Tour: Downriver (Poison River #1) by Jennifer M. Lane

Book details:

Book Title: Downriver

Series: The Poison River Series (Book 1)

Author: Jennifer M. Lane

Publication Date: May 28, 2024

Publisher: Pen & Key Publishing

Pages: 344

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#HistoricalFiction,

A sulfur sky poisoned her family and her heart. Now revenge tastes sweeter than justice.

It’s 1900. In a Pennsylvania coal town tainted by corruption and pollution, Charlotte's world collapses when her parents meet a tragic end. Sent to a foster family in a Maryland fishing village, she’s fueled by grief and embarks on a relentless quest for justice against the ruthless coal boss, Nels Pritchard.

But Charlotte is no ordinary girl. She shares the fiery spirit of her father, whose powerful speeches inspired worker riots. With a burning desire for vengeance, she sets out to uncover the truth behind Pritchard's crimes, unearthing a shocking connection between the town's toxic air and the lifeless fish washing up on the shore of her Chesapeake Bay foster town.

To expose the truth, Charlotte builds a network of unexpected allies. There are gutsy suffragists, a literary society of teenage girls willing to print the truth… and Weylan. The captivating young man lost his own family to Pritchard’s poison. He offers support, but Charlotte questions his true motives when he lures her to break the law. Could she be falling into a dangerous trap, leading her to a fate worse than poison?

With her unwavering spirit and determination, Charlotte must forge alliances and navigate a web of treachery before Pritchard seeks his own ruthless revenge.

The newest book by award-winning author Jennifer M. Lane is perfect for fans of Jeannette Walls’ Hang the Moon and the fiery protagonist in The Hunger Games. Join Charlotte in this small town, coming-of-age dystopian historical saga as she finds resilience, courage, and triumph in her search for identity, independence, and her true home.

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“You’re hurt.” Otto points a crooked finger at the blood streaming from my arm. “I can stitch it.”

The barn smells hot and sour, like cattle and piss. My lungs won’t fill with enough air, and my body can’t hold me up any longer. Everything’s running on half steam, and the barn tilts on an axis. Sliding down the wall, I thump to the ground, landing hard. Otto squats beside me, hands on his bony knees. He’s a few years older than me at best, with scruffy brown hair and a compact frame. Outside, voices call my name. I can’t believe Pine stabbed me.

“Are you real?” He can’t be. I’m dead in a field, and this is some ludicrous purgatory.

“I’m real. I’m Otto.” He moves without sound, peering out through knotholes and breaks in the walls. “This is my father’s barn. We have a feisty cow with a history of breech births. If I leave her alone, we could lose both of ‘em, so I slept in the loft.”

“I didn’t mean to break in. I’m sorry. Pine and his friends are chasing me, and I…” There isn’t enough saliva to dampen my throat. “I hate to impose, but do you have any water?”

“There’s a well, but you need more than a drink. You’re hurt.” He peels back the tatters of my sleeve and squints at my wound. His deadpan expression gives me a bit of comfort. If a man who deals with breech birth calves thinks this isn’t bad, I’ll survive it.

“Let me fix your cut.” Otto crouches next to me. “Do you have thread? Something from your hem?”

I heave myself upright. The fern leaf embroidered on my skirt will be hard to replace. It came from leftover sewing supplies after my mother made curtains for a neighbor. I pluck at it and chew it free with my teeth.

“I’ll clean your cut with moonshine. It’ll hurt.” Otto’s voice is soft, soothing. “I’d offer you a swig, but I think you had some already.”

I hold in a breath of air that tastes like hay. Otto tugs on my sleeve and pours the spirits into the wound. It stings like nothing I’ve ever felt before, and a screaming pain flares from my arm through my whole body. I bite back a whimper.

He doesn’t waste time plunging a needle into my skin, and it hurts a lot less than I thought it might. It’s like being hit with musket fire after surviving a few dozen cannon blasts to the gut, I imagine.

“I need to get out of here before I get caught.” There’s already hell to pay.

He jabs the needle through a flap of my flesh, and my vision goes dark, but I can’t tear my eyes away as my spotty vision returns.

“You should eat something,” he says with a crooked smile. “I have beef jerky.” He pauses and drops the needle. It swings from the green thread dangling from my arm. I can’t stop watching it, a gruesome little pendulum. He scrounges around in a wooden box and returns with a paper-wrapped slab of dried beef. “Here. This will help.”

“Thanks.” I tear off a strip of the dried meat with my teeth. It’s spongy in places, stringy in others, yet dry and salty at the same time. “This is delicious.”

“Can be a whole meal. You never ate beef jerky?” His brow pinches, and he squints at his stitching. Down through one side, up through the other. Tie it in a knot.

“We don’t have this where I came from.” The more I chew, the more gratifying it gets, and my stomach growls for more. “I’m feeling better already. I think you might be an angel or a fairy or something.”

“Not even a little bit, but you’re welcome.” Otto glances between my wince and my wound. “Where’d you come from, anyway? I’ve never seen you around here.”

“I grew up in Stoke. North. We were coal people.”

The past tense clings to me along with the sweat and grit. I’ll never get used to the fact that my life is in the past, that every day takes me further from my family.

“Were?” Otto tugs the thread through my skin. “Moved for the change of scenery?”

“Orphaned.”

Otto gives me that look of pity with the puckered lips and the drawn-in eyebrows. It never looks good on anyone.

“Don’t,” I say. “I can’t stand sympathy.”

He goes back to stitching. “I’m convinced life ain’t easy, no matter which slice of it you get. Especially with the rules in this town.”

“Whitaker making you suffer?” I ask.

He pulls the thread taut. “It’s always money with him. We used to have sell calves and send them out on the trains. Delivered milk. Had a store to sell butcherings and sold hides to a leather man. Now there’s a tax on every cow you sell. We got to pay Whitaker to breathe the air. We tried sheep, but they’re damn awful, full of diseases and picky as sin. If you’ve never picked June Bugs out of a sheep, you’re living right. Now we do mostly chicken, and they tax the life out of that, too.”

“He really is a horrible person. Why is he like this?”

Otto ties a knot in the last stitch, bites the thread free, and wraps the excess around his finger. He drops the coil in my palm where it lies, wet and bloodstained.

“I don’t know what broke that man,” he says. “Greed, I guess. I don’t want to know, either. The more you know, the more opinions you got to carry around. Feelings slow me down, and they don’t change nothing.”

“That’s a good policy. I’m the opposite.”

“It takes all kinds to run the world. You all should run the world. Women. You’d fix all this.”

I swallow the last piece of beef jerky. It’s salty, and a lot like eating shoe leather, but it’s filling, and it steadies my stomach. “It’s nice of you to say, but we’re probably just as prone to greed as any man.”

He pours moonshine over the needle and places it back in his tin of supplies. “You all seem more willing to think about other people. Empathy or whatever they call it.”

“Maybe.” I stand, wobble, and brush dirt and hay from my skirt. It’s in my hair, too. “Thank you for the help, but I should go. Curfew and all that.”

Otto waves a hand at a mound of hay. “You can stay if you want. There’s plenty of room. I sleep in the loft. Won’t bother you, I swear to it.”

“If someone found out I slept in a barn with a man, my life would be over. But thank you for this. I owe you.”

“No, you don’t. It’s what neighbors do.” He hangs the slingshot on its hook, scrambles up the ladder, and tucks his tin of tools in the loft. “Don’t worry about those boys. They’ll be out of school soon. Just trying to make their mark on the world.”

I inspect my skirt, where blood’s soaked into the embroidery, stiffening the stitches. I slip the coil of thread in my pocket. “Well, they made their mark on my arm, and I’m not happy about it.”

I lift the bar from the door and nudge it with my hip, inching it open. Cool air refuses to cross the threshold, hanging low over damp earth. I hadn’t noticed the smell of cattle before, but it lingers, fresh and pungent compared to the sulfur air I’m used to. I’m glad the bull is on the other side of that fence.

I slip out the door and into the night and retrace my steps. At the school, the lights are dark, the people long gone. From here, it’s a short but tiresome hike on failing knees through air that’s damp and thick with moss back to the Ryans’ house. It makes my hair stick to the back of my neck, my skirt heavy and hot.

Every step is an uphill trudge, wearing away the last of my energy until I reach the door, but the fatigue doesn’t blanket one bit of my anger. I clench it down in my jaw, between my teeth, where I hope it will stay if I encounter Finn. The front door is unlocked, as it always is, the empty fishing pail under the bench. All I have to do is get inside, past that drunken slough of a man, and into my room. The whole downstairs smells like his booze, and Finn is asleep at the kitchen table, his pipe still clutched in his right hand.

And there, by his left, resting on the table, is the key he uses to lock our doors at night.

It’s warm and heavy in my hand. And it’s mine now.

Universal Series Link: https://linktr.ee/Poison_River_Series

A Maryland native and Pennsylvanian at heart, Jennifer M. Lane holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Barton College and a master’s in liberal arts with a focus on museum studies from the University of Delaware, where she wrote her thesis on the material culture of roadside memorials.

Jennifer is a member of the Authors Guild and the Historical Novel Society. Her first book,Of Metal and Earth, won the 2019 Next Generation Indie Book Award for First Novel and was a Finalist in the 2018 IAN Book of the Year Awards in the category of Literary / General Fiction. She is also the author of Stick Figures from Rockport, and the six book series,The Collected Stories of Ramsbolt.