A little-known case of husband-murder now, Florence Maybrick’s story turns out to be a fascinating discussion of what reasonable doubt looks like. Florence was an American woman married to a much older British cotton merchant at a time when continental marriages were a fashion among American girls. Unfortunately, James Maybrick also had a penchant for self-medicating with the dangerous medicines of his day, which included strychnine, arsenic, and opium. When a lingering undiagnosed illness—maybe a gastric ulcer, maybe gastritis?—killed him in 1889, he left two suspicious brothers, a house littered with pills, packets, and potions, and a wife who had initiated an affair and perhaps a divorce. Kate Colquhon does a painstaking job of reconstructing the trial and the evidence against Florence, weaving in changing conceptions of right behavior for women and how they were expressed in novels and the legal system. I won’t spoil the outcome of Maybrick’s case, but it turned on the state of scientific evidence in the 1880s, as well as how judges and juries allowed hidebound ideas about womanhood to influence their evaluation of evidence. Colquhon suggests that her case became “a cipher both for those grappling towards a different way of being [for women] and for conservatives who believed that her alleged crime struck not simply at a single man but at the prevailing hierarchies that kept men on top” (235). Substitute race for gender and you can see why the death penalty can never be a just punishment.