Its setting the 1830s when bank failures and depression spurred a fresh migration westward, its characters the men and women of history - this book tells of fact stranger than fiction, in an account pieced together from old newspapers, court records, fragments of remenmbered legend, and the blurred physical evidence of wagon trails. James Ford, the scion of patriots, had land, wealth, family, position - he even served as sheriff. His nose for business sensed correctly the potential of a ferry situated for use throughout the year and convenient to the Wilderness Road which hundreds of travellers would follow westward. His taste for crime selected as well an isolated site. Ford's Ferry flourished, and lured a thriving - though luckless - trade. And years passed before the respectable Ford could be linked with the murder and robbery that brought a lurid notoriety to the area. If Ford was a cruel man, the soil of his Kentucky home was also harsh. Violence had followed violence since the time that Indian tribes clashed over hunting rights on this "dark and bloody ground." The authors researched beyond Ford's Ferry itself to the robber bands who congregated at an island cave of the Ohio.to the mad Harp brothers who feverishly roamed the countryside and indiscriminately shot whom they met. We read of historical trails, mudchoked in springtime, danger-riddled during Indian raids, over which men carried their families in cumbersome wagons - and of a girl who escaped Ford's trap and lived to doctor her neighbours in Ohio and to make a significant medical discovery. Violence, treachery, courage, craftiness - the gamut of characteristics that figured in the winning of the West - colour this piece of Americana'.

    BalchinWilliam Joyce by C.S. ForesterThe Murder of Darnley by Eric LinklaterThe Murder of the Duke of Enghien by Christopher Sykes.