Old Grimes Is Dead

"The award-winning McFadden tells a tale of grave robbery, the Underground Railroad, and more in a historical novel set in Western Pennsylvania... His thoroughly engrossing book seamlessly weaves humor and sadness, wit and tragedy, fear and love. An exceptional plot and characters make this historical novel a keeper." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) In rural western Pennsylvania in 1857, the pressing matters of the day--slavery, abolition, states' rights and...
More Description

"The award-winning McFadden tells a tale of grave robbery, the Underground Railroad, and more in a historical novel set in Western Pennsylvania... His thoroughly engrossing book seamlessly weaves humor and sadness, wit and tragedy, fear and love. An exceptional plot and characters make this historical novel a keeper." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

In rural western Pennsylvania in 1857, the pressing matters of the day--slavery, abolition, states' rights and bleeding Kansas--can seem faraway and irrelevant. In fact, the issue of most concern to a few of the doctors in Hartsgrove is the illegality of the use of human cadavers for medical dissection, an inconvenience which forces them to their own, criminal devices--the digging up, or "resurrection," of a specimen on their own. In the nearby Negro settlement of Little Brier, meanwhile, current concerns have taken on a more immediate aspect, as several of the free Blacks there have become involved in the Underground Railroad. When the most active among them, a bootmaker by the name of Fudge Van Pelt, dies under mysterious circumstances and his body just happens to be the one resurrected by the doctors, the lives of the two communities begin to merge in strange and dangerous ways. When a young, white school mistress is found hanged, and a little girl's body is missing from her grave, the mysteries only deepen.

"Through a series of riveting mysteries, Dennis McFadden's 'Old Grimes Is Dead' shares the fascinating resurrection of a Black man by a group of white doctors in western Pennsylvania in 1857. Although famous (or infamous) at the time, this antebellum tale is based in part on historical fact, bringing to life forgotten pieces of American lore and real characters from the past." - New England Review