As I mentioned in my review of Powder Keg, these two books should be reviewed together. I read them together and would recommend that anyone interested do. It this way. I suspect the author initially might have thought he would write one book and found he had so much information that it warranted splitting into two. The first one, Powder Keg, takes us back to the beginnings of the feuds and machinations that would ultimately end with five members of a family brutally murdered. If you lived around Lucan in 1880, you might have been told they deserved their fate. They were horrible people. That myth has been perpetrated by many sources ever since. And even when the massacre was decried, there was the undertone of justifiable homicide.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Were they angels? Of course not. They were a tough immigrant family who never stood aside from a fight but the most egregious crime they committed was their acceptance and even embrace of those who were not part of the tightly knit Irish Catholic community. One of their greatest critics who fuelled the fires was the local priest. There is blame enough to go around. What happened to them that night in February 1880 was a heinous and cowardly crime. What happened afterwards was a travesty of justice that will blot the reputation of the community and the province forever.

While they never got justice in court, as William commented some years later, many of the perpetrators of the massacre and their supporters suffered greatly. Karma is sometimes the best form of justice. I liked the way the author tied things up quite neatly with several chapters dedicated to the epilogue after the trials.

Well research and written, fair and balanced, this is an excellent book to give a better perspective of the events and the people involved. The reader can expect to be outraged but by reading the book, the reader can contribute somewhat to historical justice. Five purrs and two paws up.

This is the second book in a two book series, by author John Little, based on the well known and largely talked about Donnelly Family, otherwise known as the "Black Donnellys".
This second book begins in 1880 when a group of the Donnelly's enemies unite to murder the family and burn their house to the ground. There are two witnesses to this horrific event and two outrageous trials when the surviving members of the Donnelly family seek justice. Not only the murders but the court cases were both astounding and horrifying.
This is an extremely well-researched, unbiased and very detailed account of one of Canada's terrible tragedies.
I highly recommend reading both books in the series!

Thank you to NetGalley and ECW Press for an arc of this novel in exchange for my honest review.

All the more shocking because it’s true… as a lover of true crime I was gripped!
The surviving family members seek justice through the local courts but quickly learn that their enemies control the jury and the press. Two sensational trials follow that make national and international headlines as the Donnellys continue to pursue justice for their murdered parents, siblings and cousin.

John Little’s book which covers the background to Canada’s Donnelly family massacre, the murders themselves and subsequent legal proceedings, is a comprehensive and well researched telling of events in Lucan, Ontario.
The investigative style of the book provides a riveting narrative which is both shocking and engrossing. The information about the massacre and aftermath uses a variety of primary sources including survivor and witness testimony, family papers and newspaper coverage to recount the story.
As someone who has never heard of this family or event, I found the books contents both fascinating and totally enthralling. The background material about the family and township underscores the problematic nature of this towns political and religious divisions and the evident antagonism towards the Donnelly family. The malevolent activities of the vigilance committee against the Donnelly family which were described in detail were sickening. The substantive descriptions of the ensuing judicial examinations of the case make for interesting and disquieting reading. The author makes clear that the various stakeholders involved had their own vested interests in both the location and way in which the trials were conducted as well as the content. Justice was not the priority of many of the players. Political allegiances, job security, reputation, and religious considerations were powerful motivators in the drama surrounding the trials. For William Donnelly and the rest of his family there were many obstacles in the way of getting justice for his deceased relatives. The outcomes for the family were outrageous and disappointing.
I found the book to be well written and very engaging and would highly recommend it to others.

I don't know why this book is split from the beginning. It starts in the middle of chapter 17.. Not at the beginning but literally in the middle of a sentence.. after a preface that doesn't have anything to do what was being talked about.. and it continues to be a list of- so and so did this bad thing, went to court and got away with it over and over again. The problem is none of the things that happened had anything to do with the Donnelly's. This reads more like a subject paper on the towns history than it does about the intended people.

The Donnellys by John Little
The Donnellys: Powder Keg (Volume 1)
The Donnellys by John Little
The Donnellys: Massacre, Trial, and Aftermath (Volume 2)
Disclaimer: ARC via Netgalley

I am a Canadian, although not from Ontario. The Donnelly story didn’t make it into my school curriculum – no doubt it was considered far too scandalous, as well as too remote, having happened far away in Ontario. Constitutional development was considered a much better topic for school children to study. In spite of this, I liked reading true crime, and one of the books I read told the Donnelly’s story. I assumed, rather vaguely, that there wasn’t much more to learn. The Donnellys were clearly a group of violent brutes who got their comeuppance from their even more brutish neighbours – and wasn’t there something about English Protestants vs Irish Catholics? For those who, like me, did not grow up with their story, I’ll add here that the Donnellys were an immigrant Irish family that settled and farmed in Upper Canada, now Ontario, in the mid 1800s. Five of them were murdered by an organized mob of their neighbours during a single night in 1880.

So, I was mistaken in my conclusions about the Donnellys. There’s clearly been a vast amount of research about them, and that one book I read so many years ago was most certainly not definitive. Little has carried out an excellent review of the entire story, using both previous research and original sources to back up his own views. The results of Little’s work is laid out in two volumes, the first on the background to the crime, and the second on the crime and its aftermath.

It might seem a little excessive to have an entire book on the situation leading up to the murders, but I found that book fascinating and indeed essential to understanding the story. Rural society of the time was so different from the societies in which most of us live that the detailed explanation of how violence was routinely used as a tool to solve disputes is needed, as is the discussion of how group affiliation was essential to survival – but not impermeable or unchangeable. For example, religious affiliation didn’t always guarantee membership in the social group defined by that religion (as the Donnellys discovered) and people from one group sometimes worked with – or even led or manipulated – members of another. Little does an excellent job of explaining the situation that led up to the murders.

The murders, while horrifying, were not particularly mysterious. The mystery lies in the inability of the law to convict anyone for the murders in spite of the evidence that was available. This, too, is discussed in detail by the author. That there were such strikingly different narratives arising after the murders shows the attempts by different factions to resolve the situation in a way that was satisfactory to them, and also demonstrates the depth of the cultural divisions within the country. The differences in the reporting in rural and urban newspapers of the time was particularly striking.

This very detailed description of an infamous crime provides a much more detailed and nuanced view than I had obtained from my casual reading years ago, and is well worth reading for its clear exposition of a famous historical crime. There are parts of this story which are echoed today; for example, in high crime areas in large cities. All it needs for murderous violence to take place and remain unpunished is for people, voluntarily or through fear, to accept the authority of factions rather than either the authority of their own moral code or that of one or more of the structures that are used to create and protect civilizations where people can live together peacefully. In the Donnelly story, religion, the legal system, and the government all failed, making the tragedy inevitable.

John Little’s second volume of his two volume on Donnellys covers the murder of members of the family by fellow residents and what followed. Little’s description of the evening of the massacre relies on survivor testimony which he interweaves with an engrossing third person narrative. He does this while also examining why such events happened (and most American readers at least will see a connection to “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson).

It is a close run whether the massacre itself or the trial that follows is the more horrifying event. Little give enough background to the various forces that impact the trial. From the politicians at the top of the ladder to the various community stresses, such as religious differences, to the family of one of the surviving witnesses who were attacked as well. To say that the trial itself was a circus would be to put in mildly.

This book focuses a little more on the national and international reaction to the events than on the family lives of the surviving Donnellys themselves. This allows the reader to see the events in more historic level and how, in part, the whole violent tale holds a place in historic and folkloric tradition.

Both volumes of this two volume history are well worth reading.

Little's excellent two-part exploration of the Donnelleys ends on a strong note and offers a fitting conclusion to his historical analysis. I particularly enjoyed the in-depth coverage of the trial and aftermath, two components that are often downplayed in other works that focus almost exclusively on the murderous violence that gives the family its infamous reputation. While there is plenty of blood to go around, those interested in the legal history of the case will appreciate Little's research and archival work. The author does an exemplary job sifting myth from reality and does much to ground the feud in its historical place and time, without the sensationalism that so many other accounts have succumbed to.

Thankyou NetGalley and the author, John Little, for the opportunity to read The Donnellys; Massacre, Trial and Aftermath in exchange for an honest and unbiased opinion.
I really was hooked to this book. It was well written and extremely informative. Such a good read.

I received this book for free for an honest review from netgalley #netgalley
Awesome true crime. Great writing style and info