[In Lizzie] Hunter has … produced a hybrid work that is not successful as a novel and only partially convincing as a detective story. Using the actual transcripts of the inquest and Lizzie Borden's trial in August 1892, he intersperses fictional flashbacks to Lizzie's trip to Europe two years previously, and comes up with a provocative theory to explain both the motivations and circumstances under which the murders were committed. The contrast between the actual and the invented material is so acute, however, that it is almost like reading two different books that do not fuse. Hunter's account of Lizzie's trip abroad amounts to a travelogue of London, Paris and the Riviera, full of local color and period details but written in the style of a campy gothic novel. This florid prose jars with the flat, factual nature of the inquest and trial testimony, retarding dramatic tension until the very...