History and Mystery

Last week I skipped posting because the week before was a holiday week which I spent mostly reading a mystery novel, Night Work, by Laurie R. King, whose novels about Mrs. Sherlock Holmes I've enjoyed in the past. This book is one of her modern-day mysteries featuring Kate Martinelli, a lesbian police detective working in San Francisco.  It was well written (if a little too detailed from time to time), and though it involved a vigilante killer, that person's actions were not condoned and she does not get away with it at the end (unlike in the Lee Child book I read a couple of weeks ago). Ms. King is a prolific writer and I recommend her books highly, especially the Sherlock Holmes stories.

The other book I started reading over Thanksgiving and continue to read is Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick. It's a revisionist history of the Mayflower colony and its inhabitants.  It's quite good.  The writer keeps readers in suspense wondering what will happen to the Pilgrims and their hopes for a successful religious community in the wilderness.  Their encounters with native inhabitants as well as other English settlers who arrive later cause them (and us) much anxiety as they try to work through their many challenges.

I didn't recognize most of this story since only the first-Thanksgiving part (a sanitized version) was taught me in school.  Apparently, there was a great deal of work to creating and maintaining an English village in the forests of Massachusetts and ensuring not only the physical and spiritual survival of the immigrants, but emotional and political as well. Those who did survive those first few years turned out to be a tough lot, thanks in part to the help they secured from the indigenous people they met.

I must admit that so far I'm not too fond of these English interlopers.  They seem quite arrogant and not entirely honest or trustworthy.  But the Pilgrims seem decent next to the less disciplined or scrupulous English that follow--my ancestors, that is. Nonetheless, I'm learning a great deal about early American history and the complex founding of our English colonies.

I will finish this book this week, I hope.  But in any event, I'll write about it again in next week's post.