Before Greenland and Canada, There Was Mexico:  New Historical Mystery Echoes Today’s Headlines

Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 2, 2025: The recent suggestion that the U.S. annex Canada and Greenland sounds strikingly familiar to students of American history. The same argument—that the land masses in question are strategically important and therefore we have a right to them—was used to support the Mexican American War.

Here in New Mexico, the initial 1846 conquest by the American military was bloodless. However, it didn’t remain that way. A violent revolt broke out five months later. Loretta Miles Tollefson’s latest novel, An Unhappy Country, follows the occupation and rebellion through the fictional eyes of Jessie Milbank, the daughter of an American trader. Jessie has been in Santa Fe two years and loves her adopted home. AThere are so many things in Santa Fe which are your favorite,@ a friend teases her, and Jessie only smiles. AI plan to collect even more of them,@ she says.

A few days after the U.S. Army arrives, Jessie and her friends stumble upon a dead Mexican in the Santa Fe plaza. When yet another man dies after leaving a mysterious message, she begins to suspect the killings are linked to resistance to the American forces.

There definitely is resistance. American-appointed Governor Charles Bent has the ringleaders arrested in December 1846, but the following month, rebellion breaks out in Taos, and Bent is killed. After the American Army suppresses the revolt at the battle of Taos Pueblo, yet another man is murdered. Jessie is instrumental in making the connection between his death and the earlier ones. Whether the military leadership will do anything about her discovery is another question entirely.

A resident of New Mexico for thirty-five years, Tollefson lives in Santa Fe. Reviewers have called her work a joy to read and lauded her vivid depiction of nineteenth-century New Mexico, her beautiful style, and her attention to historical detail. The Historical Fiction Company has said her books are “a must-read for everybody interested in the rich tapestry of American history and the craft of storytelling.” Her novel There Will Be Consequences was a New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards Finalist and short listed for the 2023 Goethe Late Historical Fiction Award.

An Unhappy Country launches Friday, April 18, 2025 and is available for order wherever books are sold.

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Book Details: An Unhappy Country, Palo Flechado Press, ISBN: 978-1952026126, $18.99 paperback, $5.99 ebook. Release date: April 18, 2025.

For review copies, contact Loretta Miles Tollefson, Loretta@LorettaMilesTollefson.com, 575-776-7703

Social Media: www.facebook.com/LorettaMilesTollefson/, or @nmreader.bsky.social

Media Kit: LorettaMilesTollefson.com/AnUnhappyCountry/MediaKit

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