Barbara L. reviewed on 7/30/2009 + 988 more book reviews

I hadn't read anything from the series before, but I am definitely hooked and you will be too once you read this one. The main character is a midwife, Sarah Brandt, who works in the tenements of New York City at the turn of the last century. In this story she is called on to attend a birth in Little Italy where she finds an Italian family anxious about the upcoming birth as the baby is coming too early, or so they think until the baby turns out to be a fat and healthy baby boy, definitely not premature. The family reacts angrily as this baby was definitely conceived even before its parents had met and while the matriarch of the family threatens to throw her deceiving and hated Irish daughter-in-law out, the girl reacts calmly and tells Sarah she has nothing to fear. The next morning Sarah returns to check on the new mother and finds her dead in her bed. The family insists that the death was from complications of childbirth but Sarah thinks the girl was murdered. Sarah's friend, Police Commissioner Roosevelt wants the murderer found before the Irish and Italian tenement dwellers tear the city apart.

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