First published 2018
Roxana faces an impossible choice when she fears for her light-skinned infant's future as a slave. In a desperate act, she swaps her baby with her master's child, setting two boys on drastically different paths. The switched children grow up on opposite sides of the racial divide in a Missouri river town, unaware of their true identities. Years later, a terrible crime rocks the community. The case falls to an eccentric local lawyer nicknamed Pudd'nhead Wilson, who uses his unusual hobby of fingerprinting to solve the mystery. As Wilson unravels the crime in a tense courtroom, the truth about the switched babies emerges, exposing the brutal contradictions of a society built on slavery and racial prejudice. Twain crafts a story that reads like a gripping mystery while delivering a fierce attack on the antebellum South's moral failures.
Genres: american-fiction, historical-fiction, mystery, 19th-century
Vibes: atmospheric, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: switched-identities, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Missouri, United States
Period: 19th-century
376 pages · Paperback · Independently published
Content warnings: racism, slavery