Blood Red Roses
Description:... It is 1786, and summer has come to Rufford, Maine. As the hay ripens and roses perfume the air, the horrors of the long, hard winter - and the recent war - seem to be fading. But danger looms again, as the threat of taxes and debtor's prison incites dispossessed farmers to form up bands that roam the countryside fomenting rebellion, calling themselves the Regulators. And in the midst of this time of hope and despair, a sequence of terrible murders rocks the town of Rufford. Meanwhile, midwife Hannah Trevor is fighting her own personal war. As a young widow, she is regarded by the courts as unable to support her daughter Jennet. At any moment, the eight-year-old may be taken from her and sold as in indentured servant. Hannah - a woman of fierce independence - will be forced to consider a loveless marriage to protect her daughter. Yet deep in her heart burns a love for a man she cannot have. Then, amidst the music and light of a midsummer's eve haying party, a shrill cry brings the revelers to silence, and to the discovery of another murder that has just taken place in the rose garden of a local landowner named Daniel Josselyn. Hannah rushes to the garden to find that the cry has come from the throat of her own Jennet - who, since birth and until that moment, had been entirely mute. Turning to the bloodied body sprawled on the flagstone, she recognizes a man from her own past, long presumed dead. Hannah will immediately become a suspect, and if she is to save not only her own life but that of her daughter's, it will require every bit of intelligence, passion - and her woman's ways of knowing - to clear herself and unravel the truth from the lies.
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