Showing results by author "Alana Sanchez" in All Categories

Sophie Lyons was trained to steal as a child and spent decades moving through the crowded cities of the nineteenth century, surviving by skill, performance, and constant motion. In The Woman on the Circuit, Alana Sanchez traces Lyons’ life across New York, Canada, and the wider urban crime circuit, not as spectacle, but as labour. Drawing on court records, newspaper reporting, and Lyons’ own writing, this book examines the systems that shaped her choices: women’s criminal networks, policing and courts, public morality, and the narrow paths available to women who lived outside ...

In early nineteenth-century Leeds, fear was common and answers were scarce. Mary Bateman sold both. Branded the “Yorkshire Witch”, she promised cures and protection, drawing desperate families into rituals, payments, and obedience. Then a woman died — and the story turned from superstition to murder. The Yorkshire Witch: The Mary Bateman Case is a chronological account grounded in the historical record, separating provable fact from legend while restoring the victims to the centre of the narrative. A true-crime manuscript of fraud, belief, and poison hidden in the domestic world.

In 1880s Britain, the chemist’s shop stood at the centre of a quiet revolution. Behind its polished counter were the substances that eased pain, soothed nerves, and saved lives — and the same substances that could quietly kill. As pharmacy professionalised and poison laws tightened, Victorian society struggled to balance access with safety, privacy with accountability, and relief with risk. The Victorian Chemist explores the uneasy coexistence of medicine and poison in an age of rapid chemical progress. Through regulation, scandal, courtroom testimony, and everyday trade, this book ...

House of Bourbon is a sweeping, factual narrative of the dynasty that helped shape modern Europe. From Henry IV’s hard-won settlement after the French Wars of Religion to Louis XIV’s Versailles state, from the fall of Louis XVI and the fate of Marie Antoinette and Marie Thérèse Charlotte to the Bourbon transformation of Spain, this book traces how power is claimed, defended, and reinvented across centuries. Moving between Paris and Madrid, revolution and restoration, constitution and dictatorship, it follows the Bourbons as a living case study in legitimacy: how rulers win obedience, ...

A boarding house promised safety. Inside, people disappeared. In Sacramento, Dorothea Puente took in vulnerable tenants — elderly, disabled, and isolated — then quietly redirected their benefits and erased them from view. For years, the system accepted her explanations. Then bodies were found buried behind the house. The Boarding House is a chronological account of the Dorothea Puente case, separating record from rumour and restoring the victims to the centre of the story. A true-crime manuscript about greed, control, and what happens when disappearance becomes normal.

She was trusted with society’s most vulnerable. What she did instead shocked Victorian England. In the shadowed streets of 19th-century Britain, where poverty and desperation left countless women with impossible choices, one figure lurked behind a façade of compassion. Amelia Dyer, known as the baby farmer, offered relief to desperate mothers — for a price. What followed was one of the most chilling true crime stories in history.

She offered youth for a price, and discretion as part of the deal. In the fashionable heart of Victorian London, Madame Rachel built a beauty empire on fear: fear of ageing, fear of judgement, fear of being replaced. This historical true crime account follows the clients who came to her, the methods that held them, and the trial that exposed what polite society preferred to keep hidden.

In 1890 London, Phoebe Hogg is a young wife and mother trying to survive the soot, the rent, and a marriage that offers little safety. Then she vanishes—and her name is swallowed by a scandal the city can’t stop consuming. At the centre stands Mary Pearcey: the “other woman,” a figure the newspapers are eager to turn into a monster. A pram, a jealous narrative, and a courtroom hungry for certainty propel the case toward a verdict that satisfies the public… but leaves haunting questions behind. Phoebe Hogg: A Life in the Shadows retells the Hampstead case through the woman history ...

Rome whispers about a poison that looks like holy water. They call it Aqua Tofana—a saint-faced bottle passed hand to hand, a rumour with a price, a promise made to desperate wives behind shuttered windows. Men call it evil. Priests call it temptation. The streets call it justice. But Giulia knows what it really is: a brand built in the cracks of a city that leaves women no safe exits. When a quiet network of laundresses, servants and midwives begins to fray under pressure—boots on stone, coins offered for silence, and the Church leaning close—Giulia must protect the one person she ...

When poisoned chocolates spread terror through Victorian Brighton, suspicion fell on no one — until it fell on Christiana Edmunds. Respectable, intelligent, and outwardly composed, Edmunds defied every expectation of a criminal. Her case forced Victorian England to confront uncomfortable questions about obsession, insanity, and female violence. The Chocolate Poisoner is a gripping true crime history of a woman who reasoned carefully, acted deliberately, and was silenced for the rest of her life.

The Maid of Orléans is a historical autobiography told in the imagined voice of Joan of Arc. Drawing closely on trial records, letters, and contemporary testimony, this book traces her life from Domrémy to Orléans, from coronation at Reims to trial and execution at Rouen. Written with restraint and reverence, it presents Joan not as legend or martyr alone, but as a young woman of faith, courage, and human doubt whose obedience altered the course of France. This is the story of how her voice was condemned, silenced, and—years later—vindicated.

In the desolate plains of Kansas, Kate Bender became a name whispered with fear. But there is more to a woman than a crime. Now she tells her own story - the choices, the darkness, and bestrewn road to survival. Evil is not just born. It is made. And some lines were never meant to be crossed.

The true story of Belle Gunness, America's most deadly female serial killer. To her neighbours, in early 1900's Indiana, Belle Gunness seemed like a pious widow searching for a new husband on her secluded farm. In truth, she was luring unsuspecting men from across the country with promises of love. Her name was Belle exposes the brutal yet gripping reality of a woman who murdered without remorse - in a case more terrifying than fiction.

London made her notorious. History made her a legend. In the crowded, dangerous streets of early modern London, Mary Frith defied every rule meant to keep women silent, modest, and unseen. Known to the city as Moll Cutpurse, she strode through taverns and theatres in men’s clothing, smoked in public, moved among thieves and brokers, and scandalized authorities who could not decide whether to punish her, fear her, or profit from her fame. But Moll was more than a criminal curiosity. She was a public woman in a world that wanted women contained. Condemned by moralists, rebuked by the church...

In a world where women were caregivers, where death among the poor was expected. Mary Ann Cotton became respectable. She was a nurse, a wife, a mother. And while she comforted, she poisoned. Arsenic and Respectability is a precise, unnerving portrait of a society where poisoning was easier concealed than suspected.

In July 1895, a quiet house in Plaistow became the centre of one of Victorian England’s most disturbing domestic cases. When a mother was found dead upstairs and her two sons continued living below, the story shocked the nation—not for its violence alone, but for what followed: silence, routine, and days lived beneath a locked door. The Plaistow Case reconstructs the events of that summer and traces their long aftermath, from the courtroom at the Old Bailey to institutions, emigration, war, and adulthood. Grounded in historical records and contemporary accounts, this narrative examines ...

A woman with a gun. A federal conviction. A sentence the system could not sustain. In 1899, Pearl Hart took part in one of the last stagecoach robberies in the American West. The crime was brief, poorly planned, and quickly punished. What followed was not. Convicted under federal law and sent to Yuma Territorial Prison, Hart became an administrative problem the justice system had not prepared for: a notorious female offender confined inside an institution built for men. Within months, the punishment imposed with public certainty began to unravel behind the scenes. The Stagecoach Robbery is ...

In October 1888, a gunshot shattered the fragile order of a young frontier town. When a North-West Mounted Police constable forced his way into a notorious Edmonton brothel, the woman behind the door refused to yield. The shot that followed wounded a Mountie—and exposed a system built on tolerated vice, selective enforcement, and silence. Big Nelly Webb, a madam operating at the edges of legality, became the centre of a public scandal that threatened police authority, unsettled civic respectability, and forced a courtroom to confront an uncomfortable truth: sometimes the law is the danger...

On 5 November 1878, Ella Hearn was shot in her family home in Pocomoke City, Maryland. The accused was Lillian Duer—her closest companion. What followed was a month-long vigil, a fugitive escape, a coroner’s inquest, and a sensational trial in Snow Hill. Based on surviving 19th-century reporting, The Duer–Hearn Case reveals a story of obsession, coercive control, and a justice system shaped by gender and class.

The Angel Makers of Nagyrév were a group of women accused of poisoning husbands and relatives with arsenic in rural Hungary. As suspicious deaths mounted, investigators exhumed bodies and discovered poison in the remains. Arrests and trials followed between 1929 and 1931, shocking the world. Arsenic Village is a verified true crime account of the Nagyrév poisonings—how it happened, how it spread, and how the state finally responded.