Fiction

From the bestselling author of The Wives of Los Alamos comes the riveting story of a stranger’s arrival in the fledgling colony of Plymouth, Massachusetts―and a crime that shakes the divided community to its core.

When Helen West begins to explore the life of Maggie Fox, the founder of American Spiritualism, she begins to wonder if departed spirits do indeed return to comfort their loved ones.  To what lengths will people go to find solace after the death of a beloved? Helen confronts these questions and others in a haunting novel that weaves together two stories that take place more than one hundred years apart.

I did research on my historical novel’s real-life characters, including Laura Bridgman and Julia Ward Howe, and their nineteenth-century milieu. Doing research at AAS was a fantastic experience all around.

It is 1845, and Hannah Gardner Price has lived all twenty-four years of her life according to the principles of the Nantucket Quaker community in which she was raised, where simplicity and restraint are valued above all, and a woman’s path is expected to lead to marriage and motherhood. But up on the rooftop each night, Hannah pursues a very different—and elusive—goal: discovering a comet and thereby winning a gold medal awarded by the King of Denmark, something unheard of for a woman.

Writing The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton during a Lila-Wallace Artist’s Grant in 1996