From Publishers Weekly
Using the notorious Lizzie Borden as one of its characters, this competently written novel is set in a Massachusetts seaside resort three decades after Lizzie has been acquitted of the axe-murder of her father and stepmother. Narrator Amanda Burton recalls the events of the summer when she was 13 and established a friendship with the infamous, ostracized Lizzie, who lived next door. When Amanda awakens one morning to discover that her own dreaded stepmother has been bludgeoned to death, it is to Lizzie that she turns. With the help of some colorful secondary characters--a dapper local lawyer, a well-meaning Pinkerton man, the one-armed police chief who holds a longstanding grudge--Amanda and Lizzie battle the thickets of small-town prejudice and innuendo to uncover the murderer, though Miss Lizzie herself remains everyone's favorite suspect. Though Satterthwait ( Wall of Glass ) is sometimes clumsy in his effort to evoke the atmosphere of the 1920s and its flapper culture, he delivers an entertaining amalgam of memoir-cum-murder mystery that rehabilitates (however improbably) the reputation of a woman who has become an enduring legend. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book Description
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.

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 30 years before, when her own parents were viciously murdered.

FROM THE CRITICS

Tom Nolan