The Rope: A True Story of Murder, Heroism, and the Dawn of the NAACP

Today’s post is on The Rope: A True Story of Murder, Heroism, and the Dawn of the NAACP by Alex Tresniowski. It is 322 pages long and is published by 37 Ink. The cover has the sky on it. The intended reader is someone who is interested in true crime history. There is foul language, discussion of sexuality and rape, and violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- From New York Times bestselling author Alex Tresniowski comes a page-turning, remarkable true-crime thriller recounting the 1910 murder of ten-year-old Marie Smith, the dawn of modern criminal detection, and the launch of the NAACP.

In the tranquil seaside town of Asbury Park, New Jersey, ten-year-old schoolgirl Marie Smith is brutally murdered. Small town officials, unable to find the culprit, call upon the young manager of a New York detective agency for help. It is the detective’s first murder case, and now, the specifics of the investigation and daring sting operation that caught the killer is captured in all its rich detail for the first time.

Occurring exactly halfway between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the formal beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in 1954, the brutal murder and its highly-covered investigation sits at the historic intersection of sweeping national forces—religious extremism, class struggle, the infancy of criminal forensics, and America’s Jim Crow racial violence.

History and true crime collide in this sensational murder mystery featuring characters as complex and colorful as those found in the best psychological thrillers—the unconventional truth-seeking detective Ray Schindler; the sinister pedophile Frank Heidemann; the ambitious Asbury Park Sheriff Clarence Hetrick; the mysterious “sting artist,” Carl Neumeister; the indomitable crusader Ida Wells; and the victim, Marie Smith, who represented all the innocent and vulnerable children living in turn-of-the-century America.

Gripping and powerful, The Rope is an important piece of history that gives a voice to the voiceless and resurrects a long-forgotten true crime story that speaks to the very divisions tearing at the nation’s fabric today.

Review- An interesting true crime nonfiction book. Tresniowski has done some wonderful research into this almost forgotten crime and creation of the NAACP leading into the civil rights era. Basically a young girl is stalked, kidnapped, raped, then murdered. The small town she is from panics and because of the time they picked a person who was easy to blame, who was a black man named Tom Williams. But Williams was innocent and it becomes a race against time to save him and get justice for the child. This was a fast paced read that made me very nervous at times with Williams being hunted by angry white members of his own community. I had to flip to the back to make sure that Williams was not lynched before I could continue reading. If you are a fun of true crime and history I would recommend it. 

I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for this review and I borrowed this book from my local library.