The Dyeing Room

Spring - 1917. War is raging in Europe and America has just cast its lot against the German war machine. Back home, the nation is reeling with social strife: workers marching for their rights, immigrants demanding fair treatment, suffragettes clamoring for the vote. In Holyoke, Massachusetts, seventeen-year-old Jack Bernard has a new job at one of the city's largest textile mills, hoping to save money for college. Meanwhile, his friend, Tom Wellington, appears to have taken control of his demons and set himself on a new course. Soon the lives of both young men, their families and friends, will be torn asunder by forces and events far beyond their control. The Dyeing Room, Book 2 of the Trolley Days Series, is an absorbing blend of adventure, mystery, and romance populated with characters so life-like they seem to leap from the pages and materialize before our very eyes. Readers young and old will be captivated by this story from a century past, the world of our forebears, an era that, however distant, still speaks to us across the generations. Robert T. McMaster grew up in Southbridge, Massachusetts. He completed his undergraduate education at Clark University, then earned graduate degrees from Boston College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts. Early in his career he taught middle school science, then worked as an administrator for several environmental education organizations. After completing his graduate studies, he taught biology at Holyoke Community College in Holyoke, Massachusetts, for twenty years.The nineteen-teens have long interested Robert McMaster. He found inspiration in his parents' reminiscences of growing up in that era, particularly his father's stories of riding the streetcars that plied city streets and country roads in those days. Those stories led to his first novel, Trolley Days, published in 2012, then The Dyeing Room (2013), Noah's Raven (2017), and Darkest Before Dawn (2022). The series follows the lives of four young people growing up in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in the tumultuous World War I era (www.TrolleyDays.net).Robert McMaster's fascination with Edward Hitchcock (1793-1864), renowned American geologist and paleontologist, began when he visited the Pratt Museum of Natural History at Amherst College over half a century ago. In 2014, while doing research for one of his novels, he discovered to his great surprise that there had never been a biography written of Hitchcock. In 2021 he published All the Light Here Comes from Above: The Life and Legacy of Edward Hitchcock. More than a century-and-a-half after his death, the story of one of nineteenth-century America's most influential scientists at last had been told (www.EdwardHitchcock.com).The author's ancestral ties to Ireland led him to undertake another project, the County Wicklow Mystery Series including Rose of Glenkerry and Fugitive from Injustice, stories of mystery and romance set against the stunning backdrop of Ireland's County Wicklow (www.WicklowMysteries.com).