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The Murder of Cora Sweet
332 pages, Paperback
Published September 19, 2025
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September 29, 2025
I rate The Murder of Cora Sweet, to be a 5/5 read not because I've met the author personally but this book belongs in every high school and college for study and research papers development. This author is a new voice and she's powerful. Will add icon soon to review page. I do not have an editor. One day I would love one.
Henry Waverly Manzer, Oswego’s notorious killer who murdered 12 year old Cora Sweet in 1905, was not born a monster. He was a born to parents Waverly and Lydia Manzer. This review will bring light that he was made into a monster by circumstances, choice, and the collapse of an unsteady foundation. From the very beginning of the narrative, hereditary emerges as one of the central forces that shapes henry’s life. His birth is marked by complication and we see his father Waverly Manzer already revealing the volatility and cruelty that would shape the family environment. I believe when Lydia threw the alcohol on Waverly while he was having a heartattack is how I understood the scene, Henry was ruined because he didn’t really see his mother have emotion. He witnessed the death of his father. Lydia was only trying to get her husband to snap out of his rage. What I love about Hickey is that after reading Girl in the Glass Coffin, she is no stranger to making the reader feel uncomfortable and in a good way. Waverly set the tone for his son growing up in violence, instability, and the inheritance of shadow.
Henry was not biologically designed to kill the way that the trial case tried proving insanity. The medical examinations showed no abnormality, no lesion, no physiological marker of monstrosity. Instead what Henry inherited was a fractured legacy. Alcoholism, abuse, and volatility became the building blocks of Henry’s uneven castle. I also feel that the orphanage sealed the deal for Henry’s narcissism. True narcissism is behavior that shows no remorse for their consequences. We can agree that a child’s life is built brick by brick. When that foundation gets cracked by cruelty, the child is forever altered. I find it 100% fascinating how some people who go through trauma, go to one end of the extreme, repeating those behaviors, and then those who go through similar traumatic experiences, their consciousness remains intact. Hickey shows us a Henry raised in instability, neglected by a father whose tyranny set the tone for violence. The hereditary dimension of his life is not a matter of destiny, but of architecture: a blueprint written in shadows, waiting for the cracks to show.
Environment compounded these hereditary shadows. Hickey describes a rural Oswego County that could be nurturing, but for Henry it became isolating. He grew up in a community that knew his family’s volatility and whispered about it. This environment did not give support that Henry needed and little compassion was given, The pivotal turning point is when Henry stays at the orphanage and meets Arthur and Frida. Both shape Henry into a boy who learned arrogance as armor. Love was withheld and he was seen as a project. By the time he reached young adulthood, his environment had hardened into both familiarity and alienation: he was known, but not trusted. He wore his arrogance like the red rose pinned to his lapel at trial a symbol of performance, of composure masking hollowness. This review isn't putting the blame on anyone specifically it's interesting learning where the mind of killers form. The emotional dysregulation of his mother abandoning him, I feel altered his soul. Where in Girl in the Glass Coffin the mother was seen grieving truly grieving. Henry's mother grieves because of shame by society.
Neglect cemented what heredity and environment had begun. Henry’s father’s cruelty, his family’s inability to provide stability, and the community’s unwillingness to intervene created a boy who carried resentment, arrogance, and detachment into adulthood. Hickey’s narrative reveals the consequences of neglect most clearly in the murder itself. Henry intercepted Cora Sweet on an ordinary walk, lured her away from the road, and turned a neighborly encounter into brutality. The ordinariness of the meeting becomes horrifying in Hickey’s retelling: monstrosity erupted not from madness but from the cultivated arrogance of a man who had been neglected into hollowness. This distinction is crucial. At trial, Henry’s attorney David Morehouse argued insanity. He claimed heredity epilepsy, alcoholism and argued that Henry’s crime emerged from a defective brain.
Henry himself dismantled the defense with his own words: “I’m not crazy and I never was! I’m no crazier than you are!” This outburst, delivered in frustration, contradicted his attorney and sealed the prosecution’s case. District Attorney William Baker emphasized deliberation: Henry intercepted Cora, lured her away, struck her with a stone, and attempted to conceal the crime. These were acts of choice, not madness. The medical testimony and Henry’s own arrogance aligned. He was sane, deliberate, and hollow. Hickey’s refusal to glamorize Henry is what makes her book so haunting. She records his arrogance, his calmness in prison, his quoting of scripture without weight, and his refusal to name Cora in his final words. She refuses to offer him redemption or even fascination. In this, Hickey centers the victim, reminding readers that true crime must remember the lost, not the arrogant. This is why the book leaves readers hollow. The expectation of resolution that the execution will bring peace is denied. Mrs. Sweet continued to lay flowers in her daughter’s stone hand daily. Lydia Manzer continued to bear the stigma of being mother to a murderer. The community continued to whisper the story as warning and spectacle. Justice was delivered, but grief endured.
Hickey closes her book with Cora’s monument, not Henry’s grave. The flowers persist, the grief endures, and the hollowness remains. That hollowness is the lesson Hickey insists upon. It is the mirror trauma illusion the fairytale castle crumbling into reality, the illusion of justice dissolving into the persistence of grief. When students or scholars read this book, they are forced to look into that mirror, to see that monstrosity is not distant or spectacular but ordinary and cultivated. It forces recognition that environment, heredity, and neglect can fracture any foundation, and that arrogance can turn those fractures into violence.
This recognition is why the book belongs in classrooms. For high school students, it functions as summer reading that unsettles and provokes reflection. Unlike sanitized moral tales, Hickey’s narrative forces students to see how violence grows from neglect and arrogance, not from destiny or madness. It challenges them to ask why communities fail to intervene, why families bear burdens unequally, and why justice does not always heal. For college students, the book serves as a multidisciplinary case study. Criminology students can analyze the insanity defense and its collapse. Psychology students can examine Henry’s calmness as a defense mechanism. Literature students can compare Hickey’s narrative to Capote, March, and Dostoevsky, seeing how true crime functions as both history and literature. Comparisons sharpen this analysis.
The hollowness of Hickey’s book is its greatest strength. It teaches empathy by refusing comfort. It teaches critical thinking by denying easy answers. It teaches humility . This is why every high school student should read it for summer assignments and why college professors should assign it for case studies. The story is not entertainment but based on truth. It reflects society’s failures, families’ burdens, and communities’ responsibilities. By the end, Hickey leaves readers staring at a crumbling castle. What appeared to be ordinary life in rural Oswego collapsed into violence. What appeared to be justice dissolved into grief.
What appeared to be repentance was revealed as hollow arrogance. Brick by brick, Hickey dismantles illusions until readers are left with the unsteady foundation of trauma and monstrosity. Looking into this mirror is not comfortable, but it is necessary.
The Murder of Cora Sweet left me hollow because it revealed that justice does not restore and grief does not end. It showed that monstrosity is not born but cultivated, built brick by brick on foundations already cracked by heredity, environment, and neglect. It showed that arrogance can mask hollowness until the very end, and that victims’ families endure grief long after perpetrators are erased. That is precisely why this book must be read. To teach it is to teach students and scholars that literature and history are not about comfort but about truth. And truth, as Hickey reminds us, is often hollow, but essential. It is hollow because it denies us comfort. It is essential because it forces us to see what lies beneath the surface illusions we so often cling to. It is easier to imagine monsters as born, marked from infancy with difference, destined to reveal themselves. It is easier to look for deformities, abnormalities, or obvious signs, and to believe that those who look ordinary are safe. Hickey demolishes that comfort. I cannot stress that enough. Henry Manzer’s brain was examined and found to be normal. His body bore no mark of monstrosity. His face was composed, his demeanor calm, his lapel adorned with a red rose. He looked ordinary because he was ordinary. This is the danger Hickey forces us to confront. If monstrosity can emerge from environment, then none of us are free to assume we can recognize it in advance.
Neglect, abuse, arrogance these are not rare elements. They exist in many families, many communities. They are bricks that, when stacked carelessly, can produce unstable castles. Hickey leaves us with the awareness that the line between ordinary life and violence is thinner than we would like to admit. That recognition is hollow, but it is essential. The metaphor of mirrors deepens this recognition. It reflects not only the event itself but the structures that made it possible. In Cora’s case, the mirror reflects the Sweet family’s enduring grief, Mrs. Sweet’s daily flowers, the community’s whispers, and the Manzer family’s shame. But it also reflects the structures beneath: the tyranny of Waverly Manzer, the absence of support for Henry, the arrogance that hardened into cruelty.
To look into this mirror is to see not only Cora’s tragedy but the ordinary failures that made it possible. This is why the mirror shatters illusions. It does not flatter; it exposes. For high school students, this mirror is necessary. Adolescents live surrounded by mirrors social media, peer groups, stories that reflect identities and anxieties. So many of those mirrors are illusions, flattering distortions that conceal rather than reveal. Hickey’s book forces students to look into a mirror that refuses comfort. It reveals that violence grows in ordinary soil, that grief outlasts justice, that arrogance can mask hollowness. To give this book to high school students as summer reading is to give them a mirror that will not lie. It is to demand that they write reports not about entertainment but about humanity. For college students, the mirror is sharper still. In criminology, the mirror reflects how insanity defenses function, how courts navigate heredity, and how appeals prolong grief. In psychology, the mirror reflects the mechanisms of arrogance and calmness, the mask of composure that Henry wore even to his execution. In literature, the mirror reflects narrative itself: how stories of crime are told, whether they center victims or perpetrators, whether they glamorize or strip away. Professors who assign Hickey’s book equip their students to confront these mirrors, to see themselves reflected in the questions the case demands. This is why numbness follows the book. It is not numbness of indifference but of saturation. After reading Hickey’s chapters of trial, appeals, execution, and aftermath, the reader has looked into mirrors too long, seen illusions collapse into hollowness too many times.
The numbness is itself the hollow truth. It is the recognition that no matter how many times Mrs. Sweet placed flowers in her daughter’s hand, grief did not lessen. It is the recognition that no matter how often Lydia Manzer endured whispers, her shame did not ease. It is the recognition that no matter how many headlines reported Henry’s calmness, his arrogance never cracked. The numbness is the residue of truth when illusions are gone. This hollow truth is why Hickey’s book belongs not only in classrooms but in cultural memory. Communities that forget these lessons risk repeating them. The case of Cora Sweet is not unique in its structure—hereditary shadows, environmental neglect, arrogance cultivated into monstrosity. Similar structures appear in contemporary cases of violence, from school shootings to domestic abuse. Each time, communities seek to explain monstrosity as anomaly, as madness, as destiny written at birth. Each time, the truth is harder: monstrosity is cultivated, brick by brick, in ordinary spaces.
The parallels to other literary works by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment presents a murderer who finds redemption through confession sharpens the comparison. Hickey denies Henry Manzer this arc, leaving him hollow and unrepentant. The absence of redemption leaves us hollow too, refusing to flatter us with the illusion that all wrongs can be transformed into rights. William March’s The Bad Seed imagines a child born cruel, hereditary monstrosity written from birth. Hickey denies this illusion as well, showing that Henry was not born cruel but shaped by environment and neglect. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood humanizes his killers, sometimes eliciting sympathy. Hickey denies Henry even this complexity, refusing to romanticize or glamorize. In these comparisons, Hickey’s book emerges as singular: uncompromising, unflattering, refusing illusion at every turn. The refusal of illusion is the book’s gift to education. Students trained on comfort are unprepared for truth. Students trained on hollow truths are prepared for empathy, critical thinking, and humility. A high schooler reading Hickey’s book may feel numbness, may resist writing about grief and monstrosity. But in that resistance lies growth. A college student analyzing Henry’s courtroom outburst, his calmness in prison, or his refusal to name Cora may feel unsettled.
But in that unsettlement lies wisdom. Professors who assign this book invite students into discomfort, knowing that discomfort breeds understanding. Hickey’s book is not a light read. It is heavy, unrelenting, and numbing. It is for that reason, The Murder of Cora Sweet belongs on summer lists. It ensures that students enter classrooms not with comfort but with questions, not with illusions but with mirrors, not with castles intact but with castles crumbling. The numbness that follows this book is not paralysis but clarity. It teaches that grief endures, that justice is limited, that monstrosity is cultivated. It is not the numbness of avoidance but of recognition. Readers cannot say, “This was madness, and madness is rare.” They must say, “This was ordinariness cultivated into violence, and ordinariness is everywhere.” That is the essential lesson, the hollow truth that must be taught.
Henry Waverly Manzer, Oswego’s notorious killer who murdered 12 year old Cora Sweet in 1905, was not born a monster. He was a born to parents Waverly and Lydia Manzer. This review will bring light that he was made into a monster by circumstances, choice, and the collapse of an unsteady foundation. From the very beginning of the narrative, hereditary emerges as one of the central forces that shapes henry’s life. His birth is marked by complication and we see his father Waverly Manzer already revealing the volatility and cruelty that would shape the family environment. I believe when Lydia threw the alcohol on Waverly while he was having a heartattack is how I understood the scene, Henry was ruined because he didn’t really see his mother have emotion. He witnessed the death of his father. Lydia was only trying to get her husband to snap out of his rage. What I love about Hickey is that after reading Girl in the Glass Coffin, she is no stranger to making the reader feel uncomfortable and in a good way. Waverly set the tone for his son growing up in violence, instability, and the inheritance of shadow.
Henry was not biologically designed to kill the way that the trial case tried proving insanity. The medical examinations showed no abnormality, no lesion, no physiological marker of monstrosity. Instead what Henry inherited was a fractured legacy. Alcoholism, abuse, and volatility became the building blocks of Henry’s uneven castle. I also feel that the orphanage sealed the deal for Henry’s narcissism. True narcissism is behavior that shows no remorse for their consequences. We can agree that a child’s life is built brick by brick. When that foundation gets cracked by cruelty, the child is forever altered. I find it 100% fascinating how some people who go through trauma, go to one end of the extreme, repeating those behaviors, and then those who go through similar traumatic experiences, their consciousness remains intact. Hickey shows us a Henry raised in instability, neglected by a father whose tyranny set the tone for violence. The hereditary dimension of his life is not a matter of destiny, but of architecture: a blueprint written in shadows, waiting for the cracks to show.
Environment compounded these hereditary shadows. Hickey describes a rural Oswego County that could be nurturing, but for Henry it became isolating. He grew up in a community that knew his family’s volatility and whispered about it. This environment did not give support that Henry needed and little compassion was given, The pivotal turning point is when Henry stays at the orphanage and meets Arthur and Frida. Both shape Henry into a boy who learned arrogance as armor. Love was withheld and he was seen as a project. By the time he reached young adulthood, his environment had hardened into both familiarity and alienation: he was known, but not trusted. He wore his arrogance like the red rose pinned to his lapel at trial a symbol of performance, of composure masking hollowness. This review isn't putting the blame on anyone specifically it's interesting learning where the mind of killers form. The emotional dysregulation of his mother abandoning him, I feel altered his soul. Where in Girl in the Glass Coffin the mother was seen grieving truly grieving. Henry's mother grieves because of shame by society.
Neglect cemented what heredity and environment had begun. Henry’s father’s cruelty, his family’s inability to provide stability, and the community’s unwillingness to intervene created a boy who carried resentment, arrogance, and detachment into adulthood. Hickey’s narrative reveals the consequences of neglect most clearly in the murder itself. Henry intercepted Cora Sweet on an ordinary walk, lured her away from the road, and turned a neighborly encounter into brutality. The ordinariness of the meeting becomes horrifying in Hickey’s retelling: monstrosity erupted not from madness but from the cultivated arrogance of a man who had been neglected into hollowness. This distinction is crucial. At trial, Henry’s attorney David Morehouse argued insanity. He claimed heredity epilepsy, alcoholism and argued that Henry’s crime emerged from a defective brain.
Henry himself dismantled the defense with his own words: “I’m not crazy and I never was! I’m no crazier than you are!” This outburst, delivered in frustration, contradicted his attorney and sealed the prosecution’s case. District Attorney William Baker emphasized deliberation: Henry intercepted Cora, lured her away, struck her with a stone, and attempted to conceal the crime. These were acts of choice, not madness. The medical testimony and Henry’s own arrogance aligned. He was sane, deliberate, and hollow. Hickey’s refusal to glamorize Henry is what makes her book so haunting. She records his arrogance, his calmness in prison, his quoting of scripture without weight, and his refusal to name Cora in his final words. She refuses to offer him redemption or even fascination. In this, Hickey centers the victim, reminding readers that true crime must remember the lost, not the arrogant. This is why the book leaves readers hollow. The expectation of resolution that the execution will bring peace is denied. Mrs. Sweet continued to lay flowers in her daughter’s stone hand daily. Lydia Manzer continued to bear the stigma of being mother to a murderer. The community continued to whisper the story as warning and spectacle. Justice was delivered, but grief endured.
Hickey closes her book with Cora’s monument, not Henry’s grave. The flowers persist, the grief endures, and the hollowness remains. That hollowness is the lesson Hickey insists upon. It is the mirror trauma illusion the fairytale castle crumbling into reality, the illusion of justice dissolving into the persistence of grief. When students or scholars read this book, they are forced to look into that mirror, to see that monstrosity is not distant or spectacular but ordinary and cultivated. It forces recognition that environment, heredity, and neglect can fracture any foundation, and that arrogance can turn those fractures into violence.
This recognition is why the book belongs in classrooms. For high school students, it functions as summer reading that unsettles and provokes reflection. Unlike sanitized moral tales, Hickey’s narrative forces students to see how violence grows from neglect and arrogance, not from destiny or madness. It challenges them to ask why communities fail to intervene, why families bear burdens unequally, and why justice does not always heal. For college students, the book serves as a multidisciplinary case study. Criminology students can analyze the insanity defense and its collapse. Psychology students can examine Henry’s calmness as a defense mechanism. Literature students can compare Hickey’s narrative to Capote, March, and Dostoevsky, seeing how true crime functions as both history and literature. Comparisons sharpen this analysis.
The hollowness of Hickey’s book is its greatest strength. It teaches empathy by refusing comfort. It teaches critical thinking by denying easy answers. It teaches humility . This is why every high school student should read it for summer assignments and why college professors should assign it for case studies. The story is not entertainment but based on truth. It reflects society’s failures, families’ burdens, and communities’ responsibilities. By the end, Hickey leaves readers staring at a crumbling castle. What appeared to be ordinary life in rural Oswego collapsed into violence. What appeared to be justice dissolved into grief.
What appeared to be repentance was revealed as hollow arrogance. Brick by brick, Hickey dismantles illusions until readers are left with the unsteady foundation of trauma and monstrosity. Looking into this mirror is not comfortable, but it is necessary.
The Murder of Cora Sweet left me hollow because it revealed that justice does not restore and grief does not end. It showed that monstrosity is not born but cultivated, built brick by brick on foundations already cracked by heredity, environment, and neglect. It showed that arrogance can mask hollowness until the very end, and that victims’ families endure grief long after perpetrators are erased. That is precisely why this book must be read. To teach it is to teach students and scholars that literature and history are not about comfort but about truth. And truth, as Hickey reminds us, is often hollow, but essential. It is hollow because it denies us comfort. It is essential because it forces us to see what lies beneath the surface illusions we so often cling to. It is easier to imagine monsters as born, marked from infancy with difference, destined to reveal themselves. It is easier to look for deformities, abnormalities, or obvious signs, and to believe that those who look ordinary are safe. Hickey demolishes that comfort. I cannot stress that enough. Henry Manzer’s brain was examined and found to be normal. His body bore no mark of monstrosity. His face was composed, his demeanor calm, his lapel adorned with a red rose. He looked ordinary because he was ordinary. This is the danger Hickey forces us to confront. If monstrosity can emerge from environment, then none of us are free to assume we can recognize it in advance.
Neglect, abuse, arrogance these are not rare elements. They exist in many families, many communities. They are bricks that, when stacked carelessly, can produce unstable castles. Hickey leaves us with the awareness that the line between ordinary life and violence is thinner than we would like to admit. That recognition is hollow, but it is essential. The metaphor of mirrors deepens this recognition. It reflects not only the event itself but the structures that made it possible. In Cora’s case, the mirror reflects the Sweet family’s enduring grief, Mrs. Sweet’s daily flowers, the community’s whispers, and the Manzer family’s shame. But it also reflects the structures beneath: the tyranny of Waverly Manzer, the absence of support for Henry, the arrogance that hardened into cruelty.
To look into this mirror is to see not only Cora’s tragedy but the ordinary failures that made it possible. This is why the mirror shatters illusions. It does not flatter; it exposes. For high school students, this mirror is necessary. Adolescents live surrounded by mirrors social media, peer groups, stories that reflect identities and anxieties. So many of those mirrors are illusions, flattering distortions that conceal rather than reveal. Hickey’s book forces students to look into a mirror that refuses comfort. It reveals that violence grows in ordinary soil, that grief outlasts justice, that arrogance can mask hollowness. To give this book to high school students as summer reading is to give them a mirror that will not lie. It is to demand that they write reports not about entertainment but about humanity. For college students, the mirror is sharper still. In criminology, the mirror reflects how insanity defenses function, how courts navigate heredity, and how appeals prolong grief. In psychology, the mirror reflects the mechanisms of arrogance and calmness, the mask of composure that Henry wore even to his execution. In literature, the mirror reflects narrative itself: how stories of crime are told, whether they center victims or perpetrators, whether they glamorize or strip away. Professors who assign Hickey’s book equip their students to confront these mirrors, to see themselves reflected in the questions the case demands. This is why numbness follows the book. It is not numbness of indifference but of saturation. After reading Hickey’s chapters of trial, appeals, execution, and aftermath, the reader has looked into mirrors too long, seen illusions collapse into hollowness too many times.
The numbness is itself the hollow truth. It is the recognition that no matter how many times Mrs. Sweet placed flowers in her daughter’s hand, grief did not lessen. It is the recognition that no matter how often Lydia Manzer endured whispers, her shame did not ease. It is the recognition that no matter how many headlines reported Henry’s calmness, his arrogance never cracked. The numbness is the residue of truth when illusions are gone. This hollow truth is why Hickey’s book belongs not only in classrooms but in cultural memory. Communities that forget these lessons risk repeating them. The case of Cora Sweet is not unique in its structure—hereditary shadows, environmental neglect, arrogance cultivated into monstrosity. Similar structures appear in contemporary cases of violence, from school shootings to domestic abuse. Each time, communities seek to explain monstrosity as anomaly, as madness, as destiny written at birth. Each time, the truth is harder: monstrosity is cultivated, brick by brick, in ordinary spaces.
The parallels to other literary works by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment presents a murderer who finds redemption through confession sharpens the comparison. Hickey denies Henry Manzer this arc, leaving him hollow and unrepentant. The absence of redemption leaves us hollow too, refusing to flatter us with the illusion that all wrongs can be transformed into rights. William March’s The Bad Seed imagines a child born cruel, hereditary monstrosity written from birth. Hickey denies this illusion as well, showing that Henry was not born cruel but shaped by environment and neglect. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood humanizes his killers, sometimes eliciting sympathy. Hickey denies Henry even this complexity, refusing to romanticize or glamorize. In these comparisons, Hickey’s book emerges as singular: uncompromising, unflattering, refusing illusion at every turn. The refusal of illusion is the book’s gift to education. Students trained on comfort are unprepared for truth. Students trained on hollow truths are prepared for empathy, critical thinking, and humility. A high schooler reading Hickey’s book may feel numbness, may resist writing about grief and monstrosity. But in that resistance lies growth. A college student analyzing Henry’s courtroom outburst, his calmness in prison, or his refusal to name Cora may feel unsettled.
But in that unsettlement lies wisdom. Professors who assign this book invite students into discomfort, knowing that discomfort breeds understanding. Hickey’s book is not a light read. It is heavy, unrelenting, and numbing. It is for that reason, The Murder of Cora Sweet belongs on summer lists. It ensures that students enter classrooms not with comfort but with questions, not with illusions but with mirrors, not with castles intact but with castles crumbling. The numbness that follows this book is not paralysis but clarity. It teaches that grief endures, that justice is limited, that monstrosity is cultivated. It is not the numbness of avoidance but of recognition. Readers cannot say, “This was madness, and madness is rare.” They must say, “This was ordinariness cultivated into violence, and ordinariness is everywhere.” That is the essential lesson, the hollow truth that must be taught.
October 4, 2025
To my surprise, I actually liked The Murder of Cora Sweet even better than The Girl in the Glass Coffin! The author, Lee Ellen Hickey ingeniously writes the story in two parts-Henry Waverly Manzer as a boy and Manzer as an adult. By doing this, we are able to get inside the mind of a killer and almost understand (but not justify) his reasoning. Impeccably researched, this is a must read!
January 9, 2026
I finished this book in 2 days. I couldn’t put it down. Lee’s storytelling of “the most brutal crime in the history of Oswego county” was captivating. She relayed the atrocities of the attack and murder gently and got the idea across while sparing the gory details that are so often found in media today. Her use of charming, local colloquialisms was appropriate and added to the story thoroughly. I am from the area described in the book and I was charmed by the descriptions of the area and its’ people. She took a very difficult topic and did Cora Sweet much justice in her eloquent storytelling. Dividing the book in 2 distinct sections, “Henry” and “manzer” she told the origin story of the man who would eventually snuff out a pretty little girl on her way to church. All in all the work was brilliant, historically accurate, and well written. Hats off to you, Lee. You’ve done your city proud.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 9, 2025
Riveting!!! Lee depicts Henry M in the first half of the book in such a way that you really feel for him and are able to understand what makes him tick. The second half just rips your heart out. Another great novel. Finished up with a nice part at the end telling the reader what happened to the people who survived this tragedy!! Another 10 out of 10!
October 22, 2025
I loved this book! I stayed up all night just to finish it. I have read both her books and finding out some of the history of the town I live in was awesome, and the story was just heartbreaking. Can't wait for her next book!
December 12, 2025
Very good read ! Sad, disturbing and brought a bunch of emotions out. Highly recommend this book . The fact it's from my hometown made it especially a good read.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews