Deadly Assumptions

It’s Mid-19th century America on the verge of Civil War… 

Concord, Massachusetts is rocked again by a third murder of a female member of the Chase family.

Eight years after the drowning of wild child Mary by her own father Henry Chase, and five years after his wife Sarah was discovered in a pool of blood with her throat slit, youngest daughter Edie is found poisoned in a hotel on a rare visit to the town 
where she was raised.

The shock discovery is made by retired local doctor, Josiah Bartlett, a man who reveals as large an appetite for detective work as for the irresistible cooking of his daughter Hannah.

Bartlett, warned constantly by the town Sheriff not to stick his nose into lawmen’s work, is suspicious when he first encounters Edie after so many years – what is the real motive in her seeking him out?

Suddenly, the elderly Doctor – now a grandfather following the marriage of Hannah and Sheriff Keyes – finds himself drawn magnetically into another murder mystery involving the same ill-starred family.

It is a tragedy that seems to have no end.

After all, he had secured the confession from Henry Chase that he had indeed murdered his eldest daughter – and battered another Concord resident to death.

But the killer had miraculously bust out of jail and was able to continue his psychotic spree, butchering his wife before being shot and disappearing into the Merrimack River.

Now-grown-up Edie arrives back in Concord, begging the Doctor help save her brother Timothy who has joined a gang.

And instead of the Henry Chase case looking all wrapped up, the assumptions start to unravel in deadly fashion.

Deadly Assumptions shows Daniel Bjork’s amateur sleuth finds himself back to square one against a demonic 
force that will stop at nothing.

'Gripping right from the very first page' - Tom Kasey, bestselling author of Cold Kill 

Daniel Bjork is Professor of History at St Mary’s University, Texas, and specialises in United States intellectual and cultural history. He is the author of four books, including major biographies of philosopher/psychologist William James and the behavioural psychologist B F Skinner. He teaches all phases of United States history and has developed special topics courses in American biography, including ones on notable entrepreneurs and notorious criminals.