True crime is not my genre, generally, but the link to the Scarlet Letter got my attention and I wanted to give this a try.

Dawson unearths a notorious murder trial from Fall River MA in 1833 and reexamines the court proceedings, the evidence, and the lives of victim and accused. She brings in a forensics expert to review the testimony related to physical evidence, and a handwriting expert to evaluate relevant letters. In addition, she reviews the statements and attitudes of Catharine Williams, who wrote a book about the case while it was happening, which is credited as being the first 'true crime' book.
In the process, she discusses in heartbreaking detail the first-ever blame-the-victim defense, in which defense attorneys marshalled dozens of witnesses to testify under oath (apparently falsely) to the extremely bad character of Sarah Cornell. We are fortunate that those kinds of things are becoming less permissible today in courts of law.

I agree with her conclusions, which I won't spoil here but are not a surprise given the evidence. She also ends up agreeing with Williams despite her biases and fudging of evidence. While I found the discussion of 19th century Methodism rather uninteresting, Dawson is making a case that religious prejudice was involved and that the witnesses were gathered to malign the victim from people who would see defending a minister as defending their religious choice; this case is totally circumstantial, I might add.

My problems with the book come from the Scarlet Letter tie-in. I have read that book two or three times, although it's been fifteen years or so since my last reading, and I do not see that the parallels are that strong. Evidently Hawthorne was interested in the Cornell case, and got the germ of his idea for his book from it. That seems to be as far as it goes, and I found the repeated attempts to liken Cornell and Hester Prynne unconvincing. I do not see Arthur Dimmesdale and Ephraim Avery as similar characters in any way. Ephraim Avery was an actual rapist who abused his authority over his female congregants, and was also married, while I never felt that Dimmesdale was anything worse than weak - Hester came to him when she was vulnerable, but in the end I felt that they actually cared for one another, he did not appear to be manipulating her to protect himself, and he was burdened with feelings of guilt that appear never to have crossed Avery's mind. Not to mention he would never have actually killed Hester. This totally did not work for me.

There was one place where I got the feeling Dawson was mixing Congregational and Episcopal adherents or equating them; maybe they were both 'establishment' religions in 19th century New England, but they were not the same thing. Evidently Catharine Williams was Episcopalian and the economic elite who owned the mills were Congregational, at least according to this book, but that does not mean their attitudes and interests would have been perfectly aligned. If you're going to repeatedly throw those terms around, you should make clear what you mean and why it matters.

On the whole, this book will be interesting to true-crime history buffs, but I hope people who do not know The Scarlet Letter do not assume these two stories are the same.

Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read an advance copy of this book. Hope they give it one more good copyedit!