Misery by Stockade Bay

In the Crisis of 1893, Orcas Island was insignificant in the troubles that gripped the rest of the country. The effects were no less felt there after a push to turn the island into an orchard paradise meant that fruit rotted off the trees when no one was able to buy them. It was the same year Hattie Campbell's worthless husband died. After three years of struggling and no marriage prospects worth considering leaves Hattie caring for an invalid and manipulative mother alone, she makes the audacious decision to put an ad in the Seattle paper. With the Exclusion Act less than a decade old she never imagines a Chinese man named Zhan Tse would answer the ad for a husband. Both of them need a home, but Hattie never realized just how much she would need someone when he finds her brutally attacked under the apple trees that no longer support her.January,1889 Planning to retire from working on her back, Lila Byrne arrives to take up at a quiet house where she can decide what to do after the gold fields of Colorado made her a fortune. What she finds in the walls of the Cimarron Social Club is dire, and not for the lack of customers. All that is a trivial concern when they wake up trapped in a prairie storm to a find a dead woman encased in the ice outside and it's not likely an accident. When Lila finds that wasn't the only woman to die who came to the house and even a stranger comments Lila could be sisters with the dead, trying to stay alive long enough to escape the ice is the only concern.