Katie Letcher Lyle

You win a few, you lose a few. Very bizarre book. It is a mixture of history based on records from the time, and interspersed with the facts are things people might have said, according to the author's information. Some people might like this format, but I absolutely did not. I even got to the point where I was skimming the imaginary conversations and reiminisces just to find the factual material. If you're into true crime, ghost stories or a good historical account, skip this one and go on to another choice. I was SO disappointed I felt cheated.

Here's the basic outline. 1897 in Greebriar County WV, a young girl is discovered to be dead at the foot of her stairs. Some time later her mother reported that her daughter's ghost came to visit her several times to tell her that she was murdered by husband. Zona Heaster Shue was the dead girl; her husband was Trout Shue. According to the author's fictional conversation between Trout Shue and another party (47), the man boasted that he planned to live long enough to marry seven wives. So -- he did have a history with two women before Zona, but no one knew this in the area up to the time Zona had died. The short story here, folks, is that the mother's story of ghostly visitations and eyewitness accounts of the state of the body in the coffin and other things (like Trout not going through the undertaker but putting his wife in her coffin himself after dressing her himself, etc etc) led the DA of the time to open up an investigation and did up the body.

So...here's the deal. Lyle gives the reader only a few facts to go with her, for the simple reason that there weren't very many REAL facts about either the case or the trial. She gives us "what might have been" looks into both. There are no transcripts, there are few court records, and she goes on a lot of hearsay and a lot of newspaper articles as her sources. I wouldn't really call this "history" in its truest since. She should have probably just made a novel out of this, interweaving the real with the fictional, instead of setting up her book to have fictional parts and real parts. It didn't work for me.

Sorry...I'd love to recommend the book, but I cannot.… (more)