Walter Satterthwait: Miss Lizzie

Walter Satterthwait: Miss Lizzie (USA 2012)

From the Publisher:
A girl's stepmother is murdered, and only Lizzie Borden can find the killer
During the summer of 1921, a strange spinster rents the seaside cottage next door to Amanda Burton and her family. The new neighbor dresses in black, does card tricks, and reminisces about a long-ago trip to Paris. Her name is Lizzie Borden, and two decades earlier she was acquitted of one of the most notorious crimes in American history. Although her stepmother warns her to stay away, Amanda has no patience for her father's doughy wife, and befriends their infamous neighbor. When tragedy strikes the seaside town, Miss Lizzie is the only one who can help.

Amanda finds her stepmother hacked to pieces in her blood-soaked bed. The police suspect Miss Borden, but Amanda knows her new friend is innocent. As the township closes ranks, Miss Lizzie and Amanda hunt for the real killer. Guilty or innocent, Lizzie Borden does not go down without a fight.

Walter Satterthwait: Miss Lizzie. mysteriouspress.com, ISBN: 9781453251249 (April, 2012), 531 KB, ca. 346 p., $.9.99.

Walter Satterthwait: Miss Lizzie (USA 2000)

From the Publisher:
When her neighbor is brutally hacked to death, the infamous Lizzie Borden becomes the prime suspect. In her search for the real killer, she uncovers not only the secrets that lie beneath the sleepy surface of a small seaside town, but finally the truth of what happened thirty years before, when her own parents were viciously murdered.

Walter Satterthwait: Miss Lizzie. Backinprint.com; ISBN: 0595007945 (September, 2000), 352 p., $20.95..

Walter Satterthwait: Miss Lizzie (USA 1991)

From the Publisher:
A CHARMING NOVEL ABOUT AN AX MURDER
In 1893 a jury in Fall River, Massachusetts, acquitted Miss Elizabeth Borden of the brutal ax murder of her father and her stepmother. To this day the case has no official solution.

The year is 1921. Women have received the right to vote, prohibition has become the law of the land, and a generation has passed since the horror in Fall River. Even though she was found not guilty, the entire nation suspects that Lizzie Borden was responsible for the unsolved crime.

Amanda Burton is an inquisitive thirteen-year-old. During her summer vacation along the Massachusetts shore, young Amanda befriends her elderly next-door neighbor -- the notorious Lizzie Borden. When Amanda discovers the remains of her own stepmother, who has been hideously slain, her secure world is instantly turned upside down. The police, however, are certain they know the culprit: Miss Lizzie -- especially since the savage crime bears an uncanny resemblance to the Fall River tragedy.

"[a] charming period-piece... Walter Satterthwait constructs an entertaining narrative that mixes 1921 New England ambience, budding romance, bareknuckle fisticuffs and a suitably spooky finale." -- Tom Nolan, The New York Times Book Review

Walter Satterthwait: Miss Lizzie. A Novel. International Polygonics, Mister E's Library of Crime Classics, ISBN: 1558820744 (January, 1991), 342 p., $8.95.

Walter Satterthwait: Miss Lizzie (USA 1989)

From the Publisher:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
and gave her mother forty whacks,
and when she saw what she had done,
she gave her father forty-one.

Difficult it would have been, however, not to notice Miss Lizzie. She was, for one thing, our nearest neighbor. She rented the white clapboard cottage next to ours, and every morning from the parlor I would watch her bustle down the steps and across the small sandy yard, tufted with weed, to the gate of the picket fence. She would unlatch the gate, slip through ft, then turn and latch it once more, carefully, deliberately, like someone who took care against intruders. And then she would set on down the street, a short squarish figure, her hands folded into the sleeves of her black dress, her purse hanging from her forearm like a padlock. She moved with her shoulders hunched and bent slightly forward, leaning into a private wind, and she wore her black, I thought, almost proudly: as though it were a uniform, as though she were on march.

For another thing, of course, she was notorious. I doubt there was a single child in all New England, in all the country, who had not heard the famous bit of doggerel about her and the axe. I remember my disbelief, and my secret thrill of excitement, when Father revealed to me that, yes, the woman next door was indeed that Lizzie, the woman who had been toed, almost thirty years before, for the awful murder of her parents. And had been found, he added gravely, pointedly, not guilty.

Jacket by Doris Borowsky
Jacket illustration by John Nickle

Walter Satterthwait: Miss Lizzie. Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her neighbor forty whacks... Or did she? St. Martin's Press, ISBN: 0312034008 (August, 1989), 342 p., $17.95.