The Frozen River - Softcover

Lawhon, Ariel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593793250 ISBN 13: 9780593793251

Publisher: Random House Large Print, 2023

Synopsis

From New York Times bestselling author of I Was Anastasia and Code Name Helene comes a gripping historical mystery based on the real-life diary entries of Martha Ballard, an 18th-century midwife who found herself at the center of a murder trial.

Maine, 1789: As a midwife in the town of Hallowell, Martha Ballard knows how to keep a secret. Her neighbors respect her not only for her medical expertise and calm under pressure, but for her discretion in a community governed by rigid Puritan values. So when a man is found under the ice in the Kennebec river, Martha is the first person called to examine the body.

The dead man is Joshua Burgess, recently accused, along with the town judge, Joseph North, of raping the preacher''s wife, Rebecca Foster. The case is set to go to trial in the coming months and Hallowell is churning with rumors. Martha, having tended to Rebecca’s wounds in the aftermath, is both a witness and a confidant of Rebecca’s, and while she feels certain she knows the truth of the night of the assault, she suspects there is more to the murder than meets the eye.

For years, Martha has recounted her every day in a leather-bound journal: deaths and births, the weather, town events, her patients and their treatments. As whispers and prejudices threaten to overflow into something bloodier, and North becomes more desperate to clear his name, Martha’s diary becomes the center of a mystery that risks tearing both her family and her town apart.

In The Frozen River, Ariel Lawhon brings to life a brave and compassionate unsung heroine of early American history, who refused to accept anything less than justice on behalf of women no one else would protect.

About this title

About the Author

ARIEL LAWHON is an award-winning, critically acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author of historical fiction. Her books have been translated into over thirty languages and have been Good Morning America, LibraryReads, and One Book One County selections. She lives in the rolling hills outside Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband and four sons. Ariel splits her time between the grocery store and the baseball field.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

What’s Past Is Prologue


The body floats downstream. But it is late November, and the Kennebec River is starting to freeze, large chunks of ice swirling and tumbling through the water, collecting in mounds while clear, cold fingers of ice stretch out from either bank, reaching into the current, grabbing hold of all that passes by. Already weighted down by soaked clothing and heavy leather boots, the dead man bobs in the ebbing current, unseeing eyes staring at the waning crescent moon.

It is a miserable night with bitter wind and numbing frost, and the slower the river moves, the quicker it freezes, trapping him in its sluggish grip, as folds of his homespun linen shirt are thrown out like petals of a wilted brown tulip. Just an hour ago his hair was combed and pulled back, tied with a strip of lace. He’d taken the lace, of course, and it is possible--fate is such a fragile thing, after all--that he might still be alive if not for that choice. But it was insult on top of injury. Wars have been fought over less.

The dead man was in a hurry to leave this place, was in too much trouble already, and had he taken more care, been patient, he would have heard his assailants in the forest. Heard. Hidden. Held his breath. And waited for them to pass. But the dead man was reckless and impatient. Panting. He’d left tracks in the snow and was not hard to find. His hair came loose in the struggle, the bit of lace reclaimed and shoved in a pocket, and now that hair, brown as a muddy riverbank, is a tangled mess, part of it plastered to his forehead, part in his mouth, pulled there during a last startled gasp before he was thrown into the river.

His tangled, broken body is dragged along by the current for another quarter of a mile before the ice congeals and grinds to a halt with a tired moan, trapping him fifteen feet from the shore, face an inch below the surface, lips parted, eyes still widened in surprise.

The great freeze has come a month early to the town of Hallowell, Maine, and--the dead man could not know this, nor could anyone who lives here--the thaw will not arrive for many, many long months. They will call this the Year of the Long Winter. It will become legend, and he, no small part of it. For now, however, they sleep safe and warm in their beds, doors shut tight against an early, savage winter. But there--along the riverbank, if you look closely--something dark and agile moves in the moonlight. A fox. Tentative, she sets one paw onto the ice. Then another. She hesitates, for she knows how fickle the river can be, how it longs to swallow everything and pull it into the churning depths. But the ice holds, and the fox inches forward, toward the dead man. She creeps out to where he lies, entombed in the ice. The clever little beast looks at him, her head tilted to the side, but he does not return the gaze. She lifts her nose to the sky. Sniffs for danger. Inhales the pungent scent of frost and pine along the river and, farther away, the faintest whiff of woodsmoke. Satisfied, the fox begins to howl.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House Large Print
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593793250
• ISBN 13: 9780593793251
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 670