Ohio, 1890. Post Boy Road, Tuscarawas County. When James Booth is shot at his kitchen table on Christmas morning by the German boarder Henry Wehrli, the event sets off what the local newspaper will later call a strange analogy — the second first-degree murder in county history, the first having occurred sixty-six years earlier on the same road, involving the same family, decided by the sons and grandsons of the same jurors. But Breakfast in Booth begins long before Christmas morning. It begins in 1661, when Bartholomew Coates carried a cross-wound spool of thread to Port Tobacco Creek, Maryland, and made needlework a form of prayer. It moves through 1863, when his descendant Jesse Coates — a free mulatto man — uses the last of that thread to stop slave-catchers’ hounds in the Zekiah Swamp and carry his family north through the Underground Railroad. By the 1880s the story has settled in a needlewoman’s shop on East Fair Street, Quaker City, Ohio, where Jesse’s daughter Sooki weaves coverlets that warm people in ways wool alone cannot explain. At the center of the novel’s final act stands Christina “Teenie” Hart, sixty-two years old, crippled from childhood, keeper of a diary she has maintained since the age of nine. Teenie came to the Booth homestead to nurse her dying sister Nancy, and she brought with her a dried-apple doll with a crooked grin that she purchased from Sooki’s shop in September of 1890. Against a backdrop of mine disputes, whiskey, and a household slowly poisoned by James Booth’s rage, a mysterious woman named Prudence Bliss-Parsons — who claims descent from the accused Massachusetts witch Mary Bliss Parsons — begins visiting the barn after midnight to teach young Will Gribble the old knowledge. Christmas morning comes. The shotgun fires. The doll sits watching from the corner chair, blood on her left side, the crooked grin unchanged. The subsequent murder trial becomes Tuscarawas County’s sixteenth — and the Ohio Democrat’s final editorial question becomes the question the novel cannot stop asking: Strange analogy, isn’t it? And will the analogy stop here