Jacqueline Friedland, “Trouble the Water” (SparkPress, 2018)

New Books in Literature · Aug 17, 2018 · 41m

Douglas Elling has left his home town in England and made a name for himself in Charleston. It’s about twenty years before the US Civil War, and slavery is still very much an institution in South Carolina, but Douglas finds it abhorrent. He has promised his father-in-law to care for the family business, so he can’t simply pack up and go home. Instead he becomes involved in the nascent abolition movement, using his inherited fleet and his manumitted laborers to intercept illegal slave traders on the high seas. But when his estate goes up in flames, killing his wife and young daughter, Douglas…