Category: Book Reviews

In 1844 Enoch Price was born into poverty. An ambitious youth, he becomes a bare-knuckle fighter amongst London’s underworld. In debt to a violent and unscrupulous moneylender and facing ruin and imprisonment, he escapes to Jacksonville, Florida. He abandons his wife and three young daughters, a decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life. By the time he arrives in Florida, Enoch Price has become Harry Mason.

Through a series of thrilling and risky escapades, he plays an important role in the development and history of Jacksonville. He builds an extraordinary new life of political and financial notoriety, the shooting of a rival, and the concealment of a murder. Despite imploring his wife to join him, she declines, exhausted by his lies. Tormented by loneliness and guilt, Harry seeks solace through a bigamous marriage . This leads him into a web of deceit as he tries to conceal his true identity and past.

Meanwhile, lauded and enjoying popular success, Harry is elected in 1903 to the Florida State House of Representatives with the prospect of becoming State Governor. He advances his business interests through a series of corrupt practices. He becomes a wealthy and successful politician. However, success brings neither happiness nor contentment, and, seeking redemption, Harry plans to return home. But life is rarely that simple as the First World War breaks out, the Spanish flu pandemic takes its toll, and the American government introduces prohibition. Will there be a good end for Harry, or will his secrets prove to be the death of him?

Author Bio:

After retiring as a senior police officer, I turned my detective skills to genealogy, tracing my family history to the 16th century. However, after 15 years of extensive research, I couldn’t track down my great-great-grandfather, Enoch Price, whose wife, Eliza, had helped raise my mother. It was my cousin Gillian who called one day to say that she had found him through a fluke encounter. Susan Sperry from California, who had recently retired, decided to explore the box of documents given to her thirty years before by her mother, which she had never opened. In the box, she found some references to her great grandfather, Harry Mason, a wealthy hotel owner from Florida who had died in 1919.

It soon transpired that Susan’s great grandfather, Harry Mason, was, in fact, Enoch Price. From this single thread, the extraordinary story of Harry Mason began to unravel, leading me to visit the States to meet my American cousins, and it was Susan Sperry and Kimberly Mason, direct descendants, who persuaded me to write the book.

I graduated from Warwick with a joint in Philosophy and Psychology and a Masters in Marketing from UWE. Since leaving a thirty-year career in policing, I’ve been a non executive director with the NHS, social housing, and other charities.

I live with my wife in Bristol, spending my time travelling, writing and producing delicious plum jam from the trees on my award-winning allotment

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