of a little-known segment of our history. With the photos and individual narratives, this book will affect the reader. This author indicates that PBS did a documentary about orphan trains. There are also orphan train museums, reunions, and websites.

The Toff and the Deadly Parson by John Creasy

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This 1944 thriller stars the series hero, The Toff, cockney slang for an aristocrat. The Toff, the Honorable Richard Rollison, employs a valet, the imperturbable Jolly, who has the PI skills of Paul Drake. Rolly has a tolerant view of bending the rules and tweaks the nose of Scotland Yard, but detests scoundrels who do harm by stealing from people who can least afford it, i.e. Rolly’s plain folk who live in the East End of London. And for that, the plain folk idolize him.

In the 12th of the 60 Toff novels, Rollison gets involved when one of his plain folks, Joe Craik, is framed for a murder. In his humiliation, Craik attempts to take his own life. Rollison figures that the way to clear Craik is to find the culprit.

Rollison also gets involved with a young Parson, new to the East End. The Parson is fired up about saving the folks from drink, gaming, and other vices. Rollison tries to tone down the parson’s activism. But Rollison and the parson run into a gang of malefactors that are bent on running the parson out of the district, even it means framing him for a murder.

Creasy jams a lot of action and machinations into a slim volume. Some plot turns are implausible as are the Toff’s open-handedness with funds and his Bruce Lee-like ability to defend himself. The plot unfolds rather confusingly near the end. Creasy is a good writer, if uneven, as he uses “said, sarcastically” and “said, quietly” and “said, patiently” often enough to begin jarring the reader, a tad. He’s a little old-fashioned with that quirk they had back then: avoiding using, “said” in favor of “demand” or “remonstrate” or “murmur.”