Hanging Mary by Susan Higginbotham #BookReview

Title: Hanging Mary
Author: Susan Higginbotham
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Published Date: March 1st 2016
Genre: Adult, Historical Fiction
Format:Audio 

My Rating: ★ ★ ★

Goodreads Summary: 

1864, Washington City. One has to be careful with talk of secession, of Confederate whispers falling on Northern ears. Better to speak only when in the company of the trustworthy, like Mrs. Surratt. A widow who runs a small boardinghouse on H Street, Mary Surratt isn't half as committed to the cause as her son, Johnny. If he's not delivering messages or escorting veiled spies, he's inviting home men like John Wilkes Booth, an actor who is even more charming in person than he is on the stage. But when President Lincoln is killed, the question of what Mary knew becomes more important than anything else. Was she a cold-blooded accomplice? Just how far would she go to help her son?
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 My Review:

“I have always taken great comfort in newspapers. No matter how horrid an event, there is something in seeing it described in black and white that makes it somehow bearable.” 

Before reading this book I knew a little bit about the woman that helped Booth kill the president, but I was never really sure exactly how she was involved. This story was a new and interesting take on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and it was one that will make you feel compassion for the killers. We get to see there personal lives and how they were and potentially what might have even lead them to doing what they did.
While this is a piece of fiction, there is always that wonder in the back of your mind, if maybe just maybe this was how it potentially was for some of these characters. Did they really know what was going to happen? Or were they simply friends of the killer wrongly accused? Well I'm not sure if we will ever for sure know the answer to that one. But what I can tell you is this. In this story Mrs. Surratt is a women who is just trying to make ends meet like so many others during the war. Her son's are a part of the confederacy and while she doe support them, we also never really see her be radical about it. As for her daughter that's another story.
We also get to see the point of view of one of Mrs. Surratt's border Nora. Now for me personally while this was a supposed to be Mrs. Surratt's story I found Nora's far more interesting and I felt like we spent more time on her as well.
I feel like I can't really say to much without giving the whole story away since this is based on history. This story is interesting and it was nice to see a change for me at least on the assassination on President Lincoln. Getting to see what might have lead up to that fateful night and how exactly they all ended up meeting was very interesting.
As for the story itself though I feel like it was lacking something most of them time. But that could have just been because I listened to it on audio instead of physically reading it. I do want to read another book by Higginbotham in physical form just to see if that changes anything.