After hearing author Katy Simpson Smith speak at this year's BookMania! event, I expected to love her historical fiction novel Free Man (#594). I did not. I had saved it for a vacation treat and was disappointed.
The novel centers on the actual murder of a group of merchant traders in the American South shortly after the Revolution has been won. Murder Creek in Alabama was named to commemorate the event.
Ms. Smith picks up these unsolved murders and builds her story about a lost white man, a black slave escaping from a Florida plantation and a disaffected Creek Indian as the hypothetical murderers. Add to the mix a French nobleman living with a Creek tribe who is sent to track these three and deliver justice. It should be a killer (pardon the pun) tale, and the book certainly has its moments, but the ending is so flat that it spoiled everything that went before it for me. I started out by thinking I'd pass this book along to my husband to read while on vacation as well, but in the end, I didn't even bother. Not recommended.
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