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Witch Cradle | 
| Author: Kathleen Hills
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $15.98
You Save: $8.97 (36%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 1424060
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 340
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 8.6 x 5.5 x 1.4
ISBN: 1590582543
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9781590582541
ASIN: 1590582543
Publication Date: March 31, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Brand New.
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Product Description
January, 1951, while the country is in the grip of war in Korea, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and Senator Joe McCarthy, the residents of St. Adele, Michigan are more concerned with staying warm and shoveling snow, until a bizarre ice storm brings down a towering pine. Entangled in its roots is evidence that leads Constable John McIntire to the abandoned farmstead of a young couple who had supposedly left the community years before, part of an exodus of Finnish-Americans gone off to build a workers' Utopia in the Soviet republic of Karelia. McIntire's fears are realized when he discovers two bodies, buried sixteen years in an unused cistern.
In his zeal to uncover the truth, McIntire brings the scrutiny--and the suspicion--of a Red-hunting government agent upon his neighbors and himself. It is only the beginning of his mis-calculations. Each step in investigating the deaths seems only to bring more misery to the living. Old wounds are opened, old terrors rekindled, and old wrongs exposed. McIntire himself is not immune. He struggles to solve the two-decades old murders, while a part of the past he hoped to bury forever threatens to destroy his new life.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Disappointed February 14, 2008
With my husband's family being Finnish-American, our love of the U.P. and my fondness for mystery books I thought this would be an ideal mid-winter story to settle in with for the night. How very disappointed I was.
The writing style is somewhat disorienting, the who-done-it blatantly obvious from the beginning of the book, and the constant repetition of prattling by the characters unneeded.
Save your money and your time.
 Solid complex murder mystery April 29, 2006
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Author Kathleen Hills has a history with regions of the northern United States, and although the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is separate and distinct, from, say Montana or Northern Wisconsin, there are certainly similarities. In this third outing for the author's protagonist, the reluctant constable of St. Adele, John McIntire, comes across evidence that two former neighbors had not emigrated to the Soviet Union, as was supposed by pretty much everybody in the region.
In the early 1930's this country was in the grip of a serious depression and there was more than a little unrest. Some people organized a sort of mass emigration by mostly poor or disaffected people to a place in the Soviet Union called Karelia. Karelia was touted as the people's Eden, a place where everyone would be well-housed, properly fed and would find useful work, according to their needs. Karelia was advertised as sort of the penultimate socialist community. In reality, a lot of people who went, disappeared and were never heard from again. What was their fate in Stalinist Russia?
WITCH CRADLE, is set in the early fifties, a time when suspicion of that great evil, Communism, also known as the Soviet Union, was rampant in this country. It was the time of Roy Cohen and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. It was a time of black listing and anxiety. And while the people of the Upper Peninsula were relatively isolated from most of the excesses of that time, there were those who would take advantage of the circumstances. Bringing those national concerns down to the individual and very personal concerns of the people of St. Adele is a feat worth reading about, especially in the careful and adept hands of author Kathleen Hills.
Many questions rise. What is the FBI doing hanging around this isolated area? What exactly was Constable McIntire doing during his time away from St. Adele, the time he refuses to talk about? What exactly did happen to the people who went to the Soviet Union? And if some of the former residents of the area never made it to Karelia, what happened to them and why? This is a moving, solid work about people we all can relate to, in one form or another.
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