One hundred years after a woman is hanged, the search for justice reveals a story of simple faith, obsession, and murder. In 1832, an 18-year-old Frankie Silver was charged with murdering her young husband. In 1833, she became the first woman in the state of North Carolina to be hanged for murder. But was she guilty? More than one hundred years later, Tennessee sheriff Spencer Arrowood is determined to reveal the truth behind this unanswered question. The Ballad of Frankie Silver flawlessly weaves past and present, truth and fiction, folklore and legend in a spellbinding story that sweeps from the drawing rooms of early aristocracy to the ruins of a one-room cabin deep in the Appalachian wilderness. . . from a nineteenth-century courtroom and the infamous Hanging Oak to the cold, bare room where a final jolt for modern justice is delivered.