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True Crime Book Club

"The Sinners All Bow" by Kate Winkler Dawson

Acclaimed true crime author and podcaster Dawson, tells the true story behind the inspiration of "A Scarlet Letter." In 1832 Sarah Cornwell was found dead. Was her death a suicide or something darker?

We meet on the third Monday of every month. This will be a great way to discover new and classic True Crime writing.

In August we will read "The Sinners All Bow" by acclaimed true crime author and podcaster Kate Winkler Dawson.

From Amazon.com:

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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