The Maiden

Edinburgh, 1679. Lady Christian is arrested for the murder of her lover, James Forrester. The broadsides carry the news of her imprisonment and trial under three words: Adulteress. Whore. Murderess. Few readers of those pages doubt her guilt.

A year earlier she was newly married and living a respectable life of privilege. The book asks what drove her to risk all of that for an affair, and whether the affair makes her a killer.

Forrester had other women in his life. Christian may not be the only one with a reason to want him dead, and that possibility sits at the center of the case.

The novel is historical crime fiction with a feminist, revisionist slant, built around a trial and an investigation. It draws on a real murder trial and puts women history has forgotten at the center of the story. Christian's own voice opens with the admission that nothing she said at her trial made any difference.