Anna, Who?

Anna was twenty years old when her husband died of a gunshot in Davenport, Iowa. Within days she was in the county jail, charged with his murder, and the town had already begun deciding what kind of woman she was.

It didn't know the half of it.

Anna, Who? is a novel based on the true story of the authors' own family. It follows a young wife and mother through a trial that gripped a city, a jail where she met someone she never expected, and the walls of the Anamosa penitentiary, where her life took a turn no one had planned. What happened that night? Who was Anna, really? And what became of the child born behind those walls?

Set in the early 1900s, from the brewery district and working-class streets of Davenport to the stone cells of an Iowa prison, this is a story about marriage and grief, motherhood and sacrifice, and the way a family can lose a person and spend a century looking for her. It is also a story about what women could and couldn't say in a courtroom in 1912, and what the people around them chose to believe.

Her story was lost to the family for a century. Drawing on court records, newspaper accounts and DNA evidence, Jeff and Tracy Adamson rebuilt what they could, and imagined the rest. The result is part courtroom drama, part family saga and part mystery. It is warm, human and often funny in unexpected places. The answers come slowly, and not all of them are the ones you expect.

A Behind the Story section at the end separates the documented facts from the imagined scenes, character by character.

For readers of historical fiction, family sagas and courtroom dramas, and for anyone who has wondered what their own family never told them.