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Shediac Parish, New Brunswick, was a small English/Acadian settlement when a horrific murder took place. In The Ballad of Jacob Peck, Debra Komar examines the facts behind this disturbing case.

Komar delved into the province’s archives and museums to get the true historic details and then cleverly crafted them into seven “acts,” or chapters, presenting the material as if she were the prosecutor working against Peck.

She says the uneducated, illiterate Peck arrived in the community “like a malignant fog” in January 1805. By February 26 of that year, Peck’s revival prophesy meetings convinced one of its ardently religious citizens to commit a grisly crime. Komar details how the farmer Amos Babcock first tormented his family and then stabbed and disembowelled his mentally ill sister after being incited by Peck, who had become the area’s self-appointed pastor.

Readers are given an insight into the lives of some of the area’s residents, including the murder victim, Mercy Hall, and are shown the legal and social mores of the time. After more than two centuries, however, only limited information is available about some of the characters in this account. Komar, a retired forensic anthropologist, sticks to the known truths without making the story dry.

Although the evidence suggests that Peck induced mania in Babcock, it was only Babcock who paid the price of murder by hanging, while Peck got off free. The first of four books in a true-crime series by the same publisher and author, The Ballad of Jacob Peck offers promise for what will follow.