Search - Ballad of Frankie Silver

If you like Sharyn McCrumb, you will like this book. If you've never read her, she is a good mystery writer who often uses great historical themes, as in this book.

Told in alternating view points this book weaves the past and present, truth and fiction, folklore and legend, that sweeps from the drawing rooms of early aristocarcy to the ruins of a one room cabin in the Appalachian wilderness. A novel of simple faith and blind truth. By one of America's finest story tellers.

Once there was a murder done. It is a legend that has been told through the generations, a story rooted in a lonely churchyard in the shadow of three uncarved tombstones..in a secret buried deep in the white silence of the winter of 1832, and deeper still in the heart of a poor moutain girl accused of a terrible crime. Spencer Arrowood was a young untried deputy sheriff when his testimony helped convict a Tennessee youth for the brutal slaying of two hikers along the Appalachian Trail. Now twenty years later, Spencer receives an invitaion to an execution. After two decades on death row, a date has fianally been set to strap Fate Harkryder into the chair and throw the switch. But time has eroded Spencer's moral certainity of guilt and raised the specter of another murder. Pver a century ago, it is said that a man was murdered in his sleep, that a young wife and mother was accused of the crime and that on the gallows her last words were silenced by her Father's order. In 1833 Frankie Silver became the first woman in North Carolina to be hanged for murder. But what really happened so long ago becomes an obsession for Spencer Arrowood as the parallels between Frankie and Fate, between two crimes more than a hunderd years apart, become as clear-and as shocking-as the single truth that joins two condemned souls. Suddenly Spencer Arrowood is emgaged in a race against time to keep history from happening all over again, and to save the life of a man who just may be innocent after all. Another great book by an author who can take you into the mountain lore and past .

This book has some surprising twists.