Rumors of an adulterous relationship between Mrs. Alice Cooper and her husband’s former apprentice Charlie Northey flourished in the Maine villages of South Windsor, North Whitefield, and Coopers Mills during the summer and autumn of 1905. Then on a summer-like October Tuesday afternoon, twenty-one-year-old Charlie was found mortally wounded in Mrs. Cooper’s dining room with a revolver by his side while a hysterical Mrs. Cooper was witnessed on her front lawn alleging Charlie shot himself.

Before twenty-four hours had lapsed, the thirty-three-year-old mother of three readily admitted that she purchased that revolver the day before to protect herself from Charlie but contended he wrested it from her, took two shots at her as she fled, and then turned the .32 caliber revolver on himself. The investigators and prosecutors including State Attorney Hannibal E. Hamlin and the Kennebec County grand jury believed the matter would be best sorted out by a jury of Mrs. Cooper’s peers.

In his third historical novel, Alice Shrugged: The Mysterious Death of Charlie Northey, using deep research Peter M. Pettingill introduces the reader to a wide cast of State o’ Maine characters as he moves the reader from December, 1903 through April, 1906: the introduction of the new apprentice to the home, his subsequent emancipation, daily lives and routines of the residents, religious fervor, church services, courtship, weddings, a fiftieth anniversary party, an Augusta wedding, May Day shenanigans, and grange meetings which led to that fateful day and resulted in a forty-two day trial that made headlines from Bangor to Key West and Boston to San Francisco.