The Maiden by Kate Foster

In the end, it did not matter what I said at my trial. No one believed me.

Edinburgh, October 1679. Lady Christian Nimmo is arrested and charged with the murder of her lover, James Forrester. News of her imprisonment and subsequent trial is splashed across the broadsides, with headlines that leave little room for doubt: Adulteress. Whore. Murderess.

Only a year before, Christian was leading a life of privilege and respectability. So what led her to risk everything for an affair? And does that make her guilty of murder? She wasn’t the only woman in Forrester’s life, and certainly not the only one who might have had cause to wish him dead...

Inspired by a real life case, The Maiden gives a voice to women otherwise silenced by history. Told through chapters narrated alternately by Christian and Violet, the prostitute Forrester kept as a mistress, it’s a remarkable story, and clearly marks Kate Foster as a name to watch.