A woman doctor in an English village finds herself the center of some nasty attention from police as well as villagers. The will of a murdered woman names her the sole beneficiary and people assume she killed her. By the author of The Sculptress.
Minette Walters takes us on a compelling and unpredictable tour of the tensions between generations, and along a trail of grief made obscure by the mysterious loss of Mathilda's detailed, shocking and very personal diaries.
The crime novel originally published in London in 1994 from an author whose previous books - 'The Sculptress' and 'The Ice House' - were highly acclaimed and received awards including the Edgar Allan Poe Award 1993 for the best crime novel of the year and the John Creasey Award. This story concerns the investigation into the death of an old lady - did she commit suicide or was she murdered?.
A book written in 1939 and later discovered and rescued by Waterside Press - that gives a detailed account of the often barbaric or shameful punishments used in former times. Since this book was first published in the 1950s the description it contains of the history of crime and punishment in Britain over the previous 200 years or so has attracted interest across a wide spectrum. The work was reprinted in 1992 by Waterside Press having been out of print for decades. The contents cover a wide range of historic punishments from outlawry to the ducking stool, the pillory, stocks and whirligig to the branding iron and scold's bridle. From mutilation and torture to sanctuary and the emergence of private and then public prisons this is an essential addition to any criminal justice collection - imbued as it is by the comments of the author from the perspective of his own era, which provides for fascination in itself. Printed in the original style and format - together with a large number of the original illustrations. Quite absorbing - The book transports the reader to a time when punishments were often brutal, unrestrained and unregulated by standards, fairness or consistency. It also looks at the sometimes strange logic that was applied by judges, justices of the peace and those charged with carrying out the task.
Mathilda Gillespie's body was found nearly two days after she'd taken an overdose and slashed her wrists with a Stanley knife. But what shocked Dr Sarah Blakeney the most was the scold's bridle obscuring the dead woman's face.
Winner of the Edgar Award and the Macavity Award for Best Novel In prison they call her the sculptress: a grotesquely obese young woman convicted of cutting her mother and sister to pieces and rearranging their bodies on the floor like a jigsaw puzzle. She pleaded guilty to the crime, but no one has noticed that the facts don't add up until Rosalind Leigh comes to visit the prisoner, hoping to get a book deal out of her story. The more fevered Rosalind's pursuit of the truth, the closer she gets to the true source of the evil ascribed to the Sculptress in her cell.
When a decomposed body turns up in the ice house of Streech Grange manor, Chief Inspector Walsh is assigned to investigate the possibility that the corpse is the long-missing husband of owner Phoebe Maybury.
Alice Morse Earle was a social historian of great note at the turn of the century, and many of her books have lived on as well-researched and well-written texts of everyday life in Colonial America. Curious Punishments of Bygone Days was published in 1896. It is a catalog of early American crimes and their penalties, with chapters on the pillories, stocks, the scarlet letter, the ducking stool, discipline of authors and books (egad!), and four other horrifying examples of ways in which those who transgressed the laws of Colonial America were made to pay for their sins.