Tim Holland


Contemporary and Historic Mysteries



The Sidney Lake Mysteries




The Rising Tide


The Murder of Amos Dunn


Deception
(Coming June 22,2022)




The Rising Tide

Victorian Literature Professor Sidney Lake is pressured by his housekeeper and confident, Tillie James, to help prove a woman innocent of the murder of her husband, a crime the police do not believe happened. It was a boating accident the coroner declared but gossip in the town of Morgan sees it differently. Sidney believes the coroner and police chief are right...until he starts asking questions. The answers lead he and Tillie down a path where members of the Gullah community have the answers and find the truth in the rising and falling waters of the lowcountry.


The Murder of Amos Dunn

Sidney Lake may have retired from Morgan College but not from becoming involved in the daily lives of Tillie James and Hattie Ryan. When Amos Dunn, the owner of the Cedar Street Market, is found dead in his store, conventional wisdom of the authorities declares it a murder due to his having interrupted a robbery. Tillie doesn't believe it. Amos was a well-liked Black man actively involved in the community who liked to tweak the noses of his White friends during downtown business association meetings. "This is no accidental robbery, it has something to do with that book of numbers he's always writing in." Sam Cashman, a Black policeman from the Gullah community, is put in charge of the investigation in order to calm the community outrage. Nothing is what it seems, as the investigation moves into the White community and begins to make the political powers uncomfortable.


Deception

- Coming June 22, 2022 -

An original edition of Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall appears on a national art and antiques television show and Hattie Ryan believes it is the three-volume set stolen from the back of a police car a few years earlier. Sidney Lake, who has just finished writing a book on the literary forger Thomas Wise is sure she's right and begins to track down the owner. However, they are distracted by Tillie James' discovery of an attempt to defraud Gullah residents of their land on the Pirate Islands just off Morgan, SC. Sidney Lake takes on the two distinct investigations and gets his neighbor, a retired Morgan detective, involved as the two seemingly unrelated inquiries begin to merge. A conspiracy is uncovered that keeps everyone on edge and a major hurricane has the Lowcountry in its sights.



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Welcome to the lowcountry of South Carolina


A unique place steeped in history. A place that flew the flags of every colonial power in North America. A place to which West African farmers were dragged and enslaved..A place where the character of the country was formed. A place where those West African slaves created a home for themselves and became known as the Gullah/Geechie. A Place filled with hope, despair and above all...mystery.


The Sidney Lake series features a retired professor of Victorian Literature, Sidney Lake, and his Gullah housekeeper, Tillie James. The two live an ordinary, quiet existence along with Lake’s Labrador retriever—Mickey, until Tillie becomes upset about something that has happened to an acquaintance in the fictitious lowcountry college town of Morgan, SC. Morgan sits on the lowcountry coast between Edisto and Beaufort. The action stretches from Charleston to Savannah.