Greetings from Cape Cod in Ninth Month, 1890! It is quite lovely here, and a welcome change from Amesbury. The sea air, saltwater, and fresh breezes lift my spirits, which have been sorely taxed this week.

It wasn’t so lovely to receive a telegram from my maiden aunt Tillie, saying her teenaged ward Frannie had been murdered. As my newly minted husband David and I been planning a post-wedding trip south to visit Tillie and her sister Drusilla anyway, off we went on the express train. The next afternoon David and I enjoyed a swim and a picnic by the shores of broad Buzzard’s Bay, but soon enough the details of the mysterious murder absorbed my attention.

Walking the streets of West Falmouth, which is populated mostly by Friends, was quite the eye-opener. I am accustomed back home to being the odd person out because of my faith. Not so in this coastal hamlet. Although the Indian midwife Zerviah is not of our faith, nor her husband and son, she and I share a profession. I was grateful to able to learn from her while I attended a breech birth one night.

After David was summoned back home because of his mother’s bad health, I was left to my own devices to track down the fiend who took Frannie’s life – and to discover a secret from Tillie’s own past. With the help of a local detective and an old lady with sharp ears, we came close to the answer. But it was the villain’s own carelessness that revealed the final detail necessary for an arrest.

Now I’m off tomorrow back north to my new husband, my new home, and my true calling: helping women safely deliver their babies.

Taken Too Soon is the sixth book in the “Quaker Midwife” historical cozy mystery series, released September 8, 2020.

Quaker midwife Rose Carroll must turn her investigative skills on her own family when a young woman’s murder stuns a New England community . . .

Following a long betrothal, midwife Rose Carroll and her beloved David are finally celebrating their marriage with friends and relatives, when a most disturbing telegram interrupts the festivities: the young ward of Rose’s aunt has suffered a mysterious death, and Rose’s help is needed urgently on Cape Cod. Reluctantly agreeing to mix her honeymoon plans with murder, Rose embarks on an investigation that will expose family secrets and a community’s bigotry.

As Rose does her best to comfort her aunt in her loss and also learn as much as possible about the poor young victim’s death, she discovers that each new clue points to a confounding list of suspects: a close friend of the victim who may have harbored secret resentments, an estranged brother of David’s with an unsavory reputation, and the son of a Native American midwife who supposedly led the young woman astray. And as Rose grows closer to identifying the perpetrator, the solution will rattle her assumptions about her own family and faith . . .

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About the author
Agatha Award winning author Edith Maxwell writes the Quaker Midwife historical mysteries, the Local Foods Mysteries, and award-winning short crime fiction. As Maddie Day she pens the Country Store Mysteries and the Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries. Maxwell lives with her beau and their Energizer kitten in Amesbury, where she writes, gardens, cooks, and wastes time on Facebook. Find her at edithmaxwell.com and on social media.

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