Colonial Mystery

What if the British Museum isn't a house of learning, but a vast sinkhole of still-bubbling historic injustice? What if it presents us not with a carefully ordered cross section of history but is instead a palatial trophy cabinet of colonial loot swarming with volatile and errant spirits? When artist and writer Noah Angell first heard murmurs of ghostly sightings at the British Museum he had to find out more. What started as a trickle soon became a landslide as staff old and new brought forth testimonies of their inexplicable supernatural encounters.

Nearly 20 years before Jamestown was settled, the English established one of the earliest colonies in North America around the Chesapeake Bay region, until the colony had over 100 inhabitants. Like other early settlements, Roanoke struggled to survive in its infancy, to the extent that the colony's leader, John White, sailed back to England in 1587 in an effort to bring more supplies and help. However, the attempts to bring back supplies were thwarted by the Spanish in the midst of the Anglo-Spanish War going on at the time.

When Duncan McCallum is asked by Benjamin Franklin to retrieve an astonishing cache of fossils from the Kentucky wilderness, his excitement as a naturalist blinds him to his treacherous path. But as murderers stalk him Duncan discovers that the fossils of this American incognitum are not nearly as mysterious as the political intrigue driving his mission. The Sons of Liberty insist, without explaining why, that the only way to keep the king from pursuing a bloody war with America is for Duncan to secretly deliver the fossils to Franklin in London.

Unfairly convicted and force into indentured servitude, young Highland Scot Duncan McCallum finds himself aboard a prisoner ship bound for the New World. A series of mysterious deaths plagues the passengers and claims the life of Duncan’s dear friend Adam Munroe. Enlisted by his captors to investigate, a strange trail of clues leads Duncan into the New World and eventually thrusts him into the bloody maw of the French and Indian War.

Despite what seems like the unending war between French and British, Scottish exile Duncan McCallum has begun to settle into a new life on the fringes of colonial America, traveling the woodlands with his companion Conawago, even joining the old Indian on his quest to find the last surviving members of his tribe. But the joy they feel on reaching the little settlement of Christian Indians is shattered when they find its residents ritually murdered. As terrible as the deaths may be, Conawago perceives something even darker and more alarming.

In this powerful novel of love and family, a doctor named Paris follows a nurse to a country on the brink of civil war. When a confrontation does break out, they are swept up by rebel forces and separated. The nurse, Helen, is pregnant; she escapes, but Paris is left behind, imprisoned by rebels as war rages. A narrative of brutal power about parental bonds, forgiveness, and identity, The Colonial Hotel recasts for the 21st century the ancient story of Paris, Helen, and Oenone.

The American Colonies, 1765. As the Stamp Act dissent marks the first organized resistance to English rule, someone is kidnapping and killing members of the Iroquois Nation. Asked by an elder to investigate, Scottish exile Duncan McCallum soon uncovers a network of secret runners supporting the nascent “committees of correspondence", engaged in the political dissent fomenting across colonial borders. But as Duncan follows the trail further, it leads to his capture.

Summer, 1986. The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin—newly arrived from India—into their house in rural Wyoming where they’ll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it’s time for their uncle to die. According to Georgie, the British are to blame. And to understand why, you need to hear her story. She details the violence hiding in their house and history, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian-American in the heart of the West.