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.