Miss Lizzie - Walter Satterthwait

The notorious Lizzie Borden investigates a brutal axe-murder that's strangely reminiscent of her own alleged crimes in this "entertaining" historical novel (The New York Times).

It has been thirty years since a Massachusetts jury acquitted Lizzie Borden of brutally murdering her father and stepmother. Now, at the start of the 1920s, she's an aging spinster living a quiet, secluded life by the New England seashore.

Young Amanda Burton has heard all the stories, but nothing can dissuade her from spending time with the lonely old woman next door who shows her card tricks and smells of cigars. At age thirteen, Amanda's been left to her own devices during a rather dull and swelteringly summer-long family vacation, and Miss Lizzie is the perfect distraction.

But when Amanda stumbles upon her own despised stepmother's corpse, the brutal crime seems eerily similar to a certain double axe-slaying in Fall River three decades earlier. Naturally the whole town immediately suspects Lizzie. The local police, though, are open-minded enough to consider Amanda's brother and father to be viable suspects as well.

To help her young friend and clear her own name (again), Lizzie must sharpen her sleuthing skills to find a fiendish killer with an axe to grind.