The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin Author:Robert J. Begiebing In the seventeenth-century records of what is now Exeter, New hampshire, is the account of an unsolved murder. A woman's body, brutally mangled, was in the Piscataqua River. Robert J. Begiebing (the author) happened upon the mystery, began reading everything he could find about it, and became fascinated with what might have happened and with wha... more »t his research revealed about that long-ago time. The more he read, the less valid seemed the customary stereotypes of iron, austere men and dour, straitlaced women that have come down to us as the people of Puritan New England. So he wrote a novel in which a young Englishman sets out to find the murderer and uncovers not only witchcraft, religion, suspicion, and evil, but also excitement, warmth, full-blooded passion, and human desire.« less