Great and Horrible News

Name: Great and Horrible News
Brand: Harper UK
Availability: InStock
Author: Blessin Adams
ISBN: 9780008500252

Author: Blessin Adams

Narrator: Jonathan Keeble

Unabridged: 7 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: William Collins

Published: 03/30/2023

Categories: Nonfiction, Biography & Autobiography, True Crime, History, European History, Murder, Historical

Synopsis

‘Grimly fascinating … engrossing’ NINE HISTORIC CRIMES. ONE FAMILIAR OBSESSION. In early modern England, murder truly was most foul. This history unfolds the true stories of murder, criminal investigation, early forensic techniques, high court trials and so much more. In thrilling narrative, we follow a fugitive killer through the streets of London, citizen detectives clamouring to help officials close the net. We untangle the mystery of a suspected staged suicide through the newly emerging science of forensic pathology. We see a mother trying to clear her dead daughter’s name while other women faced the accusations – sometimes true and sometimes not – of murdering their own children. These stories are pieced together from original research using coroner’s inquests, court records, parish archives, letters, diaries and the cheap street pamphlets that proliferated to satisfy a voracious public. These intensely personal stories portray the lives of real people as they confronted the extraordinary crises of murder, infanticide, miscarriage and suicide. Many historical laws and attitudes concerning death and murder may strike us as exceptionally cruel, and yet many still remind us that some things never change: we are still fascinated by narratives of murder and true crime, murder trials today continue to be grand public spectacles, female killers are frequently cast as aberrant objects of public hatred and sexual desire, and suicide remains a sin within many religious organisations and was a crime in England until the 1960s. Great and Horrible News!

Reviews

Goodreads review by Tim

We all have a horror of violent murder. But Pre-Modern Christians had an extra reason to fear it: a murdered man had no opportunity to prepare his soul for judgment. A murderer not only killed his victim, he could conceivably have sent him to hell.......more

Goodreads review by Kit

apart from so many typos (proofreading! is! important!), i enjoyed this a lot!......more

Goodreads review by Annarella

A well researched, intriguing, and gripping historical book or a book about historical true crime. It's compelling, well written, and informative. Highly recommended. Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine......more

Quotes

Praise for : ‘Grimly fascinating…vivid detail… The early moderns were obsessed by stories of death, crime and justice,’ Adams states in her introduction. Her book, which covers the two centuries between 1500 and 1700, proves her point with a succession of grisly but engrossing cases’ ‘A true crime treat from former police officer Blessin Adams. looks at what we can learn from early modern Britain when it comes to justice and criminality’ ‘Bleakly fascinating . . . police investigator turned academic Blessin Adams explores nine historic crimes . . . stimulating non-fiction’ ‘This gory history of crime shows that our obsession with lurid podcasts is nothing new . . . Adams, a police officer turned historian, has poured over coroners’ inquest records, court documents, pamphlets, newspaper articles, parish archives, ballads, wills, letters and diaries to restage nine grim stories of crime in England between 1500 and 1700. As an ex-copper, Adams is greatly interested in developments in forensic pathology in this period, which are superbly reconstructed from the sources’ ‘Perfect for fans of true-crime, this is a bone-chilling and brilliantly researched account of murder, cruelty, and scandal in Tudor and Stuart Britain. I couldn’t put it down, but I sincerely regret reading it alone in the countryside. A fantastic debut’ ‘At once an intriguing true crime examination of historical crime and a sociological dive into Britain’s history, Adams does a stellar job of introducing a nonet of little-known crimes, running the gamut from suicide to child abuse to murder, that while not for the faint of heart, quickly become engrossing to read’