April 10, 1919. The war in Europe, the Great War, the War to End All Wars, is over - America and her allies have defeated the German forces. The USS Mongolia arrives in Boston carrying nearly 5,000 soldiers and sailors returning from France. Thousands are gathered on Commonwealth Pier to welcome the returning doughboys, dancing, waving flags, singing, and celebrating the safe return of their loved ones. But war changes things. It changes nations, and it changes people, both those who fought and those who waited anxiously back home. One soldier among the thousands arriving in Boston on this day is not joining in the celebrations. He is a young man from Holyoke, Massachusetts. He enlisted out of a sense of duty to his nation, little knowing the pain, the hurt he would suffer. His wounds are not those of gunshots or mustard gas or influenza, they are wounds of the heart and the soul, and they are deep. In Darkest Before Dawn, Book 4 of the Trolley Days Series, Massachusetts author Robert T. McMaster traces the lives of four young people growing up in a time of turmoil and wrenching change for their country, their hometown, and themselves.

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).