Kirkus Review
A summons to a long-delayed execution--Fate Harkryder, the condemned man he arrested 20 years ago, has reached the end of his appeals--sends Tennessee sheriff Spencer Arrowood back in time over 150 years to the case of Frankie Silver, the teenaged bride and mother who was hanged in North Carolina in 1832 for killing her husband with an ax, dismembering his body, and burning it in front of their baby daughter in their one-room cabin (an outrage that turned the locals against her more powerfully than the murder itself). Spencer has been haunted for years by Frankie's true-life case--a painful example, from arrest and trial to appeal and execution, of upper-class justice inflicted on a lower-class defendant--but even he wonders what possible connection this cause célèbre can have to the even more sordid case of Harkryder, convicted of robbing, raping, and killing a pair of young lovers hiking the Appalachian Trail. As he delves more deeply into Frankie Silver's story--presented here through the eyes of court clerk Burgess GaitherSpencer comes ever closer to the last secret the doomed murderer took to her grave, while realizing that that knowledge may leave him as powerless to help Fate Harkryder as to mitigate the law for Frankie Silver herself. Though the weight of the evidence sifted makes this in some ways the most impressive of McCrumb's acclaimed Ballad series (The Rosewood Casket, 1996, etc.), the burden of numberless names, relations, pasts, and futures, which make the point about class justice a hundred times over, eventually sinks the modern-day narrative in conscientious local history. (Literary Guild selection; Mystery Guild main selection; author tour)
Booklist Review
McCrumb's popular series of mysteries based on Appalachian history continues with this compelling saga of parallel murder cases, one drawn from real life, the other fictional. The story of Frankie Silver, the first woman in North Carolina to be hanged for murder, has long fascinated McCrumb, and here she puts her years of research to good use. Tennessee Sheriff Spencer Arrowood becomes obsessed with the Silver case when he's summoned to attend the execution of Lafayette "Fate" Harkryder, whom Arrowood helped convict of murdering two college students on the Appalachian Trail decades ago. Now Arrowood, older and less sure of himself, isn't so confident about the guilty verdict and finds striking similarities between Fate, a dirt-poor Tennessean, and Frankie Silver, a Carolina mountain girl hanged for killing and dismembering her husband in 1832. Circumstantial evidence convicted both of them, and though both pleaded not guilty, they refused to tell their versions of what happened rather than implicate other family members. McCrumb jumps effectively between both stories, interlacing first-person testimony from Frankie and others involved in her trial with a third-person narrative set in the present. The two stories mesh evocatively in the defiant refusal to speak of both Frankie and Fate. "Die with it in you," Frankie's father shouts as she stands on the gallows, and his words continue to echo, as silence remains the last resort of the powerless. A poignant melding of history, Appalachian folklore, and human emotion. (Reviewed April 15, 1998)0525939695Bill Ott
