Beowulf: King or Con? has created division amongst Professor Sinclair’s contemporaries. Critics of his previous lectures (Alfred, Not So Great and The Anglo-Saxons Should Thank the Normans) claim Sinclair has sunk to a new low; attempting to kowtow to the lowest academic denominator with wild claims and questionable sources. However, Alistair has received support from J.R.R. Tolkien, the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford (and a fellow Beowulf “expert”), who praises the lecture for supporting the idea that Beowulf should be viewed as a work of art rather than a “dodgy” piece of history.
Amidst the controversy, Professor Sinclair has been invited to lecture in the United States at the request of the Anglo-Saxon Colloquium ( Columbia University, New York University, Rutgers University, Princeton University, and Miskatonic University). Professor Sinclair, accompanied by his Graduate Assistant (and card-carrying Communist), Hugh d’Arcy, will be stateside from June 1st through July 11th.
Connor O’Shea sees the irony in working for the Committee of Fourteen. It is every Irishman’s God-given right to enjoy a drink, and those teetotalers are responsible for maintaining Prohibition’s stranglehold on America. However, investigating (or shaking down) local speakeasies has proven to be quite lucrative. It has come at a price, though – the inquiries from Internal Affairs have been an inconvenience, but Connor knows which asses to kiss to keep his nose clean.
Despite all the rumors of wrongdoing, Detective O’Shea has been chosen by the Committee to spearhead a five-month undercover investigation into Harlem nightlife. The goal of this investigation is not only to discover the source of the flow of illegal alcohol, but to improve the ability of the NYPD to gather information in Black Harlem.
When Ivy Morgan decided to start the Church of Cana, she realized that the stay at her father’s old church would be brief. While many of his parishioners were busy worrying about their eternal souls, a few could read the papers and would find her op-eds preaching a decadent lifestyle without boundaries or regrets both subversive and blasphemous.
The abandoned Baptist church in Sugar Hill served two purposes. It put Ivy smack dab in the middle of the cultural epicenter of the United States; nowhere was the moral fabric of the country changing more rapidly than in Harlem. And it put New York City’s rich and famous within earshot of Ivy’s message.
Jonas Markham has heard all of the stories. Small towns have their scandals, and the Babcocks are one of Byron’s most prominent families. Four generations of Babcocks have tilled the fields and split the logs of Byron since 1833. And had the Great War not left Elizabeth brotherless, the Babcock name might have gone on for generations untold.
Elizabeth’s great-grandfather, Walter Babcock supposedly suffered a debilitating breakdown in the early hours of May 1, 1855. He was found babbling incoherently upon the threshold of the family farm after being gone for several days on a logging expedition. While the truth would never be known (Walter Babcock was admitted to a Portland asylum and never spoke again), townsfolk speculated that Walter Babcock met the Devil in the woods of Oxford County.
