The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne

Historian Dawson (American Sherlock) aims in this engrossing account to solve the murder that inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Catherine Read Williams’s Fall River, which was published in 1833 and is claimed by some to be America’s first true crime book. In 1832, pregnant 30-year-old Sarah Maria Cornell was found hanged in the small town of Fall River, Mass. Before she died, Cornell had written a cryptic note urging whoever found it to seek out Methodist minister Ephraim Avery if anything happened to her. Using Williams’s reporting on Avery’s subsequent murder trial and the turmoil it caused among Fall River’s devout residents, Dawson attempts to piece together the truth, speculating about an alleged affair between Avery and Cornell and whether Cornell’s death was suicide or murder. Warring religious sects, wild rumors of promiscuity, and Williams’s own biases all color Dawson’s conclusions, which are more complicated than a simple rebuttal to Avery’s acquittal. Breakneck pacing, a novelist’s gift for scene-setting, and an edifying analysis of the overlap between the Cornell case and Hawthorne’s novel make this a home run. Readers will be rapt. Agent: Jessica Papin, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Jan.)