Review: "The Wolves of Andover," Kathleen Kent

By Paul Carrier

Call it a personal quirk. If I pick up a novel set in 17th- or 18th-century North America, I'm predisposed to like it. The colonial period is my favorite era, historically speaking, so any author who transports us to that time and place has an edge.

But turning back the clock is not enough; a novel has to win a reader’s approval on its merits. The Wolves of Andover does just that, thanks to its compelling plot, lyricism and nuanced characters.

At first blush, Kathleen Kent’s tale appears to be a risky proposition, because it’s a prequel. The danger is that readers already familiar with how things turn out may lack interest in what came before. The Wolves of Andover examines the 1670s courtship, in colonial Massachusetts, of the real-life Martha Allen and Thomas Carrier, Kent’s direct ancestors. The publication of the novel followed the earlier release of The Heretic’s Daughter, in which Kent explored the arrest and death of Martha (Allen) Carrier during the Salem witch trials in the 1690s.

Triple portrait of King Charles I

Kent avoids prequel pitfalls by coupling the budding romance between Martha and Thomas with a parallel tale, based on family lore, about Thomas’ murky past. As Thomas and Martha grow closer in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, England’s restored king, Charles II, searches for the executioner who beheaded his father, Charles I, in 1649, near the close of the English Civil War.

Charles becomes convinced that Thomas is the man he’s looking for. So several of the king’s henchmen sail for Massachusetts with orders to bring Thomas back to England - alive, if possible.

Here too, the reader knows that Thomas will elude his would-be kidnappers (or assassins). Otherwise, he and Martha would not be husband and wife in The Heretic’s Daughter, set some 20 years later. Yet as the plot to seize or kill Thomas unfolds, Kent creates enough suspense to keep us turning the pages, even if we assume that Thomas will live on.

The novel’s success stems in large part from the fact that Kent's characters, particularly Martha, are fully developed and entirely believable.

When the tough-minded Martha is about to meet a minister whom she expects to dislike, for example, her natural skepticism and unconventional outlook kick in. She speculates, correctly, that the Reverend Hastings will have "no apparent vices of his own to make him humble or soft in his opinions of others who had sinned. He would be dry and sharp and, worst of all, full of purpose. He would carry within the folds of his cloak the breath of winter and peer at everyone with pale robin’s-egg eyes, uncovering and revealing every speck of unlawfulness in moral conduct, and his hands would make a punishment of every caress.”

The younger Martha in The Wolves of Andover is as independent-minded and irascible as her older self in The Heretic’s Daughter. But Thomas, who plays a secondary role in The Heretic's Daughter, emerges here as a central, if mysterious, character. His background as an anti-royalist soldier in the English Civil War slowly reveals itself as he and Martha fall in love while working as servants in the home of Martha’s cousin, Patience, and her husband Daniel.

“Martha Carrier’s life and death have been well chronicled in both fictional and non-fictional works related to the Salem witch trials; she was one of the nineteen men and women hanged as a witch in 1692,” Kent said in a 2010 posting at examiner.com.

“More elusive was the character of her husband, Thomas Carrier; a man my grandparents insisted lived to 109 years of age, stood seven feet tall and was one of the executioners of King Charles I of England. This giant figured prominently in my imagination for most of my childhood and it was in many ways a more daunting task developing his character for my second novel.”

A cautionary note: The Wolves of Andover (which also is available retitled as The Traitor's Wife) is not gratuitously violent by any means. But life in the 17th century could be cruel and brutal, and the novel makes that clear. If you can’t stomach descriptions of dog fighting and bear baiting, look elsewhere.