Showing results for "Jay" in Murder

Florence Maybrick was the first American woman to be sentenced to death in England - for murdering her husband, a crime she almost certainly didn't commit. Her 1889 trial was presided over by an openly misogynist judge who was later declared incompetent and died in an asylum. Hours before she was to be hanged, Queen Victoria reluctantly commuted her sentence to life in prison. In her opinion, a woman who would commit adultery, as Maybrick had admitted, would also kill her husband. Her children were taken from her; she never saw them again. Her mother worked for years to clear her name.

Forced to come to grips with his understanding of the past - and its implications for the present - Roberts deftly moves between "then" and "now," ignorance and understanding, in honest, confessional prose that places the reader front and center for a true story that, indeed, is far stranger than fiction. Obsessive in nature and elliptical in structure, Roberts' story ultimately inhabits the liminal space between truth and appearances, love and danger, the hunter and the hunted.