Bryan and Wolf’s treatment is meticulous, thorough and insightful, providing a highly textured description of Iowa life circa 1900—its customs, mores, language and its criminal and judicial processes….The Hossack murder embodies the dark side of rural America, the harshness of farm life (hardly the pastoral fantasy portrayed in romantic fiction), the troubles within families isolated by distance and work, and the suffering of farm women in a patriarchal system that relegated them to slave labor without benefit of social standing.

— Dubuque Telegraph-Herald