Overview

In the southern Maryland hamlet of Friendship, a young wife and mother is found brutally murdered, her head bashed in with a crude implement. The Farmer's Wife-by Carol Booker, author of the best-selling The Waterman's Widow-suspensefully describes both crime and punishment, recovering the narrative from contemporary newspaper accounts and other archival sources. From the nerve-testing tension of suspicion, trial, conviction, redemption and retribution, readers get welcome breaks in interludes describing the tenor of the times. Slavery has forged allegiances in a nation still healing from Civil War. Even religious alliances have been affected. Nature shapes the spring of 1877 even more intimately, after perhaps the harshest winter in memory. Southern Maryland is still a practical frontier of frost-pitted roads, subsistence farming, indentured servitude, insecure jails, primitive forensics and not-infrequent lynching. But lawyers are clever, and the wit-twisting back and forth of prosecution and defense leaves the outcome as uncertain for readers as it must have been for the avid trial-followers of a century and a half ago.

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Reviews

In 1877, a murder was committed in a small field in the southern Maryland village of Friendship. Who would want to kill a young mother who had just picked a basket of spring cabbage leaves to cook for her husband and children? In her inimitable way, author Carol Booker's delves into the events surrounding this devastating crime. Renown for her book The Waterman's Widow, Booker has produced another true-crime, local-history page turner. The Farmer's Wife will surely become another favorite for book groups. -Joan Kilmon, Retired Calvert Librarian Amazing work! As in The Waterman's Widow, the history of Maryland-and in fact the entire United States in the second half of the 1800s-is perfectly told in The Farmer's Wife. For many, history seems boring and daunting. Both books bring history to life and accessible to every day people who otherwise might be nervous to pick up a book so well researched. I loved it! -Adam Tremper, Spooky Solomons Carol Booker's writing brings alive the social and political climate of the Maryland Chesapeake Bay region in 1877. Her latest book vividly recounts the shocking murder of a farmer's wife and subsequent legal process to bring the murderer to justice. She pulled me back in time, brought history to life and helped me better see the roots of current events. Highly recommended for fans of true crime and/or local history. Until reading The Farmer's Wife, I didn't know my quiet village of Friendship had such a brutal crime in its past! -Connie Trent, Anne Arundel County Library Assistant

Author Information

Carol. Booker is a graduate of the City University of New York and Georgetown University Law Center. As a journalist, Booker's beat ran from civil rights to the Nigerian civil war. She worked as a writer/editor/reporter for the Voice of America, and freelanced in Africa for Westinghouse (Group W) Broadcasting, covering the Nigerian Civil War and other stories in ten African nations. Her articles and/or photography have also been published in The Washington Post, and Ebony and Jet magazines. After graduation from GeorgetownUniversity law school, she became legal counsel to public and international broadcasting entities, the environmental giant Greenpeace, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She is a (retired) Member of the Bar of the District of Columbia, the State of Maryland, and the Supreme Court of the United States.

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