| Vendor | |
|---|---|
|
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
| Original language | |
| English | |
| Categories | |
| Weblink | |
| http://www.gooselane.com/books.p … | |
THE BALLAD OF JACOB PECK
When a man kills in the name of God, who is to blame?
On a frigid February evening in 1805, Amos Babcock brutally murdered Mercy Hall. Believing that he was being instructed by God, Babcock stabbed and disembowelled his own sister, before dumping her lifeless body in a rural New Brunswick snowbank.
The Ballad of Jacob Peck is the tragic and fascinating story of how isolation, duplicity, and religious mania turned one man violent, leading to a murder and an execution. Babcock was hanged for the murder of his sister, but in her meticulously researched book, Debra Komar shows that itinerant preacher Jacob Peck should have swung right beside him. The mystery lies not in the whodunit, but rather in a lingering question: should Jacob Peck, whose incendiary sermons directly contributed to the killing, have been charged with the murder of Mercy Hall?
In this epic saga, media accounts of what happened in the aftermath of the murder have taken on a life all their own, one built of half-truths, conjecture, and narrative devices designed to titillate, if not inform.
An investigation of a crime from the Canadian frontier, the tale of Jacob Peck, Amos Babcock, and Mercy Hall remains as controversial and riveting today as it was more than two hundred years ago.
Debra Komar has worked as a forensic anthropologist in the US, UK, and Canada for over twenty years. She has investigated human-rights violations resulting in violent deaths for the United Nations and Physicians for Human Rights, testified as an expert witness in The Hague and across North America, and authored the authoritative Forensic Anthropology: Contemporary Theory and Practice for Oxford University Press.
The Ballad of Jacob Peck is the tragic and fascinating story of how isolation, duplicity, and religious mania turned one man violent, leading to a murder and an execution. Babcock was hanged for the murder of his sister, but in her meticulously researched book, Debra Komar shows that itinerant preacher Jacob Peck should have swung right beside him. The mystery lies not in the whodunit, but rather in a lingering question: should Jacob Peck, whose incendiary sermons directly contributed to the killing, have been charged with the murder of Mercy Hall?
In this epic saga, media accounts of what happened in the aftermath of the murder have taken on a life all their own, one built of half-truths, conjecture, and narrative devices designed to titillate, if not inform.
An investigation of a crime from the Canadian frontier, the tale of Jacob Peck, Amos Babcock, and Mercy Hall remains as controversial and riveting today as it was more than two hundred years ago.
Debra Komar has worked as a forensic anthropologist in the US, UK, and Canada for over twenty years. She has investigated human-rights violations resulting in violent deaths for the United Nations and Physicians for Human Rights, testified as an expert witness in The Hague and across North America, and authored the authoritative Forensic Anthropology: Contemporary Theory and Practice for Oxford University Press.
| Available products |
|---|
|
Book
Published 2013-03-26 by Goose Lane |
|
Book
Published 2013-03-26 by Goose Lane |