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Kate Clifford Larson details the enormous risks Mary Elizabeth Jenkins Surratt undertook in assisting the fetching young actor John Wilkes Booth, her own son John Surratt, and other young men in their plot to kill Abraham Lincoln. Mary Elizabeth Jenkins Surratt, a 43-year-old widow, devout Catholic, boardinghouse owner, and Confederate sympathizer, was executed for her role in the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln, becoming the first woman executed by the United States government.

Larson has found long-lost interviews, confessions, and court testimony, and her book, The Assassins Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln, illuminates Surratt's central role in cultivating and nurturing the nefarious plan to kill Lincoln and avenge her beloved Confederacy. Larson also reveals how, by remaining at large in Canada, John Surratt helped condemn his own mother to the gallows.