The writer is a librarian in Orange County, New York. Her first novel, A Simple Murder, featuring itinerent Colonial weaver Will Rees of the fictional town of Dugard, Maine, won the Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award in 2011 and many positive reviews.
In her second book, Will and his son David and Lydia, the Shaker woman who helped him solve the murder and was subsequently cast out of the Shaker community, have returned to the family farm. Will is trying to re-establish a relationship with his son, and wondering if there is a future together for himself and Lydia, when he receives word that a childhood friend has been found murdered. Although Will and Nate Bowditch have been estranged for years, he is shocked and saddened by his death, and readily agrees to help find his murderer. Circumstances point to Nate's impetuous son, Richard, known to be furious with Nate's strange refusal to countenance Richard's choice of a bride.
But Rees quickly discovers that everyone at the Bowditch farm, and all of Nate's friends and acquaintances in Dugard, seem to be obstructing his investigation for reasons of their own. Each in turn proves to have some motive for murder --- but which among them actually turned thought into deed?
Kuhn has done a good job of researching her period, and plotting her tale, but still needs to work on making her characters believable to their time and place, rather than modern characters enacting a period drama.
