In Her Own Hand

By David S Morgan

In September 1842, a New Hampshire inquest ruled that Ada - found dead in her own kitchen room - had murdered herself, "against the peace and dignity of the State."

Then the county changed its mind.

Her husband Nathaniel is indicted, tried before two crowded pews of neighbors, and sentenced to hang - while the State of New Hampshire puts the gallows itself to a vote. He is spared. He is pardoned. He goes west. And the question at the center of the case is never answered, because the woman at the center of the case was never asked.

Nearly two centuries later, Elias arrives to close up his great-aunt's farmhouse and finds what she left him instead of an answer: a manuscript hidden beside the kitchen chimney for generations - a condemned man's account of his life and his great trouble, written in his own hand for the daughters he could no longer raise - and a letter warning him not to believe anyone who tells this story easily.

Every generation of the family has told that winter to suit its needs. Now the telling falls to Elias. Because Nathaniel's manuscript is not the only record the house has kept. Somewhere in its pages of flour and thread and the small economies of a woman's year, Ada kept her own account - and hers is the hand that was never asked to testify.

Drawn from a documented case in the history of New Hampshire - a real death, a real trial, a real referendum on the hangman, and a real memoir written by a condemned man in his cell - In Her Own Hand moves between a nineteenth-century courtroom and a present-day reckoning with what families choose to remember.

A novel about the records we keep, the verdicts we inherit, and who finally holds the pen.

For readers of Geraldine Brooks, Maggie O'Farrell, and Robert Harris's An Officer and a Spy.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H8PV6KGZ
• ISBN13: 9798996991938
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Horizon Echo Publishing
• Length: 308 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"