Resurrecting a Trial Long Forgotten
Review by Kim Cantrell
It’s the Victorian Era in the New York borough of Manhattan; specifically Nieuw Haarlem (now known as Harlem).
It is an age of sexual prudence; out-of-wedlock births are considered extremely distasteful.
Yet in such a time and place lives Mary Alice Livingston, whose family frequently socialized with the Astors and Vanderbilts. As a mother to three illegitimate children, she was struggling financially to survive.
Although she had twice sought monetary support from two of her children’s fathers via the Courts, she was, in 1895, dependent upon her stepfather, Henry Bliss.
Her father, Robert Livingston, had passed away many years before he left a trust that would be given to Mary Alice upon her mother’s, Evelina, death.
While pregnant with her fourth illegitimate child and having been notified by her stepfather that his financial support was coming to a close, Mary Alice sent her young daughter, Gracie, to her grandmother’s with a dinner of Clam Chowder from the Colonial Hotel Restaurant.
Within hours, Evelina was dead.
Did Mary Alice murder her mother by poison to gain access to her inheritance? Or was she framed for the benefit of a German doctor wishing to gain notoriety?
Mary Alice’s cousin, James D. Livingston, takes readers back more than 100 years to the events surrounding Evelina Davis Livingston Bliss’s death and the murder trial of her uncommonly (for the time) promiscuous daughter that followed.
You may have read short versions of this story in other books, but there is plenty in Arsenic and Clam Chowder that you’ve never heard. I can make that promise as much of the information comes direct from family documents that have been secreted away for many years….until now.
Livingston writes so clearly, so descriptively that readers will feel as if they are sitting in the courtroom aside this woman who made national headlines as she fights to avoid the death penalty.
Arsenic and Clam Chowder is a book centered around true crime with a mix of women’s suffrage and the history of New York’s yesteryear.
If you enjoy historical true crime, I strongly recommend reading Arsenic and Clam Chowder from James Livingston. It’s a book that, once you get started, you won’t be able to put it down!
For more information about this book and author James Livingston, visit www.jamesdlivingston.net
You’re ready to read it, so now go get it!
