The Orphanmaster: A Novel of Early Manhattan

(Paperback)

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Description

A love story wrapped around a murder mystery, set in seventeenth-century Manhattan In 1663 in the hardscrabble colony of New Amsterdam-today's lower Manhattan-orphan children are going missing and residents suspect a serial killer. The list of possible culprits is long and strange. Among those looking into the mystery are a shrewd young Dutch woman, Blandine van Couvering, and a dashing Englishman, Edward Drummond, whose newfound romance is threatened by horrible accusations. In this spellbinding work of historical fiction, Jean Zimmerman relates the harsh realities of life in early Manhattan, re-creating the sights, smells, and textures of the rough settlement surrounded by wilderness and subject to political turmoil. Compulsively readable and filled with New York history, The Orphanmaster will delight fans of Caleb Carr, Hilary Mantel, and Geraldine Brooks.

Reviews

Praise for The Orphanmaster:

The Orphanmaster is a sweeping novel of great and precise imaginative intelligence; it's also the most entertaining and believable historical novel I've read in years. Jean Zimmerman is a debut novelist who already writes like an old master. Read any page of The Orphanmaster and you'll become an instant fan. Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life and Chang and Eng

Jean Zimmerman's seventeenth-century New Amsterdam teems with enough intrigue, lust, and madness to give our twenty-first-century Big Apple a run for its money. And money is what drives this book liberating, corrupting, forming the only bulwark against a terrifying, chaotic New World. Zimmerman's wit and humanity shine light in a dark woods, creating an uncommonly rich debut. Sheri Holman, author of The Dress Lodger

Heres American history turned inside out, animated by Jean Zimmermans prodigious imagination.Monsters lurk in the shadows, chaos presses in, legends come alive, and one adventure leads with irresistible force to the next.The Orphanmaster is a breathtaking achievement. Joanna Scott, author of Arrogance and Various Antidotes

[A] compulsively readable, heartbreaking, and grisly mystery set in a wild colonial America. ALA Booklist

A feisty young Dutch woman, an English spy, and a local demon all cross paths in 1663 New Amsterdam, in this Ludlumesque historical thrillera successful mix of historical fiction, spy thriller, and horror. Library Journal

"As in the best historical fiction, [Zimmerman] has created a kind of truce between the authority of the past and the accessibility of the present, revealing to us what it once meant to be alive, and what that history means to us now ... on nearly every page there is some unobtrusively offered word or description, of food, of architecture, of dress, that brings the period and its people into clearer focus." USAToday

"Absorbing period fiction with the requisite colorful characters of the era." The New YorkDaily News

Author Bio

Jean Zimmerman is the author several works of nonfiction, including Love, Fiercely- A Gilded Age Romance and The Women of the House- How a Colonial She-Merchant Built a Mansion, a Fortune, and a Dynasty. She lives in Ossining, New York. This is her first novel.