I was waiting impatiently for Mercury's Rise after reading the previous three books about the silver rush in Leadville, Colorado. My only disappointment was that the book ran out of pages so now I'm waiting impatiently for the next one.Ann Parker lures the reader into history through intriguing and very fallible characters. Her central figure Inez Stannert blunders into situations where I want to scream, "No, don't be an idiot; why would a smart woman like you do such a dumb thing?" Sometimes I follow up with a Jay Leno comment, "Well, what did you expect?" Inez, however, is a survivor who manages to keep her wits about her.When you finish a book in this series, you realize you learned something about life in the late 1800s. It was no picnic. In Mercury's Rise, Ann Parker brings to life the pandemic of tuberculosis, even before the knowledge that it was communicable and before the establishment of sanitoria. This is very timely. Since 1985, a strain of antibiotic resistant tuberculosis has made something of a comeback in our modern world. Of course, this is all in the background; my major preoccupation with the book is just getting Inez out of her current scrape.
