Thou shalt not bear false witness. Don't lie. Especially not against yourself. But in 1894 in an Idaho court of law, with a jury on the verge of hanging her husband, Francis Cooper Hurst lies. And as a result, this young Mormon woman loses what she holds most dear in the world-her children. The Soul of Frannie Cooper is a true story, its pages drawn from historical documents of her time and from tales told by those who knew and loved her. Mormon Church records say Frannie was born in a settlement north of Salt Lake City, the sixth of twenty-one children in a devout pioneer family. Her dark hair and flashing eyes amid fair-haired, blue-eyed siblings soon creates gossip to flutter in the wind. Frances is not a natural daughter of the Cooper family. Perhaps the child of a Scots trapper and an Indian woman instead-taken in and fostered. This in the day when an Indian soul is not worth that of a white one. While the issue never settles, an imaginative young Frannie reels from family turmoil when her father brings a plural wife home. The suffering deepens when her mother bears a ninth child and abruptly dies. Grief raises the specter of a death angel which will haunt Frannie the remaining days of her life.Born and raised in the same Utah valley where Frannie lived, Bonnie Smith grew up hearing the rattle of bones from the family cupboard-great-grandfather John Hurst facing the hangman for murder, and great-grandmother Frannie admitting to an illicit relationship with the dead man. Bonnie wowed that someday she'd research and find the truth in Frannie's story. The murder occurred without a doubt yet the truth of Frannie's testimony was never as clear. Still . . . the fact is that Frannie saved John Hurst's life, and suffered unimaginable loss for it. That part is in the record book.