Set in colonial Massachusetts, The Devil’s Elbow follows Jack Parker from his orphan childhood days as an apprentice to a greedy and brutal Boston merchant to the isolated pioneer settlement of Brookfield, where he ends up in the fight of his life to protect the people and things he loves. The book is set against the background of King Philip’s War, the single greatest catastrophe to occur in seventeenth-century Puritan New England.

Jack uses the knowledge his father gave him - that the measure of a man is how he deals with the worst life can throw at him - along with the support of the powerful man who becomes his friend, and the deep, unshakeable love for his wife to fuel his determination to survive. He draws on all he has learned on his three-decade journey when he’s met with his greatest test as he and ninety-eight others are trapped in a four-room tavern for three hot, humid August days, fighting for survival against 400 once-friendly Indians who are determined to wipe them out and reclaim their land and way of life.

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The greatest grief that can happen to a boy happened to me when I was 14 years old. No matter what happened, life was never to be the same again.

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My world turned upside down when my mother died while giving birth on the cold and dismal morning of April 7, 1665, leaving me, Jack Parker, an orphan in the coastal town of Ipswich, located 30 miles north of Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

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I’ve found that there are times in life when you feel all alone as if no one else cares about your very existence. Although that’s rarely the case, it just feels that way. That’s how I felt - alone and abandoned, not knowing what to do or even where to start, scared of everything, scared of losing what little I had. It was a terrible time, for my entire world was gone.

 

My father died the previous fall in a hunting mishap of which I was the cause. I blame myself for my father’s death because if I hadn’t been so careless, he wouldn’t have had to save me and he wouldn’t have gotten sick. It is a burden I carried then and carry still.