Kate Summerscale is an English author celebrated for her meticulously researched and compelling historical narratives. She possesses a remarkable talent for unearthing fascinating, often overlooked stories and bringing them vividly to life through her keen literary sensibility. Summerscale's work delves into the complexities of the past, skillfully weaving together factual accounts with insightful explorations of human motivation and societal dynamics. Her distinctive narrative approach invites readers into intricate historical mysteries, revealing the deeper currents of human experience.
'Once more, Kate Summerscale shatters our preconceptions of a classic crime' Val McDermid From Britain's top-selling true crime writer and author of Sunday Times #1 bestseller THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER... London, 1953. Police discover the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy terrace house in Notting Hill. On searching the building, th[Bokinfo].
A thrilling compendium of our deepest fears and obsessions by the bestselling author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.
The extraordinary story of a 1930s ghost hunt, and the woman who confounded the world, from the bestselling, award-winning author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
De geheime liefde van een getrouwde Engelse vrouw voor een tien jaar jongere, getrouwde medisch student leidt in 1858 tot het eerste Britse echtscheidingsproces.
When the married Isabella Robinson was introduced to the dashing Edward Lane at a party in 1850, she was utterly enchanted. He was 'fascinating', she told her diary, before chastising herself for being so susceptible to a man's charms. But a wish had taken hold of her, and she was to find it hard to shake...In one of the most notorious divorce cases of the nineteenth century, Isabella Robinson's scandalous secrets were exposed to the world. Kate Summerscale brings vividly to life a frustrated Victorian wife's longing for passion and learning, companionship and love, in a society clinging to rigid ideas about marriage and female sexuality.
Of de moord in Road Hill House - druk 5
Engeland, 1860. Een lijk, een detective, een afgelegen landhuis en een verdachte familie met veel geheimen. Jack Whicher, een gevierd detective van Scotland Yard, wordt naar Road Hill House gestuurd om de moord op de driejarige kleuter Saville kent te onderzoeken. Met hulp van een onervaren lokaal politieteam en zonder enig feitelijk bewijs staat hij voor een schijnbaar onmogelijke taak - een van de rouwende bewoners moet de dader zijn. De moord leidt tot nationale hysterie. De gedachte wat zich allemaal achter de gesloten deuren van zomaar een respectabele familie op het platteland kan afspelen - onbetrouwbare bedienden, opstandige kinderen, gekte, jaloezie, eenzaamheid en haat - maakt mensen angstig, maar zorgt ook voor opwinding. Iedereen heeft zijn eigen theorie over wie de moordenaar is. Net als detective Whicher. In De vermoedens van Mr. Whicher reconstrueert Kate Summerscale op minutieuze wijze de feiten achter deze gruwelijke zaak. Met haar levendige vertelstem en de buitengewoon intelligente manier waarop ze het mysterie langzaam ontrafelt, heeft ze een meesterlijk boek geschreven dat leest als een thriller.
Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective
The dramatic story of the real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction. In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land. At the time, the detective was a relatively new invention; there were only eight detectives in all of England and rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking, as Kate Summerscale relates in her scintillating new book, that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher. Whicher quickly believed the unbelievable—that someone within the family was responsible for the murder of young Saville Kent. Without sufficient evidence or a confession, though, his case was circumstantial and he returned to London a broken man. Though he would be vindicated five years later, the real legacy of Jonathan Whicher lives on in fiction: the tough, quirky, knowing, and all-seeing detective that we know and love today…from the cryptic Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a provocative work of nonfiction that reads like a Victorian thriller, and in it Kate Summerscale has fashioned a brilliant, multilayered narrative that is as cleverly constructed as it is beautifully written.
Or, The murder at Road Hill House
It is midnight on 30th June 1860 and all is quiet in the Kent family's elegant house in Road, Wiltshire. The next morning, however, they wake to find that their youngest son has been the victim of an unimaginably gruesome murder - the house was bolted from the inside. As Jack Whicher, the most celebrated detective of his day, arrives at Road to track down the killer, the murder provokes national hysteria at the thought of what might be festering behind the closed doors of respectable middle-class homes - scheming servants, rebellious children, insanity, jealously, loneliness and loathing.
Joe Carstairs was born in London in 1900, the daughter of a Scottish colonel and an American heiress. She was educated in Connecticut and returned to Europe in 1916, to drive ambulances for the Women's Legion in France. She deserted her husband at the church door (marriage having been a prerequisite of her coming into her $4 million inheritance) and settled in England, where she took up motor-boat racing, winning many trophies, and established a boatyard at Cowes.
