Between Moonlight and Murder

Between Moonlight and Murder is a story of the violence and passions that play out in rural Illinois in the late19th century. The story is about the destruction of not only the lives of a young, beautiful woman and a prominent married man and his family, but also the unconscionable abuse of power by a politically ambitious prosecutor, the bitter frustration of a rejected fiancé, and an unethical conduct of the defense lawyer.

The story opens with farm wife Kate Dewitt's discovery of a body along the side of the Blind Lane road. The narrative then shifts to the background of the family of Billy Burns, a wounded, Confederate veteran who made his home in St. Elmo after spending the last months of the American Civil War in a Yankee prisoner-of-war camp in Tennessee. Billy's alcoholism aggravates his already malicious, cruel nature. His brutal treatment of his wife, Flora Jane, results in her death, and his remarriage to the widow, Millicent Zimmer, appears to be following the same course, until Millie unexpectedly stands up to him. Missouri - called Zura - is a daughter of Billy Burns. She leaves her fathers house to escape his drunkenness and brutality and to seek her fortune in the larger communities in the North.

As the account proceeds, the focus shifts to the family of Orrin Carpenter, a married man of wealth and prestige and the father of two teenage daughters. An illicit relationship develops between Zura and Orrin while Zura is employed as a domestic servant in the Carpenter home. Zura's subsequent pregnancy threatens Orrin's social position and business, and soon after his failure to provide for an abortion for her, Zura is found murdered in lonely Blind Lane.

Orrin becomes the chief suspect in Zura's murder and is hounded by the state prosecutor in order to forward his own political career. Detectives for the state set to work to gather evidence against Orrin. These detectives include an honest, but tough ex-policeman; a confidence man from Savannah, Georgia; and a brilliant, but eccentric criminalist who communicates with his dead mother and is guided by her advice.

All of this takes place in a town that is too self-righteous and judgmental to forgive and whose Victorian morality is evidenced by its treatment of Orrin Carpenter during and after his subsequent trial for the murder of Missouri Burns.