Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one. Or did she?

Lizzie was charged with the August 1892 murders, tried in a court of law, and acquitted, but the court of public opinion convicted her anyway and for the rest of her life she was hated, feared, reviled, and shunned. But what if she really was innocent?

What if, in May 1927, with Lizzie near death, Emma, Lizzie's older sister, breaks decades of silence and grants a lengthy interview to an eager young reporter from the Boston Globe? What if in that interview Emma reveals what really happened that terrible August morning thirty-five years earlier? Her story connects the known facts of the case with a few previously unknown to expose a complex web of greed, petty jealousies, infidelity, loneliness, cruelty, betrayal, and several serious mistakes in judgment.

This novel answers the prosecution's central question, "If not Lizzie, then who?" At that point only one question remains. Why was Emma's story never published?