Here’s a sneak preview of the semi-final cover art for my next non-fiction book, Bootleggers, Lobstermen, and Lumberjacks: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of Hardscrabble New England, due out October 5, 2010 (but available for pre-order now!):
(Click cover for larger image.)
In Bootleggers, Lobstermen, and Lumberjacks: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of Hardscrabble New England, author Matthew P. Mayo presents 50 narrative-driven tales covering hundreds of years of incredible, true accounts of Indian abductions and all-out wars; of timber-tough men in the golden age of New England logging; of suspected witches being hung and crushed by stones; of savage storms, fantastic shipwrecks, ruthless pirates, and half-starved castaways; of train wrecks, blizzards, and nor’easters; of the hair-raising exploits of rumrunners, smugglers, and bootleggers; of hardworking lobstermen driven to settle their differences any way they can; of hill farmers with fast cars during Prohibition doing their best to survive in the challenging and unique locale that is New England—as much a place as a state of mind.
(Globe Pequot Press; October, 2010)
(Softcover; 6 x 9; 320 pages; 28 historic photos; $16.95; ISBN: 978-0-7627-5968-2)
Here’s a taste of what’s inside:
• The Pilgrims’ first winter is a time of disease, starvation, and death
• Giles Corey is pressed to death with stones during the Salem Witch Trials
• Hannah Duston’s scalping spree leaves 14 Indians dead
• Every month in 1816 saw a killing frost, and famine swept through New England
• Big Jim Cullen gets his neck stretched in New England’s only lynching
• A R.I. girl’s corpse is mutilated, then her family inhales the fumes of her burning organs
• The mother of all logjams rips apart a Vermont town
• Two-million gallons of molasses in a 40-foot wall roars through Boston
• A high-speed Vermont booze-run ends in a shooting, a car wreck, and a dead boy
• FBI’s most-wanted, the Al Brady Gang, are outwitted by savvy Mainers
• Nazis from a submarine use a small Maine town as their entry to sabotage the US
• Lobstermen cut trap lines, burn docks, sink boats, and then the shooting starts
Available for pre-order: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Borders | Indiebound | Powell’s