Rounds (I My Needle Ply with Skill) sheds light on the history of insanity and sleepwalking pleas in the U.S. justice system through the case of Abraham Prescott, an 18-year-old farmhand living in Pembroke, NH, who in 1833 assaulted his employers, Sally and Chauncey Cochran, in the middle of the night with an ax. Both survived and, accepting Prescott's explanation that he had been sleepwalking during the attack, continued to keep him in their employ. Unfortunately, months later, Prescott killed Sally with a fence post while they were picking strawberries in a field. Again, Prescott claimed to have been sleepwalking, and his attorneys moved forward with a sleepwalking and insanity defense at trial, though such defenses had a poor track record of success. While the work is more academic than most true crime fare, Rounds makes an important contribution to the field, using the case to examine how the justice system has historically marginalized those with mental illnesses. VERDICT Ideal for serious scholars of criminal history.--Mattie Cook, Flat River Community Lib., MI

An account of an 1830s murder, the ensuing trial, and the social issues involved. In June 1833, Abraham Prescott, an 18-year-old farmhand in Pembroke, New Hampshire, murdered his employer's wife, Sally Cochran, by beating her in the head with a wooden stake. Afterward, Prescott explained that he had fallen asleep with a toothache and woke up to "discover the dying young woman in the brush." Even stranger, in January of that same year, Prescott had nearly killed both Sally and her husband, Chauncey, when, in the middle of the night, he used the blunt end of an ax to beat them in their beds. That time, too, Prescott claimed that he'd been sleepwalking and had no recollection of the events. His employers evidently believed him and kept him in their house. Rounds, a writer, historian, and executive director of the Dyer Library and Saco Museum in Saco, Maine, provides a meticulously researched account of the murder and trial. By no means is this a sensationalistic account. "It is the many interwoven social issues of Sally Cochran and Abraham Prescott's tragic tale that make it important to retell the story of the crime that ended her life," she writes. Prescott may have suffered from mental illness or some sort of cognitive impairment; however, as Rounds shows, his contemporaries didn't have a nuanced understanding of either possibility. The author is a compassionate and sympathetic narrator, and she combs painstakingly through the evidence of the murder and the records of the trial. Rounds occasionally embarks on an unnecessary tangent--e.g., in an early section that contains too much information on the history of schoolgirl embroidery (the subject of a previous book by the author)--and the chapters on Prescott's trial would have benefitted from more analysis and less summary. Still, the book is an intelligent, humane account of a horrific incident and its many consequences. An occasionally long-winded but scrupulously researched, sympathetic true-crime tale. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.