The Pirate’s Wife: The Remarkable True Story of Sarah Kidd

Historian and author Geanacopoulos follows The Pirate Next Door with a diverting account of Sarah Kidd (1670–1744), the wife of Captain William Kidd. Kidd was Sarah’s third husband—by all accounts, it was a love marriage. When Kidd was charged with piracy, Sarah joined him on his ship, hoping to find a way to clear his name. Their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, however, and after Kidd’s execution, Sarah took the secret of his hidden treasure to the grave. Courtney Patterson enhances this tale with her animated narration, superbly capturing Geanacopoulos’s emotional interpretation of the intricacies and challenges of Sarah’s life. Patterson’s narration is so effective that listeners may not notice Geanacopoulos’s tendency to pad her story with romanticized suppositions about what people might have said or thought—that Sarah may have looked back on her time with Kidd and “felt proud, very proud, to have been a pirate’s wife,” or that Kidd may have felt “terrified” and “deeply depressed” as he headed toward execution.