10 Best Books About Lizzie Borden to Read the Moment Netflix’s Monster Ends

The stepmother went first.

Sometime around half past nine on the morning of August 4, 1892, Abby Borden was struck in the back of the head in an upstairs guest room of a narrow, badly designed house on Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts. She went down between the bed and the dresser. She stayed there for roughly ninety minutes while the rest of the household moved around beneath her, unaware, drinking coffee, washing windows, complaining about the heat.

Then Andrew Borden came home from town, stretched out on the sitting room sofa, and someone walked in and did it again.

The maid, Bridget Sullivan, was upstairs in her attic room, lying down. Lizzie called her from the bottom of the stairs. A jury heard eleven days of evidence the following summer and acquitted the 32-year-old daughter of the house in roughly ninety minutes of deliberation. Nobody else was ever charged. Nobody has been charged since.

That is the whole case. It has held for 134 years, and on Thursday, September 17, Netflix is going to tell you it has an answer.

CineCinnati is an Amazon Associate. We earn from qualifying purchases made through the links below, at no extra cost to you. Every title here was picked on merit, not commission. So, don’t worry, I haven’t sold my soul to afford my bills. I never will.

What Netflix’s Monster Actually Does with Lizzie Borden

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story drops all eight episodes on September 17, 2026. It is the fourth chapter of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s anthology, after Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein, and the first one built around a woman. Ella Beatty plays Lizzie. Vicky Krieps plays Bridget Sullivan. Charlie Hunnam, fresh from playing Gein last season, turns up as Andrew Borden, with Rebecca Hall as Abby. Billie Lourd, Jessica Barden, Joey Pollari and Sarah Paulson fill out the house and the world around it.

Here is the part that matters if you care about the record. Every previous subject of this anthology was convicted. Lizzie Borden was not. And Netflix’s own logline does not hedge: a repressed daughter and a rebellious maid, trapped in a home built on humiliation and cruelty, escaping into a shared fantasy of sex, power and revenge. The trailer opens on a hand crushing a red berry and cuts to an axe going up and coming down. Brennan has said the season is about misogyny, class, and what Victorian society demanded of women, which is a real and defensible reading of the case.

It is also a verdict. The show has decided.

Streaming has form here, and it is worth knowing the shape of it before you sit down. The same instinct that turns two real people into a prestige love story and hopes nobody goes looking is at work in every Murphy true crime season, and it is a cousin of what happens when a show borrows a famous title and quietly rewrites everything underneath it. None of that makes the television bad. It makes the reading list necessary.

So leave the fact-check pieces to the big outlets. This is the other thing: the ten best books about Lizzie Borden, ranked by how much they actually give you, so that by the time the credits roll on episode eight you can argue with the screen properly.

The 10 Best Books About Lizzie Borden

1. The Trial of Lizzie Borden by Cara Robertson (2019)

If you read one, read this one.

Robertson is a lawyer who spent two decades on the case, and it shows in the worst possible way for anyone hoping to be handed a culprit. She builds the trial from the transcripts, the newspaper coverage, unpublished local accounts and letters from Lizzie herself, and then she refuses to close the door. The New York Times called the arrangement exactly right: the reader is put in the jury box. Publishers Weekly called it the definitive account. Both are fair.

What makes it the best book about Lizzie Borden is the Gilded Age reporting underneath the courtroom. You come out understanding why a jury of twelve New England men could not make themselves believe a churchgoing woman of property had done it, which is a far more interesting question than whether she did.

Buy The Trial of Lizzie Borden on Amazon

2. Parallel Lives: A Social History of Lizzie A. Borden and Her Fall River by Michael Martins and Dennis A. Binette (2011)

Eleven hundred and thirty-eight pages. Three and a third inches thick. You will need a cushion.

This is the Fall River Historical Society’s own book, written by its curator and assistant curator, who were handed private family material nobody outside the city had seen. Kirkus named it one of the best books of 2012. It contains more new primary material than every previous Borden book combined, and it is not really a murder book at all. It is the biography of a city and a woman who had to keep living in it for thirty-four years after her acquittal, buying her groceries under the eyes of people who thought she had done it.

Buy it if you want the definitive object. It is the one the other authors cite.

Buy Parallel Lives on Amazon

3. A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight by Victoria Lincoln (1967)

The neighbor’s book.

Victoria Lincoln was born in Fall River in 1904, grew up streets away from the aging Lizzie Borden, and understood the exact social machinery that produced the crime and then absorbed it. She is certain Lizzie did it. Her theory that Lizzie was in a temporal lobe epileptic state is now widely discarded, and later research suggests some of her sourcing was town gossip dressed as fact.

Read it anyway. It is the most readable of the older books by a distance, and the argument for guilt has never been made with more atmosphere. Treat it the way you would treat a very persuasive witness with a stake in the outcome.

Buy A Private Disgrace on Amazon

4. The Fall River Tragedy: A History of the Borden Murders by Edwin H. Porter (1893)

The first one. Written while the paint was still wet.

Porter was the police reporter for the Fall River Daily Globe. He stood in the courtroom. He published within months of the acquittal, promising a plain statement of the material facts, and he mostly delivers one, complete with photographs and line drawings of the dead, the accused and the jury. There is a long-running story that the Borden family bought up and burned the print run, which appears to be untrue, and the truth is duller and better: Porter kept his job at the Globe and died of tuberculosis at thirty-nine.

You are reading 1893 here, prose starch and all. That is the point. Nothing has been smoothed over yet.

Buy The Fall River Tragedy on Amazon

5. Lizzie Borden: Past and Present by Leonard Rebello (1999)

Not a narrative. An encyclopedia.

Rebello compiled every person, address, newspaper, rumour, film, play and footnote the case has generated, and the result is the reference volume serious Borden readers keep within arm’s reach. If you finish the Netflix season and find yourself wanting to know who Hosea Knowlton was, what happened to the Second Street house, or which of the fifty-odd screen versions got made and when, this settles it.

Dip into it. Do not try to read it front to back.

Buy Lizzie Borden: Past and Present on Amazon

6. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. Lizzie A. Borden: The Knowlton Papers, 1892-1893

The prosecutor’s desk, opened.

Hosea Knowlton was the district attorney who had to try a case he privately doubted he could win, against a defendant half of New England refused to believe capable of it. This volume, also from the Fall River Historical Society, prints his working correspondence. You watch a man assemble a prosecution in real time and worry, on paper, about the strength of what he has.

There is no narrator here and no theory being sold. It is the closest you can get to the case without a time machine, and after eight episodes of a show that knows exactly what happened, the silence of raw documents is a relief.

Buy The Knowlton Papers on Amazon

7. The Borden Murders: Lizzie Borden and the Trial of the Century by Sarah Miller (2016)

The on-ramp.

Miller’s book is shelved as young adult, which has kept a lot of adults away from the cleanest linear account of the case in print. She walks the murders, the arrest, the inquest and the trial in order, and her actual subject is how much of what everyone thinks they know came from sensational newspaper reporting rather than evidence. The New York Times described it as a historical version of Law and Order, which undersells the media criticism running through it. It comes with period photographs and clippings, including from the scene.

If the show is your first contact with the case, start here and then go to Robertson.

Buy The Borden Murders on Amazon

8. See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt (2017)

The novel Netflix is chasing.

Schmidt’s debut was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and it does, in prose, roughly what Brennan is attempting on screen: it goes inside the house on the day and lets four unreliable voices describe it. Lizzie. Her sister Emma. Bridget the maid. A stranger named Benjamin who may or may not have been hired to solve a problem. Paula Hawkins could not look away from it. The Guardian called it a feverish debut.

It is also genuinely unpleasant in the best way, thick with mutton and pears and heat, working the same seam of slow domestic dread that A24 turned into a house style. If the show’s version of Lizzie interests you more than the verdict does, this is your book.

Buy See What I Have Done on Amazon

9. The Murderer’s Maid by Erika Mailman (2017)

The one that centres Bridget.

Netflix has made Bridget Sullivan half the story and cast Vicky Krieps in the part, which makes this the most timely fiction pick on the list. Mailman, a Bram Stoker Award winner, splits the book between Bridget in the 1890s, an Irish immigrant trapped by service in a house getting more dangerous by the week, and a woman in the present running from men who want her dead for reasons rooted in that same summer. Diana Gabaldon called it darkly atmospheric enough to make you check behind you.

The servant who was in the house the whole time and was never seriously suspected is the case’s great blank space. This fills it in, and the Irish immigrant angle does something the show is unlikely to have room for.

Buy The Murderer’s Maid on Amazon

10. Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder by Rachel McCarthy James (2025)

The weapon, from the Pleistocene forward.

James takes one tool and follows it through half a million years of human use, from the first likely prehistoric axe murder to executions, to Candy Montgomery in a Texas utility room, to Jack Nicholson coming through a door. Mary Roach is the obvious comparison and James invites it: the jokes are there to get your guard down before the argument lands.

Her Borden chapter earns its place on this list on its own. She points out that the actual murder weapon was never recovered, and asks whether the most famous axe murderer in American history was an axe murderer at all. That is a useful thing to be carrying when the Netflix trailer swings one at you for ninety seconds.

Buy Whack Job on Amazon

Which One Should You Start With?

Depends what the show did to you.

• You want the truth, or the nearest available version. Robertson, then Miller if you need the timeline straightened out first. Then Parallel Lives when you are ready to commit a winter to it.
• You want to be convinced she did it. Victoria Lincoln, and she will convince you, so read Robertson afterwards as an antidote.
• You want the primary sources and nobody’s opinion. Porter and the Knowlton Papers. Rebello beside them to identify who everyone is.
• You want more of what the show is selling. Schmidt for the interior of the house, Mailman for Bridget. Both are novels, both know it, and neither pretends otherwise, which is more than can be said for some prestige television.
• You came for the axe. James, obviously.

The Real Reason Lizzie Borden Will Not Go Away

Every other Monster season had a confession, a conviction, or a body count nobody disputed. This one has a woman who walked out of a Massachusetts courthouse in June 1893, moved uptown, bought a big house, named it Maplecroft, and lived another thirty-four years in the city that never stopped watching her.

Netflix is going to give you a version. It will be gorgeous, it will be very loud about corsets and repression, and it will be a fantasy dressed as a reconstruction, in the way this anthology always is. Watch it. It is the most interesting subject Murphy and Brennan have picked precisely because the record refuses to close, and stories built around women who will not stay inside the script written for them are worth having on television.

Then open a book and let the case be the unsolved thing it actually is. Finishing a season and going straight to the shelf is a habit worth keeping, the way we did when Hawkins finally closed up shop, and this case rewards it more than most. Anyone who wants the last ten minutes to hand them the answer will find that His & Hers pulls off that trick far more cleanly.

And if all eight episodes leave you wanting something with a body count and an actual ending, we are three weeks out from the annual October scare list, or you can let the dice pick something for you.

Just do not let a streaming service be the last word on a jury’s.

FAQ

What is the best book about Lizzie Borden?

The Trial of Lizzie Borden by Cara Robertson. It is built from trial transcripts, contemporary newspaper coverage and previously unpublished letters, it won the New England Society Book Award, and it presents the evidence without telling you what to conclude. For a shorter, more linear introduction, Sarah Miller’s The Borden Murders is the better first read.

Is Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story based on a book?

No. The season was created and written by Ian Brennan as an original script, not adapted from a single title. Sarah Schmidt’s novel See What I Have Done is the closest existing book to the show’s approach, and Cara Robertson’s The Trial of Lizzie Borden is the standard modern account of the real case.

Did Lizzie Borden actually kill her father and stepmother?

Legally, no. She was tried in June 1893 and acquitted, and no one else was ever charged. Historians remain divided. Victoria Lincoln and several later writers argue she did it, while Cara Robertson lays out the evidence and declines to reach a verdict. Netflix’s series takes a position the court did not.

Which book covers Bridget Sullivan, the Borden maid?

Erika Mailman’s novel The Murderer’s Maid is written substantially from Bridget’s perspective. For the documented record of her testimony and her life afterwards, Leonard Rebello’s Lizzie Borden: Past and Present and the Fall River Historical Society’s Parallel Lives are the reference sources.

When does Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story come out?

All eight episodes arrive on Netflix on Thursday, September 17, 2026. Ella Beatty stars as Lizzie Borden, with Vicky Krieps as Bridget Sullivan, Charlie Hunnam as Andrew Borden and Rebecca Hall as Abby Borden.