The Sinners All Bow
Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne
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- ¥2,000
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INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER!
One of Amazon’s Best History Books of January
Acclaimed journalist, podcaster, and true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson tells the true story of the scandalous murder investigation that became the inspiration for both Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and the first true-crime book published in America.
On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a small New England town. When her troubled past and a secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist minister Reverend Ephraim Avery was uncovered, more questions emerged. Was Sarah’s death a suicide...or something much darker? Determined to uncover the real story, Victorian writer Catharine Read Arnold Williams threw herself into the investigation as the trial was unfolding and wrote what many claim to be the first American true-crime narrative, Fall River. The murder divided the country and inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter—but the reverend was not convicted, and questions linger to this day about what really led to Sarah Cornell’s death. Until now.
In The Sinners All Bow, acclaimed true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson travels back in time to nineteenth-century small-town America, emboldened to finish the work Williams started nearly two centuries before. Using modern investigative advancements—including “forensic knot analysis” and criminal profiling (which was invented fifty-five years later with Jack the Ripper)—Dawson fills in the gaps of Williams’s research to find the truth and bring justice to an unsettling mystery that speaks to our past as well as our present, anchored by three women who subverted the script they were given.
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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.
