Solomon Spring: My "Accidental" Mystery Novel

Available on Amazon Kindle now.

I have just given a new lease on life to my second Eden Murdoch novel, Solomon Spring. This book was first published as a hard cover  by TOR/Forge in the fall of 2002. A mass market paperback followed in 2003. Last month the rights reverted to me and I have now released a digital version of the book on Kindle.  You can purchase a download for $2.99 here.


Read an excerpt on my website.


A trade paperback will also be released soon. Solomon Spring is a sequel of sorts to An Uncommon Enemy, though it can be read as a stand alone novel as well.


This book has always been very special to me for a variety of reasons.  This was the most critically acclaimed and widely reviewed of all my novels, which pleased me, of course, but it also marked a new direction for  my writing in that I first began to explore the mystery genre--but did so almost by accident.

The story had been originally conceived as an exploration of two very different child custody battles. The "Solomon" in the title was an intentional reference to the Biblical story of King Solomon deciding the custody of a baby, though the real mineral spring portrayed in the book did exist at the fork of the Solomon River.  


I had every intention that the book would be a traditional historical novel in the same vein as its predecessor, An Uncommon Enemy. The story wove diverse threads that would include a naive experiment in social disobedience, a bittersweet love story, and a struggle to stay true to one's principles when a hard won career hangs in the balance--all played out against real life events of Great Plains history.

The original cover. The "label" features
an actual photograph of the spring
taken in 1879.

As the story began to take shape, though, I realized I truly hated my heroine's estranged husband so much I decided to kill him off.  This placed Eden in the awkward position of being the most likely suspect since the warring couple had been engaged in a nasty custody battle over their son. At about this time, the notion began to dawn on me that this plot was veering into the province of a murder mystery.


My chosen setting also played a role in this transformation. The place I called the "Solomon Spring" was actually named the Great Spirit Spring, or Waconda Spring. This natural wonder was situated in north central Kansas. I refer to it in the past tense because the Glen Elder Dam was built there in the 1960's which flooded the area and, sadly, this amazing formation now sits at the bottom of the resulting reservoir.


I first learned about the spring while researching An Uncommon Enemy. Its mineral waters were thought to hold wondrous healing properties by the Indian tribes who made pilgrimages there for centuries. Once white populations moved into the area, they bottled and sold the waters as a miracle elixir. A health spa was opened at the site in the early 1880's and continued in operation until the 1950's.


When the Spring was dredged in 1895, they found countless Native American offerings and artifacts, plus one item they did not expect: a human skull. I longed to invent a story that would explain the presence of that skull! 

The excerpt below, from Solomon Spring, is a historically accurate description of the Great Spirit Spring. The photo shown above was an actual photograph taken there in 1879, the same time period as my novel.

"A longing for happier days had drawn Eden back to the fork of the Solomon River after a decade’s absence. She had followed the Solomon once again to find the Sacred Spring. The last time she had made a pilgrimage to the Spring she had been carrying Hadley in her womb and had prayed there to be delivered of a healthy child. Her prayers had been answered and so she had given her the Cheyenne name of Maheo Maape, Medicine Water.


The natural–or supernatural–wonder that was the Spring never failed to amaze her. The silvery blue circle rose out of the prairie like an ancient remnant of the primordial sea that had once covered the vast plain. Why the sea vanished and left in its place only this round well of salty water perplexed and confounded innocents and experts alike. The Spring never froze in winter, nor flooded with the torrents of spring rain, nor did its surface recede in times of drought.

 It mineral-laden waters seeped over the edges of its circular bank in steady and even proportions year after year, decade after decade, slowly increasing its own basin. Higher and higher it grew above the prairie floor surrounding it as the minerals laid down their deposits for centuries to create an imposing and enormous limestone dome." 

The New Life of AN UNCOMMON ENEMY

A few weeks ago, I re-published my 2001 novel, AN UNCOMMON ENEMY.  Originally published (and nearly forgotten) in the tragic week following September 11^th, I believed the story deserved a second chance. The moral and political controversies raised after Custer’s attack on a peaceful Cheyenne camp on the Washita in 1868 were not so different from the questions faced by America in the wake of 9/11. I felt the issues posed still resonate, so I hoped the book might somehow find a new readership. 

I never imagined what would take place last Thursday night.

Kindle Nation, a blog for Kindle users, favorably reviewed the novel and posted its first chapter online. Within hours, the Amazon sales ranking jumped from #124,000th to #127th in the Kindle store.  By the next morning, AN UNCOMMON ENEMY was the #1 Western novel across ALL formats on Amazon, paper or pixel.  Number One!  The raw power of a single very influential blog to move an otherwise forgotten novel in this totally-new publishing landscape is striking. 

I also learned another lesson.  Bookstores--and the publishing industry itself--tend to force all books into narrow genres and all readers down narrow aisles.   Bloggers need not follow such dictates or conventions, and can allow their readers to self-sort their book selections without restriction.  The Kindle Nation blog, for instance, is ecumenically focused on all Kindle readers, regardless of book genre.  Think of the effect this had on my sales when Stephen Windwalker, of Kindle Nation, summed my book up this way: 

"If it weren't for my efforts to be genre-agnostic, I probably would not have gotten hooked on this novel. But the fact is that it can't be pigeon-holed in a genre; it's just a great story, well told, with totally unexpected, astonishingly well-imagined characters."

Kindle readers, who might never walk down the Western aisle of a Barnes and Noble, or read a western-themed magazine reviewing books of interest, were instantly exposed to my cross-genre novel.  (Which is more a general “historical novel” than a true “Western.”) For a brief moment, it did not have to compete for their attention with 120,000 other volumes lining the shelves and capping the ends of any bookstore.  

Bottom line: AN UNCOMMON ENEMY found an uncommon friend, for which I am very grateful.

Happy Pub Day

Today is the official publication day of the paperback version of "The Second Glass of Absinthe," but I am also excited to announce that the first Eden Murdoch novel, "An Uncommon Enemy," is also debuting this week as a Kindle edition.  
Buy it here for just $2.99.
You can read the first chapter on my website.


I have often been asked whether the character of Eden Murdoch was a real person, given that many characters in the novel did exist--Custer, Sheridan, Black Kettle. 


The answer is technically, no, she is a fictional creation, but she was inspired by two separate events. Custer mentioned in his field report, filed the morning after the battle, that they found the body of a white woman in Black Kettle's camp. He did not identify her and never mentioned her again, though he wrote extensively of the Washita Battle in later years.

The identity of this mystery woman has never been solved by scholars, but it must be assumed that it was not the body of another white captive, Clara Blinn, who was found a week later in another location. Despite this lack of documentation, General Sherman, Sheridan's superior, used it as conclusive proof that Custer struck a hostile camp, when he testified before Congress on the matter.
My novel poses the question, what if that woman had been found alive, and what if she did not tell the story the Army longed for her to tell? What if she instead gave an articulate report of the battle from the Cheyenne point of view?
Eden's character was inspired by the story of another white captive, Cynthia Ann Parker, a woman "captured twice," as Eden was. Parker was captured by the Comanches, lived among them, married into the tribe, and lived there for more than two decades before being "recaptured" by the Army and forced to return to white civilization against her will. She was never able to see her children again, one of whom grew up to be the great Comanche chief, Quannah Parker.

Tale of Two Covers

This coming August, my publisher, Macmillan, will release my historical mystery novel, THE SECOND GLASS OF ABSINTHE, in paperback. The cover design is markedly different between the original hardcover and the new, mass market paperback. In different ways, I like them both.

The older version, shown at left, is special in that it incorporated important elements of the novel. The painting of the woman holding the parrot is a real painting described in the book, only incorporated into the story in a fictional way. The painting is supposed to represent a portrait of the widowed heiress, Lucinda Ridenour, owner of the Eye Dazzler mine.

The absinthe bottle is colored too darkly emerald green to be “real” absinthe, which is a lighter, almost peridot, but, in the cover designer’s defense, absinthe was still illegal in the United States when the first cover was designed, so perhaps the artist did not know what real absinthe looked like. A forgivable mistake.

The “label” on the bottle shows a contemporary illustration of the town of Leadville, Colorado, the setting of the novel. This picture first appeared in Frank Leslie‘s Illustrated News in 1879, the year before the time of the novel, but clearly showing the “city in the clouds” at its busy, raucous best, which the novels details in some length.

The new cover also highlights the absinthe theme, but this time using an absinthe glass with a spoon and lump of sugar as its centerpiece. The color of the absinthe filling the glass is more accurately represented this time around, but absinthe has since been legalized and available at most larger liquor stores in the U.S..

The background again highlights a beautiful, sexy woman, who looks like trouble (that is, I am assuming the artist intended this woman to be Lucinda, rather than the novel’s amateur sleuth, Eden Murdoch, who has an exotic past of her own--detailed in the two prior novels, AN UNCOMMON ENEMY and ABSINTHE’s prequel, SOLOMON SPRING--but has never aspired to become a femme fatale.)

Which is my favorite? I love them both. The cover art is considered to be a major element in the marketing of the book, so I guess the most successful cover is one that entices the most potential readers to try the book. Only time will tell...