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    All Men Fear Me
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    All Men Fear Me
    Unavailable
    All Men Fear Me
    Ebook353 pages5 hours

    All Men Fear Me

    By Donis Casey

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "Casey's skill at making you care about the injustices of a time and place not often covered in history books is second to none. The admirable mystery is the cherry on top." —Kirkus Reviews

    The U.S. has finally entered the First World War and scheduled the first draft lottery. No one in Boynton, Oklahoma, is unaffected by the clash between rabid pro-war, anti-immigrant "patriots" and anti-conscription socialists who are threatening an uprising rather than submit to the draft.

    Alafair Tucker is caught in the middle when her brother, a union organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, pays her a visit. Rob Gunn is fresh out of an internment camp for participants in an Arizona miners' strike. He assures Alafair that he's only come to visit family, but she's not convinced. More unsettling, Alafair's eldest son enlists, and a group calling itself the "Knights of Liberty" vandalizes the farm of Alafair's German-born son-in-law.

    Alafair's younger son, 16-year-old Charlie, is wildly patriotic and horrified by his socialist uncle. With his father's permission, Charlie takes a part-time war job at the Francis Vitric Brick Company. Soon several suspicious machine breakdowns delay production, and a couple of shift supervisors are murdered. Everyone in town suspects sabotage, some blaming German spies, others blaming the unionists and socialists. But Charlie Tucker is sure he knows who the culprit is and comes up with a plan to catch him red-handed.

    And then there is old Nick—a mysterious guy in a bowler hat who's been hanging around town.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSourcebooks
    Release dateNov 3, 2015
    ISBN9781464204715
    Unavailable
    All Men Fear Me
    Author

    Donis Casey

    Donis Casey is an award-winning author whose first novel The Old Buzzard Had It Coming was named an Oklahoma Centennial Book in 2008. She has twice won the Arizona Book Award and has been a finalist for the Willa Award. A former teacher, academic librarian, and entrepreneur, she currently resides in Tempe, Arizona.

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    Reviews for All Men Fear Me

    4.5/5

    13 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Alafair Tucker has been likened to Ma Joad in Steinbeck's classic, The Grapes of Wrath. In many ways that is a perfect description, and if she is Ma Joad, her brother Rob is Tom Joad. America's entry into World War I seemingly brings all the world's problems right to the doorstep of small Boynton, Oklahoma, and as author Donis Casey describes the world Alafair Tucker and her family are living in, readers are reminded that things really haven't changed all that much in a century.One of the things that is so much fun in reading this series is the expansion of the Tucker clan. Alafair's ten children are growing up. The little ones are developing their own personalities. The older ones are getting jobs, moving away from home, marrying, and having children. All this growth and all this change certainly widens the series' perspective, but everything is still filtered through Alafair's eyes.In All Men Fear Me (a phrase taken from a World War I propaganda poster), there's an older man named Nick who wears a bowler hat and loves to lurk in the shadows to overhear conversations and watch people. He made chills run down my spine. Nick almost seemed imbued with a supernatural evil. Notice I said "almost." He's not the only well-delineated character in the book. Each of the various factions in Boynton have their representatives, and Casey does an excellent job at bringing them to life. I have to admit to a preference for Emmanuel Clover, an officious little man who's a stickler for the tiniest of rules. He's the type of man born to spike your blood pressure. Mr. Clover loves his daughter Forsythia Lily dearly, and for some reason that girl's name gave me a fit of the giggles each time I saw it.Sixteen-year-old Charlie gets a lot of the focus in this book, and that young man is a corker. He's full of spit and vinegar and at that age where he's just dying to have an adventure. As a matter of fact it's Charlie who gets to conduct a lion's share of the investigating here-- and it certainly brings out the Mama Bear in Alafair. Donis Casey's Alafair Tucker series started out very good (The Old Buzzard Had It Coming) and just keeps getting better and better. I feel that I know what life on a farm in Oklahoma at the turn of the twentieth century was like. I now also have a good idea of how the area fits in with the rest of the country in terms of things like culture and politics. I've come to care about each and every member of the Tucker clan, and I'd no more miss a book in this series than I'd stop liking lasagna. If you're in the mood for an excellent historical mystery series, let me introduce you to Alafair Tucker. She's one farmer's wife who knows how to make lighter-than-air biscuits while she's solving the mysteries that cross her path.
    • 5/5
      Sabotage, murders, unionizers, and patriots clash, tearing families apart in Oklahoma as the United States prepares to enter World War One. Author Casey presents a realistic portrayal of life for one family caught between pro-war and anti-war relatives and neighbors. They find their loyalties are questioned when they fail to shun their German emigrant relatives. At the center is Alafair, a farmwife, who has to find a murderer and deal with mobs that see spies everywhere they look, all while trying to keep members of her extended family safe.
    • 4/5
      I struggled to get through this book. Not because the story wasn't good but the back story was very disturbing to me. The whole breaking unions and hurting, killing and maiming people because of the current political climate struck me as too much like what is happening today. This story is set near the beginning of the U.S. involvement in WWI and some people are out to find and eliminate any "traitors", probably hiding as in plain sight as your former friends and neighbors who happen to be of German decent. Since it happened again in WWII with the Japanese and is happening right now to Muslims, I had a hard time continuing the reading.The mysterious man in the bowler hat was creepy and a very bad person who both incited the problems and seemed to do a lot of the dirty work. Alafair's son Gee Dub is joining up as are a lot of the boys in town of the right age. Charlie Boy is too young, at 16, but wants to help the war effort so he goes to work at the local brickyard. When union talk begins and sabotage is happening at the plant Charlie is determined to prove it has nothing to do with his family -- and his German brother-in-law or union uncle. Like I said, a very good story but it was a tough one for me to read. I'll continue reading the series because it is very well done, this one just wasn't my favorite in the series.
    • 5/5
      All Men Fear Me did exactly what I think the authors and publishers hope books will do on Netgalley: it made me love the author and look forward to reading everything she's written. It won a fan. I loved this book from the moment I saw the character list: there's "Gee Dub, age 20, a college student" … "Charlie, age 16, looking for action" then three younger daughters of the family, "a beauty", "a tomboy", and "a handful". I hate coming in in the middle of a series. Authors so often do a terrible job of the difficult task of balancing the needs of new readers with those of the folks who have been around since the beginning, and from experience I normally pass on Netgalley books when I see "book 2" or "the fourth book in the series" or that sort of thing. I must have missed the fact that this is the eighth book in the Alafair Tucker series, and I'm so very glad I did. Donis Casey beautifully avoided all the pitfalls and just left me really, really happy that there are seven earlier books I can't wait to get my hands on. I loved the language. By which I mean the curses – I need to incorporate “Well, I’ll be go to hell" and “Shoot fire" into my speech (hey, people already think I'm weird, might as well enjoy myself), and I might also find myself using the threat "I’ll pull his lungs out and make balloons out of them!” – and also simply the prose. It rings utterly true for 1917 Oklahoma, and and the authenticity goes deep enough that if something pings my radar, I'm going to trust Donis Casey. She knows what she's doing, and I can relax into it. I love that. What a story. It's right at the beginning of America's involvement in WWI, so we have gone from isolationism to rampant anti-German "patriotism" – so alarmingly like the tide of anti-Muslim feeling after 9/11 (and since). And one of Alafair's sons-in-law was born in Germany. It gets outright terrifying. And also surprisingly frightening is "Old Nick". Is he an evil man in a bowler hat who glories in calling himself by the devil's nickname? Or is he actually the devil? The immediate interpretation of the book's title is that yes, indeed Old Nick is one to be feared … but then there is this WWI propaganda poster: "I Am Public Opinion: All Men Fear Me". The "Knights of Liberty" – think the KKK, with a wider range of targets – are frightening in their xenophobic ignorance … but most frightening of all is the fact that both the xenophobia and the ignorance were actively encouraged by the government. An appeal to buy Liberty Bonds, from the Tulsa Daily World, 1917: "We need more loyal and less 'thinking' Americans… Are you an American?" Just typing that sends chills up my back. It's like an over-the-top science fiction novel about some paranoid and petty tin-pot dictatorship. I love Alafair. It's that simple. The fierce mother; the intelligent and inquisitive woman; the contented frontier homemaker; the woman who wants to help the prostitutes her mother takes her to charitably call upon but who is simultaneously terrified that someone will see her near that house. ("Besides, the Lord wants us to try. He don’t care if we succeed.”) I love her, I love her family, I love the setting, and I want to read – or listen to; I have discovered that the audiobooks (read by Pam Ward) are outstanding – all of them. And more. If you know what I mean. On a lighter note, here is a cooking tip I'll have to try: "Her father insisted that a pancake was not ready to flip until exactly twenty bubbles had formed over the top. Not one more or one less." I received this from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review, which I hereby set down with thanks.