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." 

Reindeer Games

The ebook revolution has been nearly fifteen years in the making, but sometimes the success of one invention requires the invention of another.  Builders had the method to create skyscrapers long before they had the initiative to do so.  Tall buildings could not meaningfully exist before the invention of the elevator.  Sure, people were capable of walking up and down thirty flights of stairs but it was scarcely desirable or practical to do so.

Books could be read on computer screens for decades, but it was not an enjoyable experience. The last two years have seen the introduction of a variety of ebook readers that not only mimic the traditional experience of reading a paper book, but now in many ways enhance, even exceed that experience.

Adjustable text sizes eliminate the need for those #$%&-ing reading glasses. Online page syncing allows the reader to simultaneously read the same book on multiple devices--Kindle at home, smart phone with Kindle app on the lunch break? No more sitting in that dentist's waiting room thumbing through year-old copies of People Magazine. (Only to learn the depressing news that the same Lindsey Lohan stories are printed every year.)

But the Kindle, Nook, and iPad were not the first portable reading devices.  I bought a Rocket eBook back in 1998.  It cost a staggering $499 (remember these are 1998 dollars, too), but I was so excited that I sold my first novel to a royalty-paying ebook publisher that I could not wait to embrace the future of reading. The Rocket eBook was a nice reading device, not very different from the Kindle in size and page appearance.  It was much heavier, I recall.  Battery size and weight have aided the new generation of ebook readers.

The various writers' groups I belonged to back in those days gave the ebook concept a collective cold shoulder.  Few of those groups would grant me "published author" status--I was not allowed to join in any reindeer games--because they informed me with confidence that "Ebooks are not Real books."

That now seems like such a quaint notion, especially given the fact that ebooks have out-sold hardcovers for the last several months. What the next fifteen years will bring to my home library, I cannot even imagine...but I bet it's going to be fun. (she said, as she composed this blog on her iPad.)

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.