5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good work, January 30, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: Borderline (Hardcover)
Former New York Times and current free lance Maine reporter, Jack McMorrow is researching a piece on the Benedict Arnold Revolutionary War trail which stretches from New England to Quebec. When he reaches Scanesett, Maine, Jack learns that someone named P. Ray Mantis mysteriously disappeared from a tour bus that stopped in town.
Police chief Dale Nevins writes the missing person off as going away with a barfly. Jack's instincts tells him there is more to the story. As he investigates the Arnold story, Jack also makes inquiries about Mantis, who has ties with local folks. Jack wonders if foul play has occurred or is the police right that the man went off with a lady of the night. If his hunch is correct, Jack knows that to continue his investigation could be very dangerous.
The Jack McMorrow mysteries are some of the best regional sleuth tales on the market today. However, the fifth book, BORDERLINE, though quite interesting, is not quite up to the level of the preceding novels. There are very many good words to say about this including: the insights into what makes Jack tick,the Maine natives and scenery, and the Arnold segments (which will also probably turn off some non-historian buffs because there are many non-mystery pages dedicated to this). In spite of all this the Mantis mystery never quite hooks the reader. Fans of the series and American History will thoroughly enjoy the story. For everyone else it is a doubtful but BORDERLINE call at best whether the who-done-it will be enough to satisfy them.
Harriet Klausner
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Benedict Arnold's Heritage., January 11, 2005
This review is from: Borderline (Hardcover)
Written by a journalist about a journalist on a quest to earn his fee to do an appealing article for 'Historic Touring' to entice Americans to explore the Arnold Trail. This is a historical story within a modern crime novel. But I choose to stick mostly to the history side. Jack was 'Johnny on the spot' when a tour bus from Boston is delayed; it seems that one of the passengers had mysteriously disappeared at that rest stop in a small Maine town.
At the time, Jack was researching Benedict Arnold's excursion there in 1775 on his way to Quebec. At the local museum, he was given an old and yellowed pamphlet, 'The Arnold Expedition and Scanesett', which had been published for a 100-yr. commemoration. While waiting for the curator, he sat on an Adironack chair on the museum's back lawn, against a thickett of spent lilacs; it was hot and close, the way Maine can be.
Gerry Boyle's writing sometimes leans toward the poetic: "I sat back and looked at the river, which was still and wide here because it was dammed a few hundred yards downstream. The dam crosses the throat of a deep stone gorge; above, the waters coasted slowly before slipping over the brink and cascading down over the rocks."
When Arnold had come up the river in October, 1775, on his doomed mission to capture Quebec City, there had been no town, no dam, just a tall waterfall. He and his group of 500 men had marched from Boston to secure boats at Pittston, Maine, setting off up the Kennebec in a leaky bateaux. This account came from a journal kept by Captain Samuel Thayer, one of the marchers who'd camped out in this backwoods place.
Like a historian tends to do, this freelance writer imagines how it was back then. The shore would have been lined with yellow and crimson in October, the river filled with fish, and the woods rustling with birds. Arnold and his 500 had hauled their heavy bateaux out of the river, heaved them up the rocks and around the torrent. That done, they'd gamely continued on their way. Most would soon be dead of exposure, starvation, or bayonet.
The route north ran along the Kennebec, but the river took a jog to the southwest and passed the towns which had been Indian settlements in 1775. It was the Indian Natanis who named Arnold "Dark Eagle" and predicted that he would soar to great heights but also fall. When they came ashore, they found The Forks, a place now favored by whitewater rafters and bear hunters. They dragged their boats overland to the west to another river where they traveled northwest, poling, wading, and trudging 50 miles through the unforgiving wilderness all the way to Canada. That river was called the Dead, which was just what many of those farm boys and sailors ended up, without firing a shot.
Now, more than 200 years later, they were forgotten, as if they'd never existed. All those lives lost. The writer contemplated: "All that perseverence and courage. All for nothing, and none of it remembered, except by a handful of tweedy professors, and a few old coots in little backwoods towns like this one." This was a similarity to the present mystery of the missing man off the bus.
Using maps to track Arnold's route to Canada led Jack on a cross-country trek in search of the unknown. He used books about Benedict Arnold and the Revolutionary War as background. Most of the men who followed Arnold up the Kennebec, across to the Dead River, through the frozen, trackless bogs either drown, froze to death, died of starvation, or were shot down in Quebec. Some wasted away on English prison ships delirious with fever.
That's what it came down to, when you stripped away all of the elaborate myths and decoration. They'd gotten lost along the way and ended up around Bigelow. He made the trek all the way to the only walled-in city in North America and found it hadn't changed much since 1775. He found the Cidadel, where General Montgomery, one of Arnold's team members, was killed, and the Ursuline Convent down Rue St. Louis.
At a museum in Augusta, he found a journal kept by Dr. Isaac Senter published as 'On a Secret Expedition Against Quebec' which was printed in 1846. But the hard life took place in October, 1775, when another group who had left Cambridge with 1100 and only 675 reached Canada. They were met by some of Arnold's advance scouts and taken up the St. Lawrence River where Arnold led an attack and was shot. Dr. Senter was the physician who treated him.
In his article, he wrote, "You've accomplished after just a few hours drive, what Benedict couldn't after three months of marching, starving and fighting: pass through the gates of old Quebec."
While working on his article, he kept in mind the missing man. There wasn't anything in 'The Maine Telegram' about anybody missing from Scanesett; nothing in the 'Globe' about a bus company losing a passenger. You have to read a lot of muck until Chapter 30 reveals the cover photo's signigicance of the chained handcuff -- a daring rescue.
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