Cradle to Grave

April 14, 2014
At the start of Kuhns’s intriguing third late-18th-century historical (after 2013’s Death of a Dyer), traveling weaver Will Rees and his new wife, Lydia, leave their Maine farm for a wintry trip to the isolated village of Dover Springs, N.Y., where their Shaker friend, Sister Hannah, aka “Mouse,” has been accused of kidnapping Maggie Whitney’s five children after finding their mother too drunk to care for them. En route, Will and Lydia get word that Maggie has been murdered, probably by Mouse. On arrival in Dover Springs, Will struggles to pry information out of the close-mouthed residents, nearly all of whom prove to be hiding dreadful secrets. At times, the tribulations of the impoverished Whitney children threaten to overwhelm the story, but readers will sympathize with Will, whose interactions with the children spur deep guilt about how uninvolved he was in the raising of David, his grown son. Agent: Mitchell S. Waters, Curtis Brown.

July 27, 2015
Book three in librarian Kuhns’s historical series featuring Maine weaver-farmer and part-time sleuth Will Rees and his wife, Lydia, finds the couple braving the winter of 1797 to travel to a Shaker community in upstate New York, where their friend, Sister Hannah Moore, has been accused of kidnapping a widow’s five children. When the widow is found murdered, Will takes it upon himself to find the real killer. Reader Berneis, whose narration finds the sweet spot between soothing and alert, is careful to create voices that compliment Kuhns’s very human, fully dimensional characters. Berneis portrays Will as thoughtful and serious, a man yearning to do the right thing. Lydia is lighter, a gentle voice suggesting someone who looks for and finds the after-storm rainbow. Sister Hannah sounds naive but filled with angry indignation at the decisions of the town elders. The elders are mainly stiff and unyielding. Kuhns saves the who- and the whydunnit for the end, but Berneis keeps listeners captivated all the way through. A Minotaur hardcover.