Champawat — Lia Matera

The novella Champawat placed third in the vote for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine's Readers Award for 2012. This ebook edition adds the prequel short story The Children, which opened Ellery Queen's 70th Anniversary issue (Oct/Nov 2011).Champawat begins with a crime in a wealthy Washington D.C. household devastated by the Spanish flu of 1918. Even before a neighbor--soon-to-be Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer--is bombed by Anarchists, a former servant finds herself relentlessly pursued across country by a U.S. Marshal. The young maid, raised by Italian Anarchists, is sure the marshal means to trick her into a careless response, one that will allow him to arrest her for actions or statements illegal under the wartime Alien and Sedition Acts. The question is, why? Things do not end well when the pair play cat-and-mouse just before Armistice Day, nor when they meet again during Seattle's 107,000-worker general strike. But their final contretemps might be the death of them both, along with the houseful of prominent politicians there to discuss 1920's Democratic primary.