‘I can never make any sense of what happened to you, Ethel. There were people had it in for you and I don’t know why. I think you were a soft target for cruel men.’Timid Ethel Slater grows up in a squalid terraced house in a railway community in 1950s York. Perpetually at the mercy of the men she encounters, she falls pregnant out of wedlock, retreats into obscurity and gives birth alone at home. When her newborn is found dead in her bedroom a few days later and fatal head...

From life ploughing the fields to satisfy a greedy sulking landlord to self-made men of the industrial revolution, from scratching a living from a few scruffy acres to squandering a fortune of as many whole farms, and from the Battlefield of Marston Moor to the Battle of Berlin, this is the story of the people of a corner of England over four hundred years.The plot pivots around one day in the year of 1841, then focuses on the lives of a handful of people and their descendants: Dul...

Tales of Hardship, Love and Happiness in Tate & Lyle’s East End Factories. The Sugar Girls went straight to No.10 in the Sunday Times Bestseller List, spending five weeks in the top ten.On an autumn day in 1944, Ethel Alleyne walked the short distance from her house to Tate & Lyle’s refinery on the shining curve of the Thames. Looking up at the giant gates, Ethel felt like she had been preparing for this moment all her life. She smoothed down her frizzy hair, scraped a bit of dirt ...

A brilliant true crime account of the assassinations that altered the course of Irish history from the "compulsively readable" writer ( The Guardian).One sunlit evening, May 6, 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, were ambushed and stabbed to death while strolling through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The murders were funded by American supporters of Irish independence and carried out by the Invincibles...

The first in the series featuring DI Geraldine Steel⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'I really enjoy this author, once you start reading you can't put down' Amazon customer⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Leigh always writes books I get lost in and the Geraldine Steel series is just fabulous!' Beyond The Books'a gritty and totally addictive debut novel' Sam Millar, New York Journal of BooksWhen D.I. Geraldine Steel relocates to the qu...

Dark and foggy Victorian streets, the murderous madman, the arsenic-laced evening meal - we all think we know the realities of Victorian crime. Adrian Gray's thrilling book recounts the classic murders, by knife and poison, but it also covers much more, taking the reader into less familiar parts of Victorian life, uncovering the wicked, the vengeful, the foolish and the hopeless amongst the criminal world of the nineteenth century. Here you will encounter the women who sol...

By dusty decree, the county judges sent em down . . . and the city sheriffs strung em up.From Norman times to the late 19th century, Cheshire had its own unique way of disposing of the criminals condemned at its assizes. For more than 500 years the countys rulers simply handed the miscreants over to the Chester city fathers who, due to an obscure medieval tradition, were duty bound to execute them.Ever since the Emperor Vespasians Second Legion encamped beside the River Dee, Chester h...

During the Blitz, the Sugar Girls kept Britain sweet. The work was back-breakingly hard, but the Tate & Lyle factory was more than just a workplace – it was a community, a calling, a place of love and support and an uproarious, tribal part of East London. This is Ethel’s story, one of four stories from The Sugar Girls.‘On an autumn day in 1944, Ethel Alleyne walked the short distance from her house to Tate & Lyle’s refinery on the shining curve of the Thames. Looking up at the gian...

A breathtaking history of Britain's executioners—from the seventeenth court of King Charles II to the UK's last official hangman of the twentieth century.In 1663, Jack Ketch delighted in his profession and gained notoriety not only because of those he executed—dukes and lords—but for how often he botched the job. Centuries later, in 1965, after nearly six hundred trips to the gallows, Albert Pierrepoint retired as Britain's longest-running executioner. Between them...

Using contemporary documents, police files, Home Office papers and newspaper reports, 'Jack the Ripper: The Facts' recreates the notorious crimes and police investigation of 1888 to provide the best available overview of the 'Great Victorian Mystery', the greatest unsolved, true crime story of all time. Written by one of the world's foremost authorities on the case, this is a completely rewritten and fully updated edition of Begg's classic title Jack the Ripper. It follows the crimes chron...

'The clearest, most accurate, and most up-to-date account of the Ripper murders, by one of Britain's greatest and most respected experts on the "autumn of terror" in Victorian London.'William D. Rubenstein, Professor of Modern History, University of Wales, AberystwythEngland in the 1880s was a society in transition, shedding the skin of Victorianism and moving towards a more modern age. Promiscuity, moral decline, prostitution, unemployment, poverty, police ineffic...

The Cleveland Street scandal, involving a homosexual brothel reputedly visited by the Queen's grandson, shocked Victorian Britain in 1889. This is the first full-length account of one of its key players, Jack Saul, a working class Irish Catholic rent boy who worked his way into the upper echelons of the aristocracy, and wrote the notorious pornographic memoir The Sins of the Cities of the Plain. Glenn Chandler, creator of Taggart, explores his colourful but tragic life and reveals for the ...