True Victorian

THE LEGEND REEXAMINED – THE CRIME THAT SHOCKED A NATION RETURNS TO THE STAND On the sweltering morning of August 4, 1892, a scream shattered the stillness of Fall River, Massachusetts. Within minutes, a quiet home on Second Street became the most infamous address in America. Inside lay Andrew and Abby Borden—bludgeoned, brutalized, and left to bleed on the polished floors of their own home. Standing in the doorway was their daughter, Lizzie Borden—calm, pale, and soon to be accused of the most sensational crime of the nineteenth century. Axed: The Untold Shocking True Story of Lizzie ...

The brutal murder of septuagenarian John Templeman shocks the little cottage community of Pocock's Fields. Rumours of illicit affairs, army desertion and violent confrontations spread as the community waits to see who will be sent to trial. An extraordinary power struggle develops between the Coroner, leading the Inquest, and the Police Magistrate, leading the Inquiry. As the case reaches a crisis point, just how far will the authorities be willing to go to bring the perpetrator to justice?

What if everything you admired about the Victorians—was built on denial? Beneath the lace gloves and gaslight of 19th-century England lay a darker world—one of public executions and private abuses, imperial brutality and official denial, moral posturing and systemic hypocrisy. The Dark Side of the Victorian Era pulls back the velvet curtain to reveal the crimes, cover-ups, and contradictions that polite society worked hard to ignore. From child migrants sent overseas under the banner of Christian charity to the macabre spectacles of execution day, from Parliament’s strategic silences ...

This story of the Elgin marbles re-creates in full detail "the greatest art theft in history." Almost 200 years after they were "purchased" from Greece, the finest and most famous marbles of antiquity still remain a burning issue. This compelling, controversial story of the Elgin marbles re-creates in full and colorful detail "the greatest art theft in history", a steamy tale of obsession, intrigue, adultery, and ruin.

A selection of murder mysteries and whodunnit’s A collection of Victorian and Edwardian murder mysteries. Gruesome and thrilling enjoy these fine dramatisations of true events and works of fiction performed by stella casts. The House of Mercy - After her travels in France, Eliza Martins...

What do Merlin, black cats, witch bottles, cursed diamonds, lucky horseshoes, talking boards, and Rome’s sacred chickens have in common? They all belong to humanity’s very long, very strange attempt to outsmart fate. STRANGE BUT TRUE: THE WEIRD HISTORY OF WITCHCRAFT & SUPERSTITION explores the peculiar beliefs, magical protections, ominous warnings, and questionable decisions that have followed people through thousands of years of history. Long before anyone blamed a witch, ancient civilizations consulted oracles, read messages in animal organs, carved curses into lead tablets, and ...

Into Africa: The Extraordinary Journeys of Frederick Courteney Selous – Volume One Before he became a legend... Frederick Courteney Selous was simply a young man determined to explore Africa. In an age when vast regions of the continent remained unknown to Europeans, Selous ventured deep into the African interior with little more than a rifle, a few supplies and an extraordinary appetite for adventure. He crossed raging rivers, travelled through country inhabited by lions, elephants, buffalo, crocodiles and hippos, negotiated with powerful African kings and chiefs, endured hunger, fever, ...

The Murders, the Manhunt, and the Mystery That Never Died In the autumn of 1888, fear settled over the narrow streets of London’s Whitechapel district. Women were being murdered. Police searched lodging houses, questioned suspects, followed witnesses, examined letters, and walked dark streets night after night. Newspapers competed for the most frightening headlines. Rumors spread faster than evidence. Then a letter arrived signed with a name that would become one of the most infamous in criminal history: Jack the Ripper. But was the letter actually written by the killer? More than a ...

The year is 1888 and a brutal serial killer stalks the streets of London. For the first time, the press realise if it bleeds it leads... Using press reports from the time The Ripper Reports reveals the crimes of Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel Murders as events unfolded. If you already know the Ripper crimes, this book reveals the fallacies, misinformation and conspiracies initially reported as events unfolded and England’s first serial killer was revealed to the world. If you are new to Jack the Ripper you can experience the rollercoaster of news revelations as the horrified ...

On the morning of August 4, 1892, one of America’s most infamous murder mysteries began inside a quiet house at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts. Andrew Borden was discovered brutally murdered on the sitting-room sofa. His wife, Abby, was found upstairs, killed earlier that morning. The house showed no clear sign of forced entry. No stranger had been seen escaping. The murder weapon was never conclusively identified. Suspicion soon settled upon Andrew’s thirty-two-year-old daughter, Lizzie. Through the eyes of Nellie Walsh, a fictional fifteen-year-old newspaper messenger, ...

August 1893. A young heir lies dead on a Scottish Highland estate. A loaded shotgun. A trusted tutor. Life insurance policies worth twenty thousand pounds, signed mere days before the fatal shot. The local authorities call it a tragic accident. Sherlock Holmes takes the next train north. At Ardlamont Estate in Argyllshire, Holmes and Watson uncover a crime of breathtaking calculation — and beneath it, something far larger: a systematic industry of fraud reaching from the Highland glens into the drawing rooms of London's most powerful men. Alfred Monson is meticulous, well-connected, and ...

One of the nineteenth century's most consequential — and most contested — spiritual figures. Helena Blavatsky co-founded the Theosophical Society, wrote two of the most influential esoteric texts of the modern era, and was publicly branded "one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history." Both things are true, and this biography holds them together rather than choosing a side. Tracing her life from a plague-era Russian childhood through a disastrous teenage marriage, years of unverifiable wandering across Egypt and possibly Tibet, a failed spiritualist ...

THIRD EDITION — Fully Revised, Fact-Checked and Updated to September 2026 The most current edition of Britain's strangest true crime collection — rewritten line by line, with three brand-new cases and every investigation brought up to date. In this expanded Third Edition of 50 Bizarre True Crime Cases That Shocked Britain, Julian Maddox returns to the darkest corners of British criminal history: the killers nobody stopped, the victims nobody believed, and the cold cases that refuse to close. From Dennis Nilsen's drains in Muswell Hill to a Victorian skull unearthed in a Richmond garden ...

What if the real history of magic is stranger than the tricks themselves? Long before rabbits popped out of hats and assistants started disappearing into suspiciously small boxes, magicians were fooling kings, terrifying crowds, exposing fake ghosts, escaping impossible traps, and occasionally making decisions that were spectacularly bad for their health. STRANGE BUT TRUE: THE WEIRD HISTORY OF MAGICIANS takes you behind the curtain for a hilarious journey through centuries of illusion, deception, showmanship, rivalry, and outright weirdness. Meet ancient tricksters, Victorian superstars, ...

An intrepid female reporter matches wits with a serious, sexy detective in an award-winning author's fun and flirty historical rom-com, perfect for readers of Evie Dunmore, Julia Quinn, and Tessa Dare!England, 1865: Newspaper columnist Lady Katherine Bascomb finds herself the subject of...

In 1910, Dorothy Arnold, a vibrant socialite and aspiring writer, stepped out for a shopping trip and was never seen again. Her disappearance gripped the nation, sparking a media frenzy and one of the most confounding unsolved mysteries in American history. Was it a tragic accident? A calculated escape? Or something far more sinister? The Vanishing Heiress dives deep into the heart of this century-old enigma, unraveling the circumstances surrounding Dorothy’s disappearance and the ripple effects it had on her wealthy family, the media, and society at large.

A macabre domestic conspiracy, a stolen fortune, and a phantom wandering the streets of Victorian London. When the notoriously eccentric and tight-fisted widow Mrs. Clarissa Hargrave precipitously leaves her secluded Richmond villa for a health resort in the Swiss Alps, London’s financial markets are caught in an unexpected upheaval. Prime riverside properties, irreplaceable family heirlooms, and thousands of pounds in consols are liquidated at fire-sale speed by an unassuming clerk wielding an absolute power of attorney. Scotland Yard sees merely the erratic behavior of an aging recluse....

He's been called a sailor, a doctor, a butcher, and a prince – yet no one truly knows. For more than a century, Jack the Ripper has been a blank canvas for countless theories, obscuring the facts behind myths, lies and half-truths. In Murder Tales: Jack the Ripper, crime historian H. N. Lloyd cuts through the fog to reveal what really happened in London’s Whitechapel. With his signature dry wit and meticulous research, Lloyd re-examines the evidence for a “medical” Ripper, dissects eyewitness testimonies, and exposes where the police investigation succeeded and failed. He also ...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a lady in danger must be in need of rescue, but whether she wants to be rescued is up for debate—for fans of Evie Dunmore and Netflix's Bridgerton from the bestselling author of A Lady's Guide to Mischief and Mayhem! England, 1867: Miss Poppy...

The Singular Affair of the Hollow Quetzal A New Adventure of Sherlock Holmes When the rarest ornithological archives of the British Empire ring with the chime of tempered steel, Sherlock Holmes is summoned to unravel a conspiracy of unprecedented ingenuity. On a dense, fog-bound November morning at 221B Baker Street, an unhinged taxidermist collapses across the threshold, his fingers stained with cochineal and his mind unraveling in terror. He brings with him an impossible anomaly: priceless museum bird skins that have been hollowed out from within and replaced with dense, ticking ...