Mary Logue - The Streel - A Deadwood Mystery No. 1

The Streel -Published May 12th 2020 by Univ Of Minnesota Press

When I was fifteen and my brother Seamus sixteen, we attended our own wake. Our family was in mourning, forced to send us off to America.

The year is 1880, and of all the places Brigid Reardon and her brother might have dreamed of when escaping Ireland’s potato famine by moving to America, Deadwood, South Dakota, was not one of them. But Deadwood, in the grip of gold fever, is where Seamus lands and where Brigid joins him after eluding the unwanted attentions of the son of her rich employer in St. Paul—or so she hopes. But the morning after her arrival, a grisly tragedy occurs; Seamus, suspected of the crime, flees, and Brigid is left to clear his name and to manage his mining claim, which suddenly looks more valuable and complicated than he and his partners supposed.

Mary Logue, author of the popular Claire Watkins mysteries, brings her signature brio and nerve to this story of a young Irish woman turned reluctant sleuth as she tries to make her way in a strange and often dangerous new world. From the famine-stricken city of Galway to the bustling New York harbor, to the mansions of Summit Avenue in St. Paul, and finally to the raucous hustle of boomtown Deadwood, Logue’s new thriller conjures the romance and the perils, and the tricky everyday realities, of a young immigrant surviving by her wits and grace in nineteenth-century America.

"I would have wanted to be a writer when I was a child if I had known it was possible. When I could only read two words: "you" and "I," I went through a wholebook and circled them. I knew reading was the key to the rest of the world. I wrote my first mystery when I was in sixth grade—it was about a mysterious trail around a pond. I continue to write about mysterious trails around Lake Pepin in my Claire Watkins mystery series. Some things never change.

Poetry, however, is the foundation of my work. I have written four books of poetry, my latest is Hand Work, which came out in 2009. This book was the result of an experiment to write a poem a day for a year. I have also published a young adult novel, Dancing with an Alien, and the Bloodwater mysteries with Pete Hautman. My non-fiction books include a biography of my grandmother, Halfway Home, and a book on Minnesota courthouses, both published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

She was an editor at the Village Voice, Graywolf Press, and The Creative Company. She published articles in the Village Voice, the New York Times and the Hungry Mind Review. For many year she taught at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. Currently, she on faculty in the low-residency Children's Literature MFA program at Hamline University in St. Paul.

She is a bi-riverbank, living on both sides of the Mississippi, with writer Pete Hautman in Minnesota and Wisconsin.