The Frozen River

The Frozen River is a historical mystery novel by the American writer Ariel Lawhon, published in 2023 by Doubleday. It is based on the life and the surviving diary of the eighteenth-century midwife and healer Martha Ballard.

The novel opens in Maine in 1789, when the body of a young man is found in the frozen Kennebec River and Martha Ballard is summoned to examine it. She is the district's midwife, which means she is present at births and deaths across the town and knows what happens inside households that the courts never hear about. The dead man is soon identified, and the investigation is bound up with the trial of a judge, Joseph North, in which Ballard's own testimony matters. Lawhon uses the record that Ballard kept of her work over decades as the frame for the story, and the midwife's ordinary rounds, her patients and her household are as much the subject as the killing.

The novel is constructed around real documents and real people, and the author's note separates what is recorded from what was invented to fill the gaps.