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A Book of Murder and Memory
Murder. Hawaii’s beautiful Hanauma Bay. The suspects: two young mainlanders on their honeymoon. Maryann Acker, a pretty young Mormon woman, is 18. William, just out of prison, is 28. The crime is robbery, ending in a killing. And before the spree is over, another robbery and murder a few days later in California.
In 1982, Linda Spalding, a mainlander herself, living in Hawaii, is chosen as a juror for Maryann’s trial there. Surprisingly the chief witness against Maryann is William, accusing her of shooting their victim. Spalding has reasonable doubts, but on the last day of the trial, she is abruptly dismissed from the jury and Maryann is sentenced to life in prison.
Eighteen years later, Spalding stumbles over the journal she kept during the trial and reads it carefully. Was she right to have doubts? Then she tracks down Maryann, who is still incarcerated.
Linda writes, Maryann answers, and moved by the letter, Linda begins to uncover much more than the answer to the question of Maryann’s guilt or innocence. There’s the bold new friendship frustrated by monitored visits, hard-to-make phone calls and the dehumanizing results of years in prison. But as her understanding of the forces that drove Maryann’s actions grows, Linda finds herself compelled to examine her own past as well as Maryann’s.
"Starred Review. This delicate yet powerful work should find a wide readership." - PW.
This information about Who Named the Knife was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Linda Spalding was born in Kansas and lived in Mexico and Hawaii before immigrating to Canada in 1982. She is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, The Purchase (awarded Canada's Governor General's Literary Award), Daughters of Captain Cook, The Paper Wife, and (with her daughter Esta) Mere. Her nonfiction includes A Dark Place in the Jungle, Riska: Memories of a Dayak Girlhood, and Who Named the Knife. In 2003 Spalding received the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contribution to the Canadian literary community. She lives in Toronto, where she is an editor at Brick magazine.
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