Best-selling true-crime author M. William Phelps takes readers to his own backyard in eight bloodcurdling murder cases. Think New England is all bucolic landscapes and Robert Frost poems? Think again. In Murder, New England, Phelps explores different motives, themes, and community reactions to horrific crimes, including: The killing of Rebecca Cornwall, a 73-year-old widow who in 1673 was burned to death in front of her bedroom fireplace on an island in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay.The 1879 case of Holyoke, Massachusetts, millworker John Kemmler, who lost his job and then killed his daughters because he feared they'd be forced into prostitution.Boston, 1931, and the New England Mafia's murderous coming of age. The 2001 case of teenage slackers in Norton, Massachusetts, whose murder of a grandmother was blamed on TV, youth, drugs, sex, money, and rock-n-roll.And the 2008 murder of a young woman out for a jog in Woodstock, Connecticut, attacked by the groundskeeper of an estate owned by the puppeteer who played Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch.