The Wandering Heart
Historian Lizzie Manning didn’t set out to become a sleuth, and she had no intention of becoming personally involved in a medieval mystery. Her expertise lay in eighteenth-century maritime voyages, and her assignment was to find a Tlingit Indian corpse robbed from its grave two hundred years ago during Captain Cook’s Pacific voyage. First accident, then compulsion, pull her deeper into the past, through thirty generations of one British family. Lizzie’s sources aren’t fingerprints and firearms, but documents, artifacts, paintings, architecture, and even the landscape—though modern forensic science helps clarify what happened to a few ancient corpses. Lizzie’s work takes on personal meaning as she is drawn into her own family’s history of insanity and a search for a Crusader’s disembodied heart.
As with Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody and Amanda Cross’ Kate Fansler, Mary Malloy creates a heroine who is a respected scholar in her field, and who draws on her expertise to solve the mysteries that come her way.
“An impressive fiction debut. . . . Malloy mixes history and fantasy with flair and delivers a wonderfully satisfying puzzler.” –Publishers Weekly
“Mystery a la gothic. . . . Historian Malloy does her research proud, inserting humanity into the too-often dry history some of us suffered through in school.” –Mystery Scene
“Malloy’s use of medieval tales, the Knights Templar history, ancient artifacts, and naval history deftly guides the reader deeper into the character and her motivations. . . . This novel itself reads like a seafaring voyage full of swift turns, unknown frontiers, and the desire to answer the big questions we all ask ourselves.” –ForeWord
“Malloy provides a terrific tense thriller.” –Midwest Book Review
Mary Malloy is the author of four non-fiction works of maritime or ethnographic history and four novels. She has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Brown University, where her dissertation was on the maritime fur trade to the Northwest Coast and the collecting of artifacts for New England museums. She taught maritime and environmental history for twenty-five years at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, MA, and made several voyages to the north and south Pacific with college undergraduates. Mary taught Museum Studies at the Harvard Extension School for twelve years, winning the Petra Shattuck teaching award in 2010.
