I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which is just about perfection in the category of historical fiction.  It’s the story of Martha Ballard, a midwife living in Massachusetts (now Maine) in 1789. She is called to the scene when a dead man is taken from the frozen river as she is the town’s trained medical representative. She deems the cause of death murder but when that conclusion is challenged by the newly arrived from Boston and Harvard trained doctor, she begins her own investigation. Martha is also called as a witness to the rape of a woman she treated where one of the suspects is the dead man and the other is the town’s judge. The book includes many side stories of townspeople in colonial America, the women whose babies Martha delivers and her own family of grown and nearly grown children, as well as her husband (the relationship between Martha and her husband is one of the highlights of the book). The author does an excellent job of describing scenes of colonial America, from the taverns to the buggies to the candle-lit interiors to the frozen landscape that is winter in New England. And the portrait of this strong woman standing up for herself and others is not one I will soon forget.