A murderous atmosphere pervaded 19th-century America marked by lurid newspaper accounts and remembered in ballad and verse. The Bloody Century presents 50 of the most intriguing murder cases from the archives of American crime. It is a collection of fascinating stories - some famous, some long-buried - of Americans, driven by desperation, greed, jealousy, or an irrational bloodlust, to take another’s life. 

A deeply engaging and completely original book about nineteenth-century Britain’s fascination with good quality murder. Murder in nineteenth-century Britain was ubiquitous – not necessarily in quantity but in quality. This was the era of penny-bloods, early crime fiction and melodramas for the masses.

As any reader of murder mysteries can tell you, poison is one of the most enduring—and popular—weapons of choice for a scheming murderer. It can be slipped into a drink, smeared onto the tip of an arrow or the handle of a door, even filtered through the air we breathe. But how exactly do these poisons work to break our bodies down and what can we learn from the damage they inflict? In a fascinating blend of popular science, medical history, and narrative crime nonfiction, Dr Neil Bradbury explores this most morbidly captivating method of murder from a cellular level. 

The stories and the people involved in the history of murder are stranger, darker and more compulsive than any crime fiction. There’s Richard Parker, the cannibalized cabin boy whose death at the hands of his hungry crewmates led the Victorian courts to decisively outlaw a defence of necessity to murder. Dr Percy Bateman, the incompetent GP whose violent disregard for his patient changed the law on manslaughter. Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England in the 1950s, played a crucial role in changes to the law around provocation in murder cases.

In September 1935, Dr Buck Ruxton strangled his wife, Isabella, whom he suspected of having an affair, in their Lancashire home while their three children slept in their beds. When the nanny, Mary Rogerson, disturbed him in the act, he killed her, too. To hide his crimes, he dismembered and chopped up the bodies, removing any distinguishing features, before he disposed of them in a ravine on the Scottish borders. It took the genius of professors Sydney Smith and John Glaister, and their groundbreaking forensic techniques, to piece together the identities of the bodies. 

A female thief, with four husbands, a lover, and, reportedly, over 12 children, is arrested and tried for the murder of her stepson in 1872, turning the small village of West Auckland in County Durham upside down. Other bodies are exhumed, and when they are found to contain arsenic, she is suspected of their murder as well. The perpetrator, Mary Ann Cotton, was tried and found guilty and later hanged on 24 March 1873 in Durham Gaol. It is claimed she murdered over 20 people and was the first female serial killer in England. 

There are few criminal cases more astonishing yet less well-known than that of Graham Young. A quintessentially British crime story, it involves two sensational trials, murders both certain and probable, a clutch of forgiving relatives, and scores of surviving victims. A Passion for Poison tells the absorbing life of master poisoner, Graham Young, who killed many 10s of people in a murderous career, which began as a 13 year-old schoolboy in a North-west London suburb, with the murder of his step-mother in 1960 before culminating in four further life sentences in 1971. 

This audiobook uncovers 10 amazing true crimes that exploded into the national news, shocking Americans from coast to coast - crimes that were eventually forgotten - until now. Many of these incredible cases went unexplored for decades.

Most of us today rarely see a dead body. In 19th-century Sydney, when health was precarious and workplaces and the busy city streets were often dangerous, witnessing a death was rather common. And any death that was sudden or suspicious would be investigated by the coroner. Henry Shiell was the Sydney city coroner from 1866 to 1889. In the course of his unusually long career, he delved into the lives, loves, crimes, homes, and workplaces of colonial Sydneysiders.

The Tudor dynasty died out because there was no heir of Elizabeth I's body to succeed her. Henry VIII, despite his six marriages, had produced no legitimate son who would live into old age. Three of the reigning Tudors (Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I) died without heirs apparent, the most tragic case being that of Mary Tudor, who went through two recorded cases of phantom pregnancy. If it were not for physical frailty and the lack of reproductive health among the Tudors, the course of history might have been different.

Like her previous books, this book will be the result of the author's passionate interest in the realities of everyday life, and the conditions in which most people lived, so often left out of history books. This period of mid-Victorian London encompasses a huge range of subjects.

We know what life was like for Victoria and Albert. But what was it like for a commoner like you or me? How did it feel to cook with coal and wash with tea leaves? Drink beer for breakfast and clean your teeth with cuttlefish? Dress in whalebone and feed opium to the baby? Surviving everyday life came down to the gritty details, the small necessities and tricks of living. Drawing on Ruth's unique firsthand experience gained from living on a Victorian farm for a year, this book will teach you everything you need to know about 19th-century living. 

Inside The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women, a fascinating book about life during medieval times, you will discover tantalizing true stories about medieval women and a myriad of historical facts. 

In 1922, Major Herbert Armstrong, a Hay-on-Wye solicitor, was found guilty of, and executed for, poisoning his wife, Katharine, with arsenic. Armstrong's case has all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery, from a plot by Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers (indeed some aspects of his story appear in Sayers' Unnatural Death). It is a near-perfect whodunnit.  

Meet Clare Barker, the social worker who likes nothing more than sorting out other people's problems (while failing to deal with her own). Wracked with guilt over being white, middle-class and heterosexual, she has a dedicated social conscience (unless it's inconvenient for her) and lives to interfere in other people's lives—both on a personal and professional basis. Bearing the brunt of her control freakery and lack of self-awareness are her family, colleagues and long-suffering teacher partner, Brian—all of whom have their own frustrations, disappointments and dramas.