An Old Murder Comes Unsolved by Elizabeth Buhmann
An Old Murder Comes Unsolved by Elizabeth Buhmann
repost from J.C. Martin
Elizabeth Buhmann’s debut novel, Lay Death at Her Door, has just been released by Red Adept Publishing. She is here today to tell us more about the book’s very intriguing story.
An Old Murder Comes Unsolved
by Elizabeth Buhmann
Lay Death at Her Door is about an old murder that comes unsolved when the man who was convicted of it is exonerated. The fictional case is similar to a number of real cases that have made headlines all across the US in recent years.
Since 1992, the Innocence Project, a non-profit organization founded by a couple of well-known defense attorneys, has been revisiting cases where the latest DNA profiling technology can be used to exonerate people wrongly convicted of rape and/or murder. In more than 300 cases, people have been freed after serving five, ten, in some cases more than twenty years for crimes they didn’t commit.
Often, these people have been convicted on eyewitness testimony. Persuasive and much-loved by prosecutors and juries, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. When it’s false, usually the witness is simply mistaken. But what if the witness deliberately lied?
Lay Death at Her Door is told from the point of view of Kate Cranbrook. As a 20-year-old college student, she witnessed a murder. She was beaten and raped. As eyewitness for the prosecution, she almost single-handedly convicted the wrong man for the crime.
In chapter one, she tells us that she lied on the stand. She knew who the real killer was and lied to protect herself. Then, for twenty years, she lived with the knowledge that she had committed perjury and was an accessory, however unwilling, to murder.
When the crime comes unsolved at the beginning of the book, her life is about to come apart at the seams. But Kate is a bold and determined woman, and she hatches a daring plan to settle a deadly private conflict on her own terms. The plan works, but it brings disaster down on her head.
You won’t like Kate Cranbrook. She’s deeply flawed, cunning and ruthless. But I think you’ll find her story—Lay Death at Her Door—a cool read for a hot summer afternoon.
About the Author
Elizabeth Buhmann is originally from Virginia, where her first novel is set, and like her main character, she lived several years abroad while growing up. She graduated magna cum laude from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. For twenty years, she worked for the Texas Attorney General as a researcher and writer on criminal justice and crime victim issues. Elizabeth now lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, dog, and two chickens. She is an avid gardener, loves murder mysteries, and has a black sash in Tai Chi.
Lay Death at Her Door
Twenty years ago, Kate Cranbrook’s eyewitness testimony sent the wrong man to prison for rape and murder. When new evidence exonerates him, Kate says that in the darkness and confusion, she must have mistaken her attacker’s identity.
She is lying.
Kate would like nothing better than to turn her back on the past, but she is trapped in a stand-off with the real killer. When a body turns up on her doorstep, she resorts to desperate measures to free herself once and for all from a secret that is ruining her life.