Ellen Crosby Author Visit
Image of the front sign.
On Sunday, November 24, 2019, we were blessed with an enjoyable visit and enlightening presentation by Ellen Crosby. For those not yet familiar with Ellen, she has been authoring the Wine Country Mystery series which is for the most part based in the Virginia wine country. She also authored a mystery series involving photojournalist Sophie Medina.
In her former incarnation she has had a varied career which includes such gigs as working as a freelance reporter for the Washington Post, a Moscow-based correspondent for ABC News Radio and as an economist at the U.S. Senate.
Her varied background has enabled her to make and keep many high-level contacts. These contacts have enabled her to conduct in-depth and accurate research before beginning each of her various books. Her painstaking research results in a feeling of factual reality to her mysteries.
Her newest book, the tenth in the Wine Country Mystery series, is entitled The Angels’ Share. According to some local and some not so local Masonic lore, one of Sir Francis Bacon’s relatives arrived at Jamestown in the early 1600s with a cache of secret documents he was charged with keeping both safe and secret. Bacon was not only a lawyer and judge, he was also a Freemason, a Rosicrucian and an alchemist. Aside from being rumored to have been the real writer of Shakespeare’s plays, he was also a prolific writer of novels and histories. One of his best known novels was The New Atlantis which combined scientific pragmatism with a greatly Utopian vision of a new form of government in a new land was never fully finished — or at least no publicly published version of it was.
Among this cache of documents was supposedly a Free Masonic outline and template for a new form of enlightened government to be formed and nurtured to maturity among Englishmen in North America. This cache was to be hidden away and its knowledge kept secret until the time was ripe for its revelation.
The initial hiding place was chosen and preserved by a small select group of Freemasons under the initial church tower at Jamestown. A threat of floods led to its removal to Williamsburg and its new hiding place — a vault under the Bruton Parish Church. There is was observed by a small select group which included Thomas Jefferson.
It has since become the subject of much speculation and many rumors. It is believed by some that the Rockefellers financed the rejuvenation of Colonial Williamsburg so that they could get their hands on the cache.
As usual, the story begins in wine country, this time in a wine cellar and an offer to pay any price for a cache of 200 year old Madeira that was kept by a big time prohibition bootlegger with access to the lower levels of the U.S. Capitol Building
You will not want to miss reading this gripping and exciting mystery.
Images taken by Barb Fellencer.
