In the tradition of The Devil in the White City comes a spell-binding tale of madness and murder in a nineteenth century American dynasty
On June 3, 1873, a portly, fashionably dressed, middle-aged man calls the Sturtevant House and asks to see the tenant on the second floor. The bellman goes up and presents the visitor's card to the guest in room 267, returns promptly, and escorts the visitor upstairs. Before the bellman even reaches the lobby, four shots are fired in rapid succession.
Eighteen-year-old Frank Walworth descends the staircase and approaches the hotel clerk. He calmly inquires the location of the nearest police precinct and adds, "I have killed my father in my room, and I am going to surrender myself to the police."
So begins the fall of the Walworths, a Saratoga family that rose to prominence as part of the splendor of New York's aristocracy. In a single generation that appearance of stability and firm moral direction would be altered beyond recognition, replaced by the greed, corruption, and madness that had been festering in the family for decades.
"A hybrid of pulp and Poe . . . . [O'Brien's] saga of this prominent 1800s family of Saratogians has enough moments of melodramatic excess--religious fanaticism! inherited insanity! parricide!--to rival the most extravagant Gothic novels of the day. . . He combines an enthusiast's zeal for the potboiler and the penny press and a memoirist's almost melancholy fascination for the varnished-away trac
Eric Banks, The Chicago Tribune
"Geoffrey O'Brien's eloquent The Fall of the House of Walworth vividly resurrects the idiosyncratic and ultimately tragic malcontents who for four generations lived at Pine Grove. . . . Mr. O'Brien writes that Clara's mother and grandmother 'almost succeeded in sweeping from the house all traces of quarrels and ravings, of murder and of judicial punishment that killed the soul if not the body . .
Edward J. Renehan, Jr., The Wall Street Journal
"O'Brien salts his story of Walworth's arrest and murder trial with an anatomy of the Walworth family's bizarre cast of characters and the history of Saratoga Springs and its notoriety as a spa destination. But it is the sordid details of the marriage of Mansfield and his wife Ellen that had tongues wagging in 19th century New York that gives this history the spark of a modern-day suspense novel..
