historical fiction
Book Launch Event: The Body on the Bed by Leonard Krishtalka
Barnes & Noble Topeka 6130 SW 17th St, Topeka, United StatesReporter Mary Fanning finds the body on the bed, poisoned.
Mary finds the body on the bed in the house next door. Smart, tough and inquisitive, she covers the murder trial as the first woman reporter for the Kansas Daily Tribune. Amid the upheaval of post-Civil War Lawrence, she unravels the diabolical plots and desperate lives that led to three dead bodies and a shocking last act.
Did a doctor's brazen affair with his patient's wife incite him to murder? On the morning of April 28, 1871, the body of Isaac Miles Ruthman is found poisoned in his bed in Lawrence, Kansas. His doctor, John J. Medlicott, a fervent churchgoer, is arrested and charged with first degree murder. He's carrying a picture of Ruthman's wife, Anne Catherine, and two of her love poems in his wallet. He'd visited Ruthman the previous evening to give him a medicinal powder--a poison cocktail of deadly nightshade and morphine, according to the autopsy.
Is it a coincidence that the doctor's wife, Sarah, died suddenly and mysteriously just four months earlier? Did Medlicott first kill her, then Ruthman? Or did Ruthman commit suicide, depressed over his finances and ill health--authorities had to break into his bedroom when they found the door locked from the inside.
Mary Fanning, sharp, strong-willed, and the first woman correspondent for the Kansas Daily Tribune, is assigned to report on the trial and investigate Ruthman's poisoning. Her independence leads her to fight for suffrage for women and Blacks in post-Civil War Kansas. Her ardor leads her into an illicit love affair with a woman. Her incisive mind leads her to uncover lives torn by lust, obsession, and deceit, a trail of dead victims, and the fiendish scheme behind the body on the bed.
"A thrilling tale of murder and betrayal ... a defiant suffragist ... a lurid web of deceit ... impeccably researched."
~Kirkus Reviews
Watkins Museum Book Launch: “The Jayhawker Cleveland: Phantom Horseman of the Prairie” by David Hann
Watkins Museum 1047 Massachusetts Street, Lawrence, KSA legend in his own time, Marshall Cleveland rode into Leavenworth alone in June, 1861 to view his own “Wanted Dead or Alive” poster. No one in that town of 12,000 inhabitants, nor any soldiers from Fort Leavenworth, attempted to collect the reward, and Cleveland rode slowly out of town.
The Free State of Kansas and the slave state of Missouri are the backdrop of this tale of heroic deeds and fatal mistakes. David Hann takes the reader on a trail ride through a gritty time in the American West when people were pitted against each other and some had to choose sides in a life-and-death battle of ideas.
Not all of the settlers in Kansas and Missouri had an opinion on the slavery question, but having no opinion was not an option. Residents were caught in the middle of two conflicting ideas, and a wrong answer given to strangers could result in loss of property and sometimes loss of life.
The Jayhawker Cleveland is a story of a man and his times. Culled from 1860s newspaper articles and published reports of a tumultuous and violent era in American history, Hann describes how this liberator of slaves and horses found brief but deadly fame during the Kansas Missouri Border War.
Intended for the Young Adult audience, older folks will surely enjoy the bravado and adventure portrayed so adeptly in Hann’s The Jayhawker Cleveland.
Author Leonard Krishtalka at Watkins Museum
Watkins Museum 1047 Massachusetts Street, Lawrence, KSMary Fanning finds the body on the bed in the house next door, poisoned. Smart, tough and inquisitive, she covers the murder trial as the first woman reporter for the Kansas Daily Tribune. Amid the upheaval of post-Civil War Lawrence, she unravels the diabolical plots and desperate lives that led to three dead bodies and a shocking last act.
