Now in paperback! *Awarded honors in nonfiction by the Massachusetts Book Award. *A riveting true story of murder, captivity, revenge, and escape Told with narrative skill and exquisite historical detail Massacre on the Merrimack examines a dark period in America's past and the bloody deeds of Hannah Duston, who escaped her Native American captors and returned to her settlement of Haverhill, Massachusetts, with a collection of scalps. Jay Atkinson is the author of eight books. He has written for the New York Times, Boston Globe, Newsday, Men's Health, and Boston Globe magazine. He lives in Methuen, Massachusetts.

Early on March 15, 1697, a band of Abenaki warriors in service to the French raided the English frontier village of Haverhill, Massachusetts. Striking swiftly, the Abenaki killed twenty-seven men, women, and children, and took thirteen captives, including thirty-nine-year-old Hannah Duston and her week-old daughter, Martha. A short distance from the village, one of the warriors murdered the squalling infant by dashing her head against a tree. After a forced march of nearly one hundred miles, Duston and two companions were transferred to a smaller band of Abenaki, who camped on a tiny island located at the junction of the Merrimack and Contoocook Rivers, several miles north of present day Concord, New Hampshire. This was the height of King William's War, both a war of terror and a religious contest, with English Protestantism vying for control of the New World with French Catholicism. After witnessing her infant's murder, Duston resolved to get even. Two weeks into their captivity, Duston and her companions, a fifty-one-year-old woman and a twelve-year-old boy, moved among the sleeping Abenaki with tomahawks and knives, killing two men, two women, and six children. After returning to the bloody scene alone to scalp their victims, Duston and the others escaped down the Merrimack River in a stolen canoe. They braved treacherous waters and the constant threat of attack and recapture, returning to tell their story and collect a bounty for the scalps. Was Hannah Duston the prototypical feminist avenger, or the harbinger of the Native American genocide? In this meticulously researched and riveting narrative, bestselling author Jay Atkinson sheds new light on the early struggle for North America.

On April 1, 1931, newspapers in all parts of the country announced in giant headlines that Knute Rockne had died in a plane crash in Kansas. Who was Rockne, age forty-three, to receive all this attention? As head coach of the Notre Dame football team, he was a celebrity whose face and voice were familiar to millions through magazines, newspapers, and radio. At Notre Dame, he himself had been a great football player. After graduation, he remained to teach chemistry and coach track and football. At thirty, he was named head football coach for the Fighting Irish, and over the next thirteen years, his team went undefeated five times. Rockne coached stars such as George Gipp, one of the most talented men ever to play the game, and the "Four Horsemen," the most famous backfield in football history. He raised the status of the coaching profession and helped develop Notre Dame's nationwide following of millions of Irish and other Catholics, many of whom had never even entered a college classroom. In "Rockne" Jerry Brondfield has recaptured the magnetism that made Rockne great. In this dramatic and peculiarly American story, he shows how a Norwegian immigrant could gain lasting fame as the coach of an American game at a university founded by Frenchmen and associated with the Irish.