Jarrettsville

(NYTBR) In her third novel, “Jarrettsville,” Cornelia Nixon has the advantage of telling a true story, one that took place in her own family. Just after the Civil War, a distant ancestor, Martha Jane Cairnes, made national headlines after she shot and killed her sometime lover, Nick McComas. With the steady hand and steely nerve of a practiced marksman, Martha gunned Nick down on the porch of the barroom at the local hotel. The ensuing trial blended all the elements that, then as now, thrilled and fascinated the prurient American imagination: illicit sex, betrayal, murder — and the specter of race, since local rumor held that Martha had also had a liaison with a black man.
While Nick was a Union Army veteran, Martha and her family had been Confederate sympathizers. Their town, Jarrettsville, lay in northern Maryland, just a few miles below the Mason-Dixon Line, occupying its own strange no man’s land between North and South. Continued