April 15, 1865: Washington, recovering from a brutal and bloody Civil War, was suddenly plunged into a Reign of Terror by an assassin's bullet. Her name was Mary Surratt. She was a real person, the owner of the Washington, D.C., boarding house in which John Wilkes Booth and other conspirators in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln met and plotted. She went to the gallows, almost certainly a victim not of her own guilt but of mob hysteria. Through the use of a fictitious but vividly imagined diary, Pamela Redford Russell goes beyond historical drama to create a novel of emotional depth and psychological penetration.