Murder Most Civil: A Victorian Mystery
Karen Frisch
ISBN 978-0-9825899-4-6
Publication date: June 15, 2010

In 1860 Boston, Henrietta Newell Cobb is stunned when an abolitionist’s wife claims to be the target of whoever just murdered her husband. Henrietta agrees at her brother Freddy’s request not to notify the police before the woman disappears, even though the decision jeopardizes her own future. After discovering that the murder weapon was a bust of Caesar, Henrietta also learns that the seductive widow has been heaving her own bust at Freddy, a respectably married Harvard professor, with scandalously effective results. As upper class Boston braces for war, Freddy is charged with murder, and Henrietta must call on the botanical expertise of Henry David Thoreau to save him from the hangman.