Copper Kettle
4/5
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About this ebook
"Set in 1920, Ramsay's satisfying prequel to his contemporary Ike Schwartz series provides fascinating details of a soldier's life during WWI. It's a genuine pleasure to read a story of detection that depends purely on observation and logical deduction to reach its conclusions." —Publishers Weekly
It's 1920. Jesse Sutherlin has returned to Buffalo Mountain a war hero, having after survived the trenches of World War I. Not only did he fight the enemy, reaching the rank of officer, he went a few rounds with some of his fellow soldier who viewed him as a hillbilly.
Jesse is glad to be home. But his view of the world and of himself has changed. What next? He can't shake his training as an officer to follow the old lifestyle. He applies for a job at the local sawmill where his new boss quickly makes him foreman for a decent wage. And he meets the independent Serena Barker.
His cousin and fellow soldier, Solomon McAdoo, was less fortunate in his war service. He's suffering from shell shock. One day, up on the mountain while tending to a family moonshine still owned by Big Tom McAdoo, he's shot in the back. When Jesse hears this, he knows violence is going to boil up. The west side of the mountain is McAdoo territory, while the east side belongs to the Lebruns. The dispute ignited by Solomon's murder will be like the feud between the West Virginia Hatfields and McCoys, with no winners, only more dead men. The mountain is a hard place, where shooting someone over a disagreement is just part of life. Jesse decides to head off the violence by investigating the crime.
But he's hampered by his bellicose Sutherlin family who want retribution. Jesse is also held back by Serena, a Lebrun relative, who urges him to get away before he gets himself killed, and by a bigoted local sheriff who soon arrests him on the testimony of an eyewitness to Solomon's death. Jesse encounters a lawyer in Floyd, the county seat, who is hired to defend him when he's arrested, romances the girl from the enemy camp, and tries to stay alive while preventing more, perhaps wholesale, deaths. Big Tom gives him a deadline: four days.
Looming over all this drama is the specter of the influenza epidemic that killed more people worldwide than died in the trenches, as well as the grinding kind of poverty that has become a way of life for folks on the played-out farmland of this corner of Appalachia.
Frederick Ramsay
Frederick Ramsay was raised on the east coast and attended graduate school in Chicago. He was a writer of mysteries set in Virginia, (the Ike Schwartz Mysteries) Botswana Mystery series, Jerusalem Mystery series and stand-alones (Impulse, Judas: The Gospel of Betrayal). He was a retired Episcopal Priest, Academic, and author.
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Reviews for Copper Kettle
3 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This mystery was sent to me by the publisher Poisoned Pen Press. Thank you.It’s 1919 in the historical mystery by Frederick Ramsay set in the Buffalo Mounatin community of rural Virginia. Folks scratch out a living working the played-out soil on farmsteads, make moonshine, or maybe are lucky enough to grab one of the dwindling timber jobs. They believe in the Bible and taking care of their own with no interference from outsiders. They also believe in revenge and if a family member, no matter how distant, is done wrong, then it is up to his relatives to settle the score with the folks from the other side. In Buffalo Mountain there are two clans, the McAddo’s who live on one side of the mountain and the Lebruns’s who live on the other. No love is lost between them. When Jesse Sutherlin came back to the mountain after a year in the trenches of the Western Front everything is just the way it was when he left. Things haven’t changed much since the Civil War but World War I changed him. The Army taught him to read better, drive a truck, and become an efficient killer. He met men from all over the country whose names he could not even pronounce, exchanged words with the German boys that old men said were his enemy, and seen Paris. He knew with a clarity as pure as the stream by his mother’s cabin that the mountain ways were not enough and that folks had to move with the times or they would be left behind.So when his cousin Solomon had the back of his head blown away and the McAddo’s were ready to find a Lebrun and string him up, Jesse had to stop it. He had seen too much of killing and without proof about who had murdered the poor shell-shocked veteran, Jesse wasn’t about to let a new blood feud flare up and more blood spill down the mountain from both sides.On his quest for the truth he finds himself the chief suspect in the murder of a Lebrun. No one really blames him because he did right by his cousin Solomon and if he hangs for it, well he upheld the family honor. Jesse is having none of this. He has no hankering to be shot from behind, killed in a knife fight, or swing from a tree. He didn’t survive the war jut to die on his mountain.Jesse is a wonderful protagonist and the characters on the mountain are interesting people. From his stoic mother who has had too many losses in her family to the girl he comes to love from the opposing clan, the reader meets a tight, finely drawn community. This appears to be the start of a new series by Ramsay and it is very welcome. I look forward to reading more about the mountain and its folks.