TRYING TO PROVE that a historical figure was not JackThe Ripper was the beginning of 15 years of research. At eachturn, whether it be motive, opportunity, psychological profile,etc., I could not remove him from suspicion. What I foundonly kept pointing more and more toward he could havedone it. It was painful not be able to cross him off my list.As we have learned mass-murderers come in various shapesand sizes. Theodore Robe...

Young Sherlock Holmes: Bedlam is Andrew Lane's short read in which the iconic detective is reimagined as a brilliant, troubled and engaging teenager.Sherlock has been incarcerated in the Bethlehem Hospital – Bedlam - where Victorian London’s most unfortunate citizens are locked away in squalor, cruelty and hopelessness. Sherlock tells them he’s not mad – but who’d believe a lunatic? There’s only one option: he has to escape – and then use all his rational ...

'A story to strike pity and terror into any heart' Times Literary SupplementJoseph Carey Merrick, born in Leicester on 5th August 1852, is better known as the Elephant Man. Through horrible physical deformities which were almost impossible to describe, he spent much of his life exhibited as a fairground freak until even nineteenth-century sensibilities could take no more.Hounded, persecuted and starving, he ended up one day at Liverpool Street Stat...

Everyone has a secret in their past: discover the hidden lives of some of the best-loved residents of Burracombe.Escape to the little Devonshire village that feels like home with this compelling Burracombe short story.On Easter day in 1918, as the Great War entered its closing stages, Frances Kemp looked out at the little thatched village in the valley below and promised that, one day, she'd come back...For long before Miss Kemp became headmistress ...

*The ebook bestseller*A story bursting with colour and flavour, perfect for fans of Susanna Gregory, Georgette Heyer and Joanne Harris1665. Susannah Leyton has grown up behind the counter of her father's apothecary shop in bustling Fleet Street. A skilled student - the resinous scents of lavender, rosemary, liquorice and turpentine run in her blood - her father has granted her the freedom to pursue her considerable talents....

From bestselling thriller author David Morrell comes a brooding Thomas De Quincey short story about the coldest of deaths and their heartbreaking aftermath.Thomas De Quincey -- the central character of Morrell's acclaimed Victorian mysteries, Murder as a Fine Art and Inspector of the Dead -- was one of the most notorious and brilliant literary personalities of the 1800s. His infamous Confessions of an English Opium-Eater made history as the first book abou...

"I like the way your mind works," said Doyle. "We should work on something together. Pool our resources. What do you say?" I said I would enjoy that very much.' ---------------- When a young journalist, Bertram Fletcher Robinson, meets his writer hero Arthur Conan Doyle on a troop ship coming back from South Africa, he is delighted - especially when the creator of Sherlock Holmes suggests they collaborate on a 'real creeper' of a story. But the experience will prove traumatic for both of t...

John Merrick had lived for more than twenty years imprisoned in a body that condemned him to a miserable life in the workhouse and to humiliation as a circus sideshow freak.But beneath that tragic exterior, within that enormous and deformed head, thrived the soul of a poet, the heart of a dreamer, the longings of a man. Merrick was doomed to suffer forever—until the kind Dr. Treves gave him the first real home in the London Hospital and the town's most beautiful and esteemed actres...

"An enthralling and luminous play" about the nineteenth-century man whose physical deformity doomed him to the life of an outcast: "haunting [and] splendid" ( The New York Times).The Elephant Man is based on the life of John Merrick, who lived in London during the latter part of the nineteenth century. A horribly deformed young man, a freak attraction in traveling side shows, is found abandoned and helpless and is admitted for observation to White...

A funny, fantastically entertaining debut novel, in the spirit of Wodehouse and Monty Python, about a famous poet who inadvertently sells his wife to the devil--then recruits a band of adventurers to rescue her.When Lionel Savage, a popular poet in Victorian London, learns from his butler that they're broke, he marries the beautiful Vivien Lancaster for her money, only to find that his muse has abandoned him.Distraught and contemplating suicide, Savage acci...

Beauty, romance, suspense: Judith Eubank handles a timeless mystery with a light, sure touch. Crossover evokes the brooding atmosphere of Daphne du Maurier with the wit, intelligence, and sensibility of Dorothy Sayers. As she adapts to British university life, Meredith Blake, a young American scholar, discovers that Edwards Hall is not the same for her as it is for the others. For her, it is full of riddles and reminders of the Victorian family that had once lived there and the tr...

By the time Vivienne Eliot was committed to an asylum for what would be the final nine years of her life, she had been abandoned by her husband T.S. Eliot and shunned by literary London. Yet Vivienne was neither insane nor insignificant. She generously collaborated in her husband’s literary efforts, taking dictation, editing his drafts, and writing articles for his magazine, Criterion. Her distinctive voice can be heard in his poetry. And paradoxically, it was the unhappiness of t...