Acclaimed journalist,podcasterand true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson tells the true story of the scandalous murder investigation that became the inspiration for both Nathaniel HawthorneΓÇÖs The Scarlet Letter and the first true-crime book published in America. On a cold winter day in 1832Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a small New England town. When her troubled past and a secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist minister Reverend Ephraim Avery was uncoveredmore questions emerged. Was SarahΓÇÖs death a suicide…or something much darker? Determined to uncover the real storyVictorian writer Catharine Read Arnold Williams threw herself into the investigation as the trial was unfolding and wrote what many claim to be the first American true-crime narrativeFall River. The murder divided the country and inspired Nathaniel HawthorneΓÇÖs The Scarlet LetterΓÇöbut the reverend was not convictedand questions linger to this day about what really led to Sarah CornellΓÇÖs death. Until now. In The Sinners All Bowacclaimed true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson travels back in time to nineteenth-century small-town Americaemboldened to finish the work Williams started nearly two centuries before. Using modern investigative advancementsΓÇöincluding ΓÇ£forensic knot analysisΓÇ¥ and criminal profiling (which was invented fifty-five years later with Jack the Ripper)ΓÇöDawson fills in the gaps of WilliamsΓÇÖs research to find the truth and bring justice to an unsettling mystery that speaks to our past as well as our presentanchored by three women who subverted the script they were given.