Chesapeake Chaos

About the Book

In 1650 Luke is sent to Maryland on a joint mission: Catholic proprietor Lord Baltimore seeks to understand his collapsing authority, and General Cromwell needs to assess the situation as a precursor to the English republic’s planned attack on the remaining Royalist colonies on the Chesapeake. Luke becomes involved with a dysfunctional planter family of an old adversary which is beset by a series of murders that may stem from an atrocity committed years earlier in England, or from the current political turmoil on the Chesapeake. The situation involves a family breakdown, bitter planter rivalries, piracy, renegade Amerindians, a major Indian conflict, problems along the Delaware, violent weather conditions , a Puritan settlement expelled from Virginia and invited by Baltimore to settle in Maryland - an offer repaid by their determination to reject their Papist overlord and erect God’s kingdom, the machinations of neighbouring Virginia, the recreation of a Jesuit mission and the clandestine incursion of a foreign power. Luke struggles to solve the murders and save the Chesapeake for England.

About the Author

Geoff Quaife has been a schoolteacher, college lecturer, university professor and educational administrator. He is an academic historian who has written several works of non-fiction including Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives an analysis of the sexual behaviour and mores of the English peasantry, and a general survey of the great European witch hunts Godly Zeal and Furious Rage. He taught in seventeenth century European history especially the English Civil wars where he developed an affection for the achievements, and the army of Oliver Cromwell; and in English colonization of the Americas. Chesapeake Chaos brings together both these interests.