Coal Bones
Coal Bones starts with trouble at Bull Creek Mine, which Milo Kachigan is called in to examine.  Milo is the local detective and is leery about what he is being drawn into by the Coal Mine police.  This is the start of an intriguing and far reaching series of events. Helen Sorby is a journalist, quite a reach for a woman in 1906, and lives with her twin brother Peter.  She is asked by one of the local coal barons to help find his daughter who has gone missing.  The baron is afraid of two things; one, that his daughter has run away to become an anarchist or a socialist (both equally troubling to him) and two, she may have stolen a good number of his securities.  Helen agrees to help in return for access to he coal mining towns so she can report on the conditions for her newspaper. It turns out that Milo and Helen date; in fact Milo has asked her to marry him many times.  As we see these two characters together we also see the mysteries come together, becoming a very tangled web indeed.  The events all seem to come together at the end in a very interesting manner. I found Coal Bones to be a slow book to start, but I was very glad that I made the effort to stick with it.  I really enjoyed all the twists and turns of the events.  I learned a lot of social history about the time period and coal mine towns.  I found that the characters were hard to get a handle on at first, but by the end I really liked them.  I recommend this book to anyone who likes mysteries with lots of unexpected twists and turns.  For mystery lovers - this book won't disappoint. Karen Rose Cercone has written a mystery that transports the reader back to the early 1900s with seemingly little effort. Michelle Sawyer  --Copyright © 030199 Literary Times, Inc.  All rights reserved--FromLiterary Times