The Patriote Proposition
It is late summer 1833. Elizabeth Darmon and her family are enjoying visiting her sister’s home in Lower Canada when a series of disasters strike. Elizabeth first knows something is wrong when the carriage bearing her family returns to the house empty. She goes into town to begin a search for her missing relatives. When she returns, her sister’s house is on fire and the servants are dead. Meanwhile, her brother-in-law Charles Bagwell regains consciousness but not his memory, and begins a search to find out who he is. Through a series of dead ends, vague clues and near misses, Elizabeth and her family cross back and forth through Quebec and Lower Canada searching for answers and for each other.
Thomas Thorpe has constructed an action-packed adventure centered on the early emergence of the party responsible for the Patriote Rebellion of 1837. The historical detail is intriguing, but the story becomes hard to believe when the protagonists keep nearly stumbling upon one another and easily picking up the clues they need. Nevertheless, this book will hold the audience’s attention until the end. This is the first of four novels about the Darmon family.
