A Lull Before the Storm

     By the end of the nineteenth century, women had won full suffrage in only four states — Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah. In 1900, Susan B. Anthony turned over the presidency of the now-united National American Woman Suffrage Association  (NAWSA) to Carrie Chapman Catt, signaling a new generation of leadership.

     During this period, little effort was devoted toward passage of a constitutional amendment. Instead, the association’s work centered around winning voting rights in the individual states. Catt gave speeches and organized women to help plan and execute suffrage campaigns. In many states, men feared that enfranchising women would interfere with political efforts to disenfranchise African-Americans and immigrants. Despite its Quaker roots, NAWSA was not immune to Jim Crow influences. While the national organization did not explicitly prohibit non-white members, it allowed state and local affiliates to set their own membership requirements. Many groups, especially in the South, admitted only white women.

     Catt devised the ‘society plan’ to recruit wealthy members of women's clubs into the NAWSA. These women had organizing experience, time to volunteer, and money to contribute to the cause. While there was a strong black woman’s club movement, Catt did not extend her recruiting efforts to them, even though those groups were often engaged in promoting women’s rights, including suffrage. Consequently, the NAWSA became predominantly white. 

     In 1902, Catt helped to found the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA). The IWSA brought together groups pursuing votes for women around the world, eventually representing 32 nations. The organization is now known as the International Alliance of Women.

    When Catt’s husband fell ill in 1904, she resigned her NAWSA presidency to care for him. He died in October 1905. 

Anna Howard Shaw

     Anna Howard Shaw succeeded Catt to the NAWSA presidency. Although she was a talented speaker, she lacked the leadership skills of her predecessors. However, when southern NAWSA members formed the Southern Woman Suffrage Conference in 1906, Shaw refused to give the national association’s endorsement to the overtly racist organization.

     During Shaw’s term, members organized other new affiliates. In 1907, Harriet Stanton Blatch (Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter) formed the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, with membership comprised of professional and industrial working women. This contrasted with Catt’s ‘society plan’ which appealed to upper-class women. The Equality League adopted tactics of English suffragists, including parades, street speakers, and pickets. The League became the Women's Political Union in 1910.  

  

    The National College Equal Suffrage League became an affiliate of the NAWSA in 1908. The organization had been founded in Boston at the beginning of the century as the College Equal Suffrage League.

     The death of Carrie Chapman Catt’s husband was followed by a rapid succession of more deaths among people important to her. Susan B. Anthony died in February 1906, and Catt's mother and younger brother both died in 1907. These sorrows plunged Catt into despair. Her doctor and friends convinced her that traveling abroad would help her recover from the devastating losses. She spent much of the following eight years promoting equal-suffrage rights worldwide as the IWSA president.

      In 1909, Catt and some of her friends founded the Woman Suffrage Party to fight for the vote in New York. Within a year, the Party had 20,000 members. The organization remained independent, but Catt and its other leaders remained loyal to the NAWSA.

      By the end of the decade, the public’s attitude toward the suffrage movement had improved dramatically. Working for the cause had come to be viewed by many as a respectable activity for middle-class women. Infrastructure in support of the suffrage movement had been built. However, from 1896 to 1910 there had been six state campaigns for suffrage. All six failed.

     But the tide was about to turn.

Ann Markim

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Unconventional Heroines and Women of Destiny

The end of this month will mark the first anniversary of the publication of my first novel, Courting Anna.  I wanted to do something to celebrate, and thought it would be fun to have a conversation with a couple of my favorite Prairie Rose authors about a topic dear to all of us.  C. A. Asbrey, author of The Innocents mystery series (most recently the concluding novel, Innocent to the Last) is an online friend who’s become one of my favorite Internet writing comrades.   She introduced me to Prairie Rose, when she posted an announcement for the Women of Destiny series on Facebook.   Mary Sheeran is a friend of several decades’ standing with whom I’ve sung in choirs and ensembles.  She was already the author of three books, when she saw that my project had been accepted to the Women of Destiny line, and realized that her A Dangerous Liberty would fit in well.  Geographically, we’re two New Yorkers and a resident of the original York, across the Atlantic – not an actual Westerner among the lot of us.

Each of us has a heroine who’s not precisely typical of the 19^th century time period in which we’re all writing.  Abigail MacKay, Christine’s heroine, in the 1870s, is a female Pinkerton agent.  My Anna Harrison, in the 1880s, is an attorney.  And Mary’s Elisabeth Winters is a touring musician and composer in the 1860s, a concert pianist at a time when women played piano in the parlor, but men commanded the stage.

I’m guessing that we’ve all read books where the heroine is a modern woman in period costume, with no real concessions to historical veracity.  You know the type – she’s always done exactly what she wanted, she absolutely refuses to wear a corset, and quite possibly she substitutes trousers for long skirts whenever possible.  On the other hand, if you read the fiction actually written in the nineteenth century, for every Elizabeth Bennet, there are dozens of female characters who can be very difficult for twenty-first century readers to relate to.  In historical fiction, there are plenty of appealing traditional heroines who are beloved by readers.  But one approach which can work very well is to create a heroine who operates within the culture and conventions of the time period in which her story takes place, but who is an outlier, pushing at those boundaries.

I know that other Prairie Rose authors have written about such heroines -- I logged in to post this and just saw Becky Lower's post about Revolutionary Heroines!  I hope you’ll join in and share about the characters you’ve created in the comments.  Or, as readers, which characters have you loved reading about.  This post will be in several parts, and I’d love to extend the conversation.

An unconventional heroine in historical fiction is still someone of her time.  What are some ways your Prairie Rose heroine is unusual for her time period, and what are some ways in which she is grounded in it?

Christine:  In the same way as the female attracted to the work in law enforcement in the 19^th century will be out of the norm, she will also be very much part of that society. Abigail understands the social mores, the rules, and the strictures imposed on 19^th century women, even as she rejects them. When she challenges, she picks her battles. Abigail MacKay isn’t a complete rebel. She’s a woman who has found life constrains her skills and intelligence, but is pragmatic enough to understand that there’s more than one way to skin a cat than to constantly turn to direct challenge – although she isn’t afraid to do just that when it’s needed.   

Cate:  Anna is a lawyer, which is obviously unusual in the 1880s, though it’s actually historically plausible.  She’s independent, and she’s able to support herself comfortably through her work, which obviously many women could not do at that time.  Her father was an attorney, as well.  From a very early age, Anna was fascinated by his work and hung around his study, and then his office, as much as she could.  Her parents were followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideas, and they felt that their daughter should follow her own inclinations and talents.  At the time, some lawyers were educated at law school, but others trained in the offices of senior attorneys.  Anna did the latter, clerking for her father, and later practicing law by his side.  Thus, she was able to avoid some of the worst of the barriers against women in the profession.  After her father’s death, Anna carried on the practice, and because she was already so well-known in her community, it continued to flourish.  Of course, the further afield she went from Carter’s Creek, the more difficulties she encounters in being accepted.  In the book, she’s called to another part of the territory to defend the hero in court, and finds herself treated as quite the spectacle.  People sometimes try to do an end run around her and deal with her male law clerk, later partner, but he’ll have none of it.

Mary: I have spent so much time in the far west during the 1860s that I pretty much think it's MY time.  Elisabeth is of her time and she's also me. When she stays away in Europe, having told herself that the United States has lost the dream and that the country doesn't care that it has lost the dream, she's also me. I wrote A Dangerous Liberty a little more than ten years ago, and I think I still feel that way. As for Elisabeth. Is she of my time, yes.  Is she of her time? Yes, because there have always been expatriates, and she was one early on, having seen her father and Abraham Lincoln killed. Certainly, a dream lost. Her father was an abolitionist US Senator with a powerful voice, respected by many and highly regarded abroad. 

Christine:  Abigail was brought up to expect to marry and have children, and it was a revelation for her to find there was another option. She was educated, but like many of her era, expected that her education would help her sons. It’s only after being widowed that the job accidentally found her. She didn’t seek it out, but accepted the role with gusto as a solely domestic life was not enough for her. She does fit in her era, in that she longs to be a mother and enjoys domesticity. It’s important to her, but she’s not prepared to compromise in her choice of partner – but she’s unusual in wanting a partner, and not to accept the subordinate role, or submit to a husband. He has to accept her as an equal.

Cate:  Anna is simply hopelessly undomesticated.  She can’t cook and she’s terrible at needlework.  She had a fiance, David, who was her father’s law clerk.  He supported her joining the firm and practicing by his side, at the same time that they planned to have a family.  But when he caught sick and died, not long before the wedding was meant to have happened, she decided never to marry.  It took her a long time to get over her broken heart, and besides, she felt that her subsequent suitors expected her to adopt the more traditional role that she knew she’d never fit.   I don’t see her as a stereotypical spinster, but as the late Victorian New Woman – she’s made her own choices.   She loves pretty dresses and she loves talking about the law.  Courting Anna is obviously wordplay, between the courtroom in which she flourishes and the unexpected courtship of Anna by Jeremiah Brown.

Mary:  Elisabeth loves to wear great clothes, too. She does feel lonely without a man, and she does seek male companionship, not always wisely. In fact, hardly ever wisely. The safety she seeks is part of a time when women were supposed to have a male protector always around, and if they didn't - what was wrong with them, and although she tosses out her guardians and doesn't sleep with that playwright and feels sorry for that banker, she is of her time even as she fights it. 

Christine:  Abigail has a scientific bent, and enjoys studying, something which was not seen as very feminine in her day, but she is confident enough not to care.   She also has enough insight to understand that she alienates certain types of men, as well as women. That doesn’t matter to her either, as they bore her.   My heroine doesn’t defer to men, which is unusual in her époque, unless they have a greater degree of skill or experience in an area. She also isn’t prepared to let the man take the lead all the time. She’s not a side-kick, or a woman looking for security, or social position. Abigail is as skilled as anyone else, and isn’t afraid to challenge up.

Mary:  Already a precocious musical talent, Elisabeth entered the professional music scene just before women were entering the professional music world ever so slowly. Girls and women could play instruments at home, but entering the professional world of music was tough. Men were certainly in the majority of professional pianists. Women were not admitted into conservatories until the 1870s, and then, very few. From reading music critics of the time, it's apparent that the music world assumed women did not have the upper body power to perform the piano music of Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt. Critics usually regarded women in this light, excusing their deficiencies or, if the woman did play with "masculine" power, noted it as an oddity - the hint being that the woman was unwomanly.

Elisabeth has difficulty in presenting her own voice. Certainly talented, she was respected because of her father. Audiences in Europe - and those when she returned the US - considered her playing as the voice of her father. Thus, her powerful musical phrases were not unwomanly - her father's voice was coming through her. She also composed piano concerti, and although these were not seen as being on the level of Chopin or Liszt, they were considered as her hearing her father's voice. So she was perceived as a good daughter. However, conductors who supported her piano artistry would not conduct her compositions. She conducted her choral symphony.  Women conductors were unheard of - pretty much almost to our lifetime.

Christine:  None of that means Abigail isn’t a woman of her time, though. Some educated 19^th century women were pushing for more rights and greater equality, since they turned their attention to social causes after the abolition of slavery. Abigail finds herself drawn to these people, and very much agrees with their causes.  She is motivated by a need for improvement for all, rather than simple personal security and happiness. Even at the end of the series, there’s every indication that she intends to continue to work when the children are old enough for her to do so. I think it is rare to see a progressive feminist as a heroine in a romantic role in a historical novel. She fits squarely into a movement within the time the stories are set, even if that was a minority view at the time. Some of the other characters are loosely based on real people. In fact, the more outrageous they are, the more likely they are to be based on real people. Vida is inspired by Mary Edwards Walker, who was captured in the Civil War as a spy, while working as a nurse (she had been refused permission to enter as a doctor despite being qualified), and became the first female surgeon in the army. She found female clothes restrictive and often wore men’s clothes and a top hat. The night hag is based on a Hungarian killer, Viktoria Foedi Rieger. Basing some characters around real people is another way of anchoring characters in time and place with a degree of veracity.     

Cate:  Anna is also firmly grounded in her time period.  The germ of the novel came from my watching some Westerns while I was in graduate school specializing in the 19^th century novel.  The British Victorian novel, especially, portrays such a different world than the Western does, even while they’re happening at the same time.  So while Anna has grown up in Montana territory, there’s also that Victorian element to her.  As a lawyer, she’s lived in a more masculine world, but some things still easily shock her.  Her family came from Massachusetts, and were great readers of Emerson and some of the more progressive thinkers of the day.  She’s been exposed to big city culture:  her parents have taken her to San Francisco, Chicago, and even to New York and to Boston, where they have relatives.   So, in addition to the books her parents have had shipped to them regularly, she’s also been exposed to art and music.   She enjoys her afternoon tea, with good china cups and silver service.   And despite her nonconformity to certain gender roles, she’s aware that as a guest in a man’s world, she needs to guard her respectability in other ways, quite strictly.  With her wards, Sarah and Caroline, she tries to protect their innocence, as she assumes they will live more conventional lives than she has done.     

She does have a commercial law practice, but she takes some cases for the money so that she can afford to do pro bono work, representing people who need her help.  And she does legal work for several of the Native American nations in the area.  If I ever get the chance to write the sequel, that’s how Sarah will find her father, who’s a Blackfoot.

Mary:  It's not that Elisabeth doesn't push the boundaries as her father would. She hires a black singer for her vocal piece, attends black churches, and rescues a Chinese prostitute being beaten on the street when no one else will help the girl. She engages in discussions about women voting and lobbies legislatures for women's rights - with liquor. Of course, having someone out to kill her can be a little unsettling, so being a public face takes considerable courage. People want her bloodline at an end; that's how crazed they are. She suspects she is a target, but she still stays. She has work to do.  Is she ahead of her time in these situations? I hesitate to say that a courageous woman is ever ahead of her time, and the more we delve into history, we keep finding women who were ahead of our time. 

It's always going to be a struggle for Elisabeth to have her own career with her own voice heard. Will she give up on the country? On her place in it? I'm not sure, given the ending of the book, if she'll be able to find a way for her voice to be heard. Readers should wonder: Is that a happy ending? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

For more of this conversation, tune in next month -- Monday, August 17!  Read our books!  Tell us about your favorite heroines, that you've written, or that you've read!

Connect with Cate:

Website & Blog: https://www.catesimon.com/

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/catesimonbooks/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cate_simon_books/ 

Twitter: @CateSimon3

Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19389877.Cate_Simon 

To Buy on Kindle or in Print:

https://tinyurl.com/y4k6rwvd

http://mybook.to/CourtingAnnaCate

New Release -- Innocent to the Last (The Innocents Mystery Series Book 6) by C.A. Asbrey

Nat, Abigail, and Jake are hot on the trail of the mysterious man behind the scenes who orchestrated the murder of baby Ava. Determined to bring her killer to justice, they are prepared to do whatever they must, no matter where the clues lead. Rebecca, an attractive newspaper woman investigating the same deadly gang of criminals brings complications into the mix for their plans—and for Jake’s heart.

With a slew of hired killers on their tails, the stars align when they bump into Nat and Jake’s old gang, The Innocents, in the midst of a train robbery. They strike a reluctant deal with The Innocents to take refuge in their old hideout at Ghost Canyon—at a price. Abi’s ability to break into a new type of armored car, one containing a rumored “golden boy” statue, gains them their refuge and buys them some very limited time.

When the hired killers show up at Ghost Canyon, there’s hell to pay with the surprise attack Nat has devised. If Jake survives, will he be able to find peace—and love—with his heart’s desire, at last? Can Nat and Abi deliver retribution for the death of their young daughter?

In a story filled with surprise villains, unexpected love, and gut-wrenching action, these twists and turns keep Nat, Abi, and Jake INNOCENT TO THE LAST…


EXCERPT

     Rebecca turned over and punched her pillow. Why couldn’t she sleep? There was something worming into the back of her brain, but she couldn’t quite scratch the itch. All of a sudden, she saw herself standing in her office today, waving that check in the face of those damned men. The Farmers & Stockworkers National Bank in St. Louis. That was Meagher’s bank. What was it her father had always told her? If you want to bring someone down, look at where the money came from. She knew Meagher probably paid his henchmen in cash, but whoever he was in thrall to would pay by more sophisticated methods. And Becky Kershaw now had his bank details. She pushed herself upright and ran a distracted hand through her silken blonde hair. The bank. How could she see their records?

     She’d never done anything for the newspaper other than general office and printing work. Her father had acted as the reporter, and when they merged, Fernsby had taken that over. Her role never changed. She knew nothing about how to investigate a powerful man.

     Not for the first time, she wished she knew more about how journalists got private information like bank details. Nobody had ever taught her how. She couldn’t get a job in the bank. They usually only employed men. Rebecca dropped back down, running scenarios and fantasies through her mind, all of them ending with Meagher’s corruption proven by her work. How great would it be to bring down the mayor? It might at least give her some kind of future with another newspaper. And she really needed one. Meagher would arrange an accident if she stayed in Greenville. She had to leave tomorrow, at the latest.

     Schemes and plans percolated until she drifted off to sleep. By the time dawn lit the world she had convinced herself that there was no downside to her grand idea. Even if she was caught holding up the bank, a court appearance would throw enough attention at Meagher to make it worthwhile. She could declare her accusations and get them reported in the press that way. Besides. She wasn’t going to get caught—even if she was, she wasn’t actually stealing any money. All she needed was the name and address of the man paying Meagher.

     What could go wrong?

     

Revolutionary Women

It’s hard to believe, especially in today’s social environment, how stringent women’s lives were as recently as 200 years ago in America. This is an especially difficult road to navigate when writing historical romances. In light of recent events in the romance publishing industry, and its long-overdue push to be inclusive, some books featuring the struggles of women to serve equally with men, or to live their own best lives, are shoved aside as being too controversial for today’s climate. 

I’ve written before about women’s participation behind the scenes during the Revolutionary War in America, and how not every woman stayed behind closed doors knitting socks and rolling bandages but acted as spies or secret double agents, passing along overheard information. Some women became camp followers, and helped feed the troops who marched into battle, but never before have I written about the women who actually fought alongside the men in these battles. But there were a handful of these brave souls. Allow me to introduce you to Deborah Sampson, the only woman to earn a full military pension for participation in the Revolutionary War. 

Deborah Sampson was born in 1760 in Plymouth, MA, one of seven children of Pilgrim stock, and related to both Myles Standish and Governor William Bradford. Upon the death of her father, Deborah was placed as an indentured servant at age ten. When her indenture was completed, at age 18, she became a teacher, but in 1782, when the Revolutionary War dragged on, the patriotic Sampson had enough of sitting on the sidelines. She donned men’s clothing, named herself Robert Shurtleff and joined the Massachusetts regiment. Standing at five feet, nine inches, and stocky of build, she bound her small breasts with a linen cloth in order to pass as a man. Her features were ordinary, and, according to her friend, Herman Mann “not what a physiognomist would term the most beautiful.” Her appearance–tall, broad, strong, and not delicately feminine–contributed to her success at pretending to be a man. 

She was given the dangerous mission of scouting neutral territory to gauge the British troops buildup and supplies. As Shurtleff, she led expeditions and raids on British troops, often fighting in one-on-one encounters with the enemy. She dug trenches alongside her fellow countrymen and endured cannon fire. 

For nearly two years, she fought alongside men in the Continental Army without detection as to her true identity, but she did have a couple close calls. During a battle, she received a gash on her head from a sword and was shot in the thigh. She allowed the medical staff to care for her head wound but left the medical tent before they could undress her to care for the leg wound. She extracted the bullet herself with a penknife and sewed her wound closed. Her gender was ultimately discovered when she became ill during an epidemic, and lost consciousness. 

Following her honorable discharge in October 1783, she returned to Massachusetts and two years later, married Benjamin Gannet, a farmer from Sharon, MA and had three children. Her life story was written by Herman Mann in 1797, entitled Memoirs of an American Young Lady. She became an ordinary farmer’s wife, and raised their children, except in 1802, when she spent a year touring the country and talking about her experiences on the battlefield, becoming one of the earliest female lecturers in the country. 

State of Deborah Sampson outside the Sharon, MA library

 Following her death, her husband petitioned the government for spousal pay, given to any spouse of a soldier. The committee concluded that the history of the Revolution “furnished no other similar example of female heroism, fidelity and courage” and awarded Mr. Gannet the payment he requested.  

Several books have been written about Deborah Sampson’s experiences and are available on Amazon. 

 

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/deborah-sampson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Sampson

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Deborah-Sampson

The first book in Becky Lower’s new Revolutionary Women series, was released in June. It features Pippa Worthington, a British heiress who, in order to avoid a loveless arranged marriage, dons a boy’s clothes and heads for America at the start of the Revolutionary War in search of her own freedom. Find out what happens next here: https://www.amazon.com/British-Heiress-America-Revolutionary-Women-ebook/dp/B089RNSY3P

Texas Chili

It’s nearly 100 degrees (F) and 85% humidity outside here (as it is for many of you) and I’m hungry for comfort food. Not just any soup or casserole or pasta, but chili. And not just any chili, but my mother’s chili. I have the recipe and even if I follow it exactly, it still doesn’t taste quite like when she made it. But that got me to thinking about the origins of chili.

To explore a bit, let’s dig into the history of the state dish of Texas, chili. The one thing known for certain is that chili did NOT originate in Mexico. The Diccionario de Mejicanismos, published in 1959, defines chili con carne as (roughly translated): “detestable food passing itself off as Mexican, sold in the U.S. from Texas to New York.”

Historians believe chili came from the Canary Islands to what is now San Antonio in the 18^th century. Dallas millionaire and chili lover, Everrette DeGolyer’s research stated that the first chili mix was a pemmican-type brick on dried beef, fat, pepper, salt, and chile peppers pounded together and shaped into bricks for the cowboys and gold prospectors around 1850. A brick could be dropped into a pot with water and boiled into, well, chili.

In Texas prisons the “bread and water“ was a stew made of a tough cut of beef cut into fine pieces and boiled with chiles and spices. The food became a kind of status symbol of the Texas prisons and the inmates used to rate jails on the quality of their chili.

Texas chili went national in 1893, when Texas set up a San Antonio Chili Stand at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

You can still get the original spice blend created in 1890 from Pendery’s World of Chilis and Spices in Fort Worth. (www.Penderys.com)

Any chili afficionado will tell you it all starts with the meat, or in the case of Texas chili, beef. Ranching is big business in Texas, after all. To compete in the Terlingua Chili Festival, the most famous chili competition in the world, you must use beef, cut up in some fashion. Strips, chunks, cubes, but some version of chopped up beef. I use ground (gasp!).

Next you brown and drain the meat; add… Well, here. I’ll let William Clark Green tell you how to make it.  

The Chili Song – performed by William Clark Green

See you next month!

Tracy

Book review: Innocent to the Last by C. A. Asbrey

The finale to the Innocents Mystery Series is almost here (just a few more days) and fans will be delighted with this last piece of their journey.  Take a peek!

Blurb:

Nat, Abigail, and Jake are hot on the trail of the mysterious man behind the scenes who orchestrated the murder of baby Ava. Determined to bring her killer to justice, they are prepared to do whatever they must, no matter where the clues lead. Rebecca, an attractive newspaper woman investigating the same deadly gang of criminals brings complications into the mix for their plans—and for Jake’s heart.

With a slew of hired killers on their tails, the stars align when they bump into Nat and Jake’s old gang, The Innocents, in the midst of a train robbery. They strike a reluctant deal with The Innocents to take refuge in their old hideout at Ghost Canyon—at a price. Abi’s ability to break into a new type of armored car, one containing a rumored “golden boy” statue, gains them their refuge and buys them some very limited time.

When the hired killers show up at Ghost Canyon, there’s hell to pay with the surprise attack Nat has devised. If Jake survives, will he be able to find peace—and love—with his heart’s desire, at last? Can Nat and Abi deliver retribution for the death of their young daughter?

In a story filled with surprise villains, unexpected love, and gut-wrenching action, these twists and turns keep Nat, Abi, and Jake INNOCENT TO THE LAST…

My review:

Innocent to the Last delivers an explosively entertaining ending to a captivating mystery series.

Starting with a mess and a bang, we reconnect with our heroes on their journey of revenge for the death of Nat and Abi's daughter.  Unexpected twists, entertaining situations, and unique events propel the reader through the story, keeping you on your toes and turning the pages to the end. Becky joins our trio, adding a sweet and refreshing innocent charm to the darker and world-wary group.

Perfectly timed laughter filled one liners balance out heart and mind twisting revelations. And moments of beauty are exposed, showcasing the growth and the strong bonds of love the family has for each other.  I loved getting to see the closeness between Abi and Nat still going strong and then getting to watch Jake and Becky dance around each other till the final notes faded and they finally fall. 

We get the added bonus of going full circle in the series and encounter several previous characters that add a bit of fun and make the world feel more complete.  And as always, the science and mystery/investigative part of the story shines through, giving us pieces of technology and tricks of that time (and honestly a few tricks I kinda wanna try on a much smaller scale myself lol).

Fans of the series will enjoy this final installment of the series, wrapping up loose ends and giving a happily ever after vibe... Well, mostly. I mean, can Nat, Abi, and Jake ever avoid some kind of excitement or challenge?

Favorite quotes:

I have so many highlighted that picking some (spoiler free) ones was a challenge.  So I'm going for more laughter-filled ones.

(Abi talking about Becky)  "She should have better taste than to take up with a criminal."

Jake snickered through the gloom.  "It strikes me that a lotta people would say the same to you."

(someone talking to Nat about Abi)  "Where the hell did you find this woman, Nat?"

"In a barn, covered in s***."

"Nat!" [Abi said.]

"What?"  Nat turned a glittering smile on his wife.  "I didn't tell him it was yours."

(Jake talking with Nat) "I can't get involved with a woman. I'm wanted."

"If you want to be together, we can find a way."  A wry smile licked over Nat's face.  "Have you met my wife?  Let me introduce you to the ex-Pinkerton we kidnapped."

Purchase link:

New Release -- KENDRA’S SEARCH The Barlow Wives: Book Four by Agnes Alexander

When Kendra Fullerton’s father declares he’s moving the family from Philadelphia to far-away England, she and her younger sister, Francine, rebel. They escape by taking a long journey of their own—to Wyoming! Kendra knows her father has carried on a long-time affair with her best friend’s mother—could she and her best friend, Patrice, actually be half-sisters? Now, Kendra and Francine head to Wyoming for a visit with Patrice to search for the truth. But nearing her destination, a train wreck introduces her—in a most embarrassing way—to a handsome, but confirmed, bachelor, Garrrison Barlow.

To make matters worse, she learns that Garrison’s twin brother is married to Patrice—and he’s not about to let her forget what happened.  But Kendra cannot deny the instant attraction she feels sparking between Garrison and herself—in spite of their unorthodox first meeting.

Only a few days into Kendra’s visit, Kendra’s mother arrives from New York with an ominous man, Oliver Quizenberry, who she is determined Kendra will marry.

Kendra has no intention of wedding the strange man her mother is forcing on her. Though Garrison tries to remain steadfastly uninvolved emotionally, he is determined to protect Kendra. But Quizenberry hides a sordid and dangerous past none of them suspect. As his nefarious plans unfold, Kendra understands that Quizenberry poses a deadly threat to her entire family, especially her father, who is being held prisoner. Will Kendra find the answers she needs in time to thwart Quizenberry’s plot? Can Garrison protect the woman he’s fallen for? In an intricate web of deceit, what lies at the end of KENDRA’S SEARCH…

EXCERPT

     Just as Kendra’s eyes closed and she was about to fall asleep, the train squealed, and the wheels screeched. The car began to sway and jerk. Women screamed, children cried, and men tried to brace themselves for an impact. Carpet bags, dinner baskets, blankets and humans flew into the isles and across seats and against windows.

     Sitting in the seat beside the aisle, Kendra glanced at her still sleeping sister scrunched down and wedged in the corner. Thinking Francine was safe, she tried to grab hold of something to keep herself from being flung out of the seat. She failed.

     In a matter of seconds, she ended on top of the handsome cowboy she’d seen board the train. Though she’d been intrigued by his looks, she didn’t see where he’d ended up sitting when he entered the car. She had wondered where he was. Now she knew he must have been seated somewhere behind her, because at this moment, he was in the floor near the back of the car. She was face down on top of him, and a woman twice her size was against her, wedging all three of them between a seat and the back door.