Lizzie Borden: A Novel of the Fall River Murders and Trial That Divided America

Two bodies. An hour and a half between them. One woman in the house. And not a drop of blood on her dress.Fall River, Massachusetts. August 4, 1892. A Thursday of suffocating heat. In a narrow house on Second Street, a house without hallways and with every door locked, Andrew Borden and his wife, Abby, are found hacked to death. Only two other people were at home: the Irish maid, who was washing the windows, and the younger daughter, Lizzie Borden, thirty-two, a Sunday-school teacher and a respectable lady of the town.Ten months later, in a New Bedford courtroom, the whole nation waits for the verdict.This novel reconstructs the case from the inside. It alternates the morning of the murders, told minute by minute, with the trial of June 1893, told witness by witness. The story is carried by those who were there: the maid, the neighbor, the doctor with the morphine, the officer who found the handleless hatchet, the friend who watched a dress burn, the prosecutors, and the defense. Only one person is never given a voice: the accused.- Built on the trial testimony, the secret inquest, the autopsies, and the newspapers of the day.- A mirror structure: what the witnesses lived through, set against what they swore to on the stand.- An Author's Note that separates the documented from the imagined.If the case has gripped you on screen, here is what was really said in that courtroom, and what was never known. When you close the book, the verdict will be yours.