Wolves Against the Moon

Romance, intrigue, business rivalry, and the history of settling the Northwest frontier is all combined in this unique historical fiction novel.

Wolves Against the Moon is the story of an adventurous Frenchman on the old Northwest frontier, Joseph Bailly, (based in part on the brief family chronicle by Joseph Bailly's granddaughter, Frances R. Howe, The Story of a French Homestead) as well as references in early documents.

Julia Cooley Altrocchi took this scant biographical material and expanded and cast it in the form of a novel. The period spans those treacherous years between 1794 and 1812, when the borderland between Canada and the new territories of the United States shifted from French to English to American dominance, with the Indians still struggling to maintain possession.

This story starts with a New Year's Eve Ball in Quebec, where we meet Joseph Bailly, yearning for the adventures and freedom of the wilds, and the French temptress who got into his blood and poisoned it for years, and the ambitious, unscrupulous trader who became Joseph's bitterest enemy. It is a dramatic story that unfolds, shifting from Quebec to Mackinac Island to the Indiana and Michigan territories to New Orleans and Baton Rouge. There is tragedy-there is romance-and one can feel themselves transported back in time by this fast-paced novel.