This is a troubling story of crime, sin, guilt, punishment, and expiation, set in the rigid moral climate of 17th centurion New England. The young mother of an illegitimate child confronts her Puritane judges. However, it is not her harsh sentence, so much as the cruelties of slowly exposed guilt as her lover is revealed, that hold the reader enthralled all the way to the book's poignant climax.