Spencer Arrowood was a young, untried deputy sheriff when his testimony helped convict a Tennessee youth for the brutal slaying of two hikers along the Appalachian Trail. Now, twenty years later, Spencer receives an invitation to an execution. After two decades on death row, a date has finally been set to strap Fate Harkryder into the chair and throw the switch. But time has eroded Spencer's moral certainty of guilt and raised the specter of another murder.

Over a century ago, it is said that a man was murdered in his sleep, that a young wife and mother was accused of the crime, and that on the gallows her last words were silenced by her father's order. In 1833 Frankie Silver became the first woman in North Carolina to be hanged for murder. But what really happened so long ago becomes an obsession for Spencer Arrowood as the parallels between Frankie and Fate, between two crimes more than a hundred years apart, become as clear-and as shocking-as the single truth that joins two condemned souls. Suddenly, Spencer Arrowood is engaged in a race against time to keep history from happening all over again, and to save the life of a man who just may be innocent after all.

Told in alternating viewpoints-including the haunting voices of Frankie and Fate-The Ballad of Frankie Silver flawlessly weaves past and present, truth and fiction, folklore and legend, in a spellbinding story that sweeps from the drawing rooms of the early aristocracy to the ruins of a one-room cabin deep in the Appalachian wilderness. A novel of murder, simple faith, and blind truth, this novel confirms Sharyn McCrumb's status as the quintessential writer of the Appalachian region. . . and one of America's finest and most evocative storytellers.