The Lady in the Cellar

Murder, Scandal and Insanity in Victorian Bloomsbury

By: Sinclair McKay

Narrated by: Charles Armstrong

Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's Summary

Number 4 Euston Square was a respectable boardinghouse, like many others in Victorian London. But beneath this ordinary veneer lurked a murderous darkness. 

On 8th May 1879, the corpse of former resident Matilda Hacker was uncovered in the coal cellar. The investigation that followed stripped bare the shadow-side of Victorian domesticity, throwing the lives of everyone within into an extraordinary maelstrom. 

Someone in Number 4 Euston Square must have killed Matilda Hacker. How could the murderer prove so elusive? 

Best-selling author Sinclair McKay delves into this intriguing story to shed light on a mystery that baffled Scotland Yard.

©2018 Sinclair McKay (P)2019 Oakhill Publishing

victorian police procedural

If you enjoy true crime and police procedurals from Victorian England, this book is for you. It goes into great detail to give as clear an image as possible, over a hundred years after the fact, of a heinous crime, its impact on the society of the day, and how the police handled it, as well as how the fallout of such a crime impacted all the various players involved.

Not Worth A Credit

I have never given a review as bad as this, usually, a poor book has some saving graces, but not this one. I like victorian history, and I like a detective novel, from the description that was what I thought I was going to get. But alas no. As it says in the description there is indeed a body found in a coal cellar. Then each chapter opens with what each character would have been doing in his or her life in Victorian England, bearing no relationship to the story whatsoever. Then the story might re-emerge for a few paragraphs, in what I came to realise was the wrong order, talking about the trial before the evidence or main suspect had been covered. Very rare for me but I have given up and it is going back.