The Burying Ground

June 8, 2015
In this engaging fourth installment of Kellough’s (47 Sorrows) Thaddeus Lewis Mystery series, the crime and intrigue in pre-confederation Canada continues. In 1851 Thaddeus returns to work as a so-called saddlebag preacher, guiding his horse and cart through the rural area north of Toronto in an attempt to attract villagers to his beloved but dwindling Methodist Episcopal church. When off duty, Thaddeus reverts to his pastime as sleuth to help an old friend investigate a puzzle at a Strangers’ Burying Ground, where intruders have mysteriously unearthed a long-buried body. Aiding the investigation is Thaddeus’s son, Luke, a recently graduated medical doctor with a secret, who has just arrived in the village of Yorkville to take up a position as junior partner to an aging and eccentric doctor. When Luke rescues a beautiful young girl from the clutches of slave catchers, he is propelled into a dangerous world that has an unexpected connection to the graveyard investigation. Situating the exploits of these endearing and surprisingly deep characters against the volatile backdrop of 19th-century Upper Canada, Kellough weaves a tale that is almost as much a history lesson as it is a thrill ride. Agency: Robert Lecker Agency.

July 29, 2013
Kellough revisits pre-Confederation Canada in the third installment of her Thaddeus Lewis series. The year 1847 sees calamity as a potato blight scourges Ireland; what would have been a humanitarian disaster on its own is made immeasurably worse when British authorities eschew aid in favor of forcing the Irish to choose between near certain starvation and chancy emigration. Canada is flooded by desperate refugees, easy fodder for disease and exploitation. Protestant minister Thaddeus Lewis and his son Luke find themselves caught up in a mystery rooted deep in the Irish tragedy, a series of seemingly unconnected deaths linked by two green ribbons and a common history of prejudice, violence and a deadly cycle of retribution. Kellough embraces the history of her native Ontario, accepting the ugly facts along with the laudable ambitions of a few to improve a society divided by superstition, class and religion, a society that punished victims and rewarded exploiters. While Kellough takes some liberties with the actual history of Thaddeus Lewis to facilitate her tale, in grander matters she paints an accurately unsentimental picture of Victorian-era Ontario in a time of plague and disaster, eschewing narrative convenience for historical verisimilitude. Canadian distribution: UTP. U.S. distribution: Ingram. Agent: Robert Lecker.

June 1, 2015
The fourth Thaddeus Lewis novel, set in Toronto in the mid-1800s, finds the Methodist preacher and amateur sleuth looking into mysterious goings-on at a local cemetery. Graves are being disturbed, and the police don't seem to care since this particular graveyard, the Strangers' Burying Ground, is where the dregs of society (drunks, crooks, the homeless) are laid to rest. Itinerant preacher Lewis, recently returned to Toronto from the wilds of Prince Edward Island, uncovers one of the city's darkest secrets and puts his own life on the line to expose the facts behind a sex scandal. Based very loosely on a real personthere was a Methodist preacher in Toronto in the mid-1800s named Thaddeus Lewisthis is an engaging historical mystery. The author gets the period detail just right, but she never lets her research overshadow the story, never yanking the reader out of the action with an unwieldy chunk of historical exposition. Fans of Chesterton's Father Brown, or of Anne Perry and others who set their mysteries in Victorian England, will find this Canadian variation much to their liking.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)