Lizzie Borden should be one of the most fortunate young women in Fall River, Massachusetts. Her wealthy father could easily afford to provide his daughters with fashionable clothes, travel, and a rich, cultured life. Instead, haunted by the ghost of childhood poverty, he forces Lizzie and her sister, Emma, to live frugally, denying them the simplest modern conveniences. Suitors and socializing are discouraged, as her father views all gentleman callers...

In August, 1892 Lizzie Borden is famously charged with the murder of her stepmother and father. It causes a huge media sensation, perhaps the first example of a tabloid court case. But what really happened on that night? Did Lizzie really do it? What happened in her quietly idyllic Massachusetts life that unfurled this chain of events? Did her father's strict hand send her down this treacherous path? Perhaps it is Bridget's influence, the maid that...

In Fall River, Massachusetts, home to New England's infamous Bridgewater Triangle, Tessa must prove her brother innocent of murdering his girlfriend's parents with an axe, a mystery that proves all too close to the Lizzie Borden murders one hundred years earlier.

"This is a retelling of the famous story of Lizzie Borden, charged with killing her father and stepmother with "forty whacks" of a hatchet. Conforti describes the crime, the investigation, and the trial that resulted in her acquittal. He places the trial in the context of the social and cultural climate of late 19th century Fall River, a town made rich by textile factories, most of which were owned by one branch or another of the Bordens', but that...