The Allards Book Eight: The Chief
At the end of the 19th century, Moses Allard’s first born son, Diddy, dies, but not before leaving a lifelong impression on his younger brother, Abe, who grows up preferring fishing, duck hunting and ice boating to the family farm. Marrying a girl from another early French farming family, Abe joins the police at the onset of WWI where he cuts his teeth on the early days of Prohibition and Detroit’s infamous Purple Gang.
Abe’s only child, Gladys, is raised by a father who desperately longs for a son as the lakeside farming community enters the age of suburbia. Marrying and starting her own family, she lives in an exciting era encompassing Prohibition, the Great Depression, two world wars and the emergence of Detroit as the Motor City.
The last in a series of eight historical novels, The Chief continues to bring history to life through the eyes of one family and to be for French-Canadians what Roots is to African-Americans, but readers need not have French-Canadian heritage or be from Detroit to love these books.