Savage Liberty
A Mystery of Revolutionary America
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Following a tortuous path of sabotage and treason, exiled Scotsman Duncan McCallum must survive his enemies long enough to glimpse the emergence of the American Revolution in this thrilling Publishers Weekly Best Mystery of the Year.
When a ship arriving from London explodes in Boston Harbor, both the peace of the colonial city and Duncan McCallum’s life are shattered. Summoned by John Hancock to a beach awash with the bodies of the victims, Duncan discovers that the ship was sabotaged. Hancock refuses to let him take evidence to the authorities, for this is 1768 and relations with the government are sour.
Fearing that the intrigues of Hancock and the Sons of Liberty might set the colonies ablaze, Duncan relentlessly pursues the truth, only to be falsely charged with treason and murder. With the help of Ethan Allen, aged natives, and outlawed Jesuits, he survives scalp hunters, imprisonment, and his own spiritual crisis, only to realize he cannot resolve the terrible crimes until he first understands the emerging truths about freedom in the American colonies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1768, Edgar-winner Pattison's excellent fifth mystery featuring Duncan McCallum (after 2016's Blood of the Oak) finds Duncan, an exiled survivor of a slaughtered Scottish clan, in Boston, where tensions are growing between the Sons of Liberty and British officials over the increasing economic pressures on the colonials. Patriot Samuel Adams asks Duncan to use his medical training to determine what killed Jonathan Pine, a Native American Christian convert. The victim was aboard a British ship that exploded in Boston Harbor, but Adams has reason to suspect that Pine's death was different from those of the nearly 40 others who died in the blast. Soon after determining that Pine was tortured and fatally stabbed, Duncan learns that the explosion was an act of sabotage connected with a list that prominent Bostonian John Hancock began compiling of men with military experience whom he expects would "not shirk the call of liberty." Duncan's search for the list, and the truth behind the incident, is complicated when he's accused of blowing up the vessel and must flee for his life. Pattison has few peers when it comes to integrating historical events into a complex but plausible whodunit plot.
