2023 50 Book Challenge

2023 is Historical Murder Trash!
* = Must Purchase

1) The Bloody Countess: Atrocities of Erzsebet Bathory by Valentine Penrose - XDid Not Keep!X
2) The Royal Art of Poison by Eleanor Herman XDid Not Keep!X
3) Blood Work by Holly Tucker XDid Not Keep!X
4) Unnatural Murder by Anne Somerset - Enjoyed!
5) A Taste for Poison by Neil Bradbury Ph.D. Loved!
6) The Affair of the Poisons by Anne Somerset - Enjoyed!
7) City of Light, City of Poison by Holly Tucker XDid Not Keep!X
8) The World of Lore: Wicked Mortals by Aaron Mahnke - Enjoyed!
9) The London Monster by Jan Bondeson Loved!
10) Damn His Blood by Peter Moore - Enjoyed!
11) Heaven's Ditch by Jack Kelly XDid Not Keep!X
12) The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London by Sarah Wise - Enjoyed!
13) The Murder of Dr. Chapman by Linda Wolfe Loved!
14) Death of an Assassin by Ann Marie Ackermann XDid Not Keep!X
15) The Murder of Helen Jewett by Patricia Cline Cohen - Enjoyed!
16) The Beautiful Cigar Girl by Daniel Stashower Loved!
17) Killer Colt by Harold Schechter Loved!
18) The King of Confidence by Miles Harvey Loved!
19) All That is Wicked by Kate Winkler Dawson - Enjoyed!
20) The Peculiar Case of the Electric Constable by Carol Baxter XDid Not Keep!X
21) Blood & Ivy by Paul Collins XDid Not Keep!X
22) Murder, Magic, Madness by Owen Davies Loved!
23) The Last Pirate of New York by Rich Cohen XDid Not Keep!X
24) Hell's Half-Acre by Susan Jonusas Loved! and The Benders by Fern Wood XDid Not Keep!X
25) Man-Eater by Harold Schechter - Enjoyed!
26) The Inventor and the Tycoon by Edward Ball XDid Not Keep!X
27) Death at the Priory by James Ruddick Loved!
28) Hell's Princess by Harold Schechter Loved!
29) The Midnight Assassin by Skip Hollandsworth XDid Not Keep!X
30) Myth, Monster, Murderer by Jackie Anderson - Enjoyed!
31) Did She Kill Him? by Kate Colquhoun - Enjoyed!
32) The Killer of Little Shepherds by Douglas Starr - Enjoyed!
33) The Burning of Bridget Cleary by Angela Bourke XDid Not Keep!X
34) Empire of Sin by Gary Krist
35) The Devil's Gentleman by Harold Schechter
36) The Butcher's Tale by Helmut Walser Smith
37) Conan Doyle for the Defense by Margalit Fox - XDid Not Keep!X
38) American Lightning by Howard Blum XDid Not Keep!X
39) Thunderstruck by Erik Larson - Enjoyed!
40) Starvation Heights by Gregg Olsen Loved!
41) The Crimes of Paris by Dorothy Hoobler
42) Devil's Rooming House by M. William Phelps XDid Not Keep!X
43) And the Dead Shall Rise by Steve Oney - DNF!
44) The Ghosts of Eden Park by Karen Abbott Loved!
45) Violette Noziere by Sarah Maza - Loved!
46) American Demon by Daniel Stashower - XDid Not KeepX
47) Twilight at the World of Tomorrow by James MauroXDid Not KeepX
48) Death in the City of Light by David King - Enjoyed!
49) Death in the Air by Kate Winkler Dawson Loved!
50) The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston
51) I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara
52) Furious Hours by Casey Cep

Bonus Ones:
Paris Requiem by Chris Lloyd XDid Not Keep!X
Perfume: The Story of a Murder by Patrick Suskind Loved!
The Pale Blue Eye by Louis Bayard Loved!
See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt
All the Blood We Share: A Novel of the Bloody Benders of Kansas by Camilla Bruce
Six Miles to Charleston by Bruce Orr

Finished reading The Bloody Countess: Atrocities of Erzsebet Bathory by Valentine Penrose
Pages: 148
Words: Mielliki, Isten, Ordog, dithyramb, ichthyoglosses, ichthyodontes, "ceremony of the touchstone", meerschaum, salmordine,
Notes: "The minutes of the trial were discovered in 1729 by a Jesuit Father, Laslo Turaczi, who wrote a monograph on Erzsebet Bathory, to be published in 1744."

"Gout was the hereditary illness of the family...the other was epilepsy. Stephen Bathory, King of Poland, Erzsebet's uncle, died of this disease...She was always suffering from headaches

"Another uncle still, named Gabor, complained of being possessed by the devil...Erzsebet's paternal aunt, Klara Bathory got rid of her first two husbands...Finally she took a young lover and gave him a castle...They were both captured by a pasha. Her lover was skewered and roasted. As for her, she was r***** by the whole garrison and her throat slit."

"Andras Bathory was hacked to death on a glacier. His severed head was recovered; it was sewn back on again and the body was exhibited in the church of Gyulalehervar."

"She was thought to have been, amongst other things, a lesbian."

"Tomas Nadasdy always protected men of learning. It was he who, in 1537 at Sarvar, was responsible for the printing of the first book in Hungarian language, a copy of which is still in the possession of the National Museum in Budapest."

"Ferencz died at Csejthe in January, 1604, when he was only 49 years of age."

"As for the young ones...she had conducted them to the main castle on the hill...given nothing to eat and drink...After 4 days, her sister, Anna, and her husband, left for Presbourg and Erzsebet finally gave unfortunate girls food and drink but only 3 survived."

"12 Augustiner Strasse at the corner of Dorotheengasse in Vienna. It was this house which Erzsebet and Ferencz stayed during their sojourns to the Viennese court."

"Jo Ilona had ripped the clothes off of a young serving wench, and she stood there in the snow. Water was poured on to her and it froze instantly. The girl struggled towards the heat of the torches; more water was poured over her...She was buried at the edge of the road in the field, under the snow."

Rating: 2 out of 5

Finished reading The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul by Eleanor Herman
Pages: 260
Words: Aqua Toffana, pomander, sternutatoria, toadstones or tongue stones, kohl, stibnite, lanolin, cadaverine, putrescine,
Notes: "deadly quartet of arsenic, antimony, mercury and lead."

"...sublimate (mercury chloride, a poisonous white crystal), sal ammoniac (a mineral composed of ammonia chloride), rock salt, verdigris (a blue or green powder from corroding copper), and distillate of cyclamen, a flower that blooms in December in Venice."

"On May 26, 1604, when King Henri IV of France moved forward to take Holy Communion from the priest, his dog grabbed his coat and pulled him back. He made the priest take the wafer first, and his body swelled up and burst in twain."

"The gentlemen who made Henry VIII's bed every morning had to kiss every part of the sheets, pillows, and blankets they had touched to prove they had not smeared poison on them."

"...inhaled poison is the most dangerous of all...a blast of odorless, tasteless mercury can go directly to the brain."

"In 1613, Sir Thomas Overbury died in agony after his enemies at the court of James I paid a doctor to give him a sulfuric acid enema."

"In 1536, Count Sebastiano Montecuccoli, was found guilty of pooisoning the heir to the Fremch throne, eighteen year old Francois, Duke of Brittany..."

"Unicorn horn was believed to sweat. change color and shake if it came near poison...the cost of one was at least 11x its weight in gold..Christian V of Denmark commissioned a new throne made entirely of unicorn horn"

"Waving emerald, coral, aquamarine, and amethyst rings over food was thought to neutralize poison, as were stones engraved with the image of scorpions."

"When the calcium carbonate in fossils is mixed with arsenic, it neutralizes the poison via chelation. Chelation can neutralize mercury, arsenic and most heavy metals."

"...ceruse foundation, a paste consisting of tincture of white lead ore, vinegar and sometimes arsenic, hydroxide and carbonate...applied over egg whites..."

"Jerome of Brunswick advised those wishing for thicker hair to take the blood of a thirty year old man and rub it into the scalp or drink it, preferably in the middle of May."

"Aqua argentata, or silvered water was used a lotion...called for mercury sublimate mashed in a mortar and mixed with liquid mercury and strong white vinegar. After sitting for 8 days, it was mixed with 12 or 15 crushed pearls, ground up gold or silver, camphor, bezoar and talc. This mixture was left in the sun for 40 days, then combined with eggs, turpentine and lemon grind."

"During the Lewis and Clark expedition, the men's main diet was strips of dried beef, and they all suffered from shocking constipation. They brought along laxative pills with a 60% mercury content which did the job. Since mercury doesn't dissolve in soil, modern historians have discovered many of the expedition's campsites by finding the areas they used as a latrine."

In the 11th century the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy entered into a civil war. Those who supported the Pope were the Guelphs and those who supported the emperor were the Ghibellines. Napoleon's surname, Bonaparte, came from "Buonaparte" meaning good party, which were the Florentine Ghibellines.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Finished reading Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution by Holly Tucker
Pages: 231
Words: epiglottis; girdle books; ostiola; mithridate
Notes: "1667: Denis transferred lamb's blood into the veins of a 15-yr old boy."

"Mauroy was formerly the Marquise de Sevigne's valet, who greeted visitors and guests before they entered her salon."

"The heart was connected to Leo; the feet, Pisces; the gut, Libra; and the genitalia Scorpio."

"According to Aristotle, the lowest entity on the Great Chain of Being was plant life, which possessed a corporeal "vegetative soul" endowed with only the basic faculties necessary for life: nutrition, growth and reproduction. Higher up, animals enjoyed both this vegetative soul and sensitive soul which allowed for sensation, movement and emotion. Humans alone possessed an intellectual soul, along with the vegetative and sensitive faculties. This allowed for knowledge, memory, will and reason."

"Unlike humans, who have only four blood types, dogs have more than a dozen possible blood types."

"In 1667, the same year as Denis' experiments, parliament reversed the 1566 decree that forbade the use of chemical remedies."

"Animals did not drink, swear or overindulge their passions. Animals are less subject to the "sadness, envy, anger, melancholy, disgust and generally all the passions that trouble the life of man and corrupt the whole substance of the blood."

"But neither Oldenburg nor the English scientific community could deny that the French had won the race for the first human blood transfusion."

"Judge Defita exonerated Denos of all accusations that his transfusions had killed Mauroy. The widow was formally charges with murder and taken away."

"In his address President George W. Bush called for legislation to prohibit animal-human embryonic stem cell research as a way to prevent "untold damage to the human species." In 2009, a few months after her son left the White House, Barbara Bush underwent open-heart surgery to replace her aortic valve; the replacement valve was from a pig."

Rating: 3 out of 5

Finished reading Paris Requiem by Chris Lloyd
Pages: 385
Words: None
Notes: None

Rating: 3 out of 5

Finished reading City of Light, City of Poison by Holly Tucker
Words: argentine, cantharis, cantharidin, la robe battante, spikenard, terebinth resin, earth of Lemnos, brodequins,
Notes: "An ornate rooster was painted on each lantern, the symbol of timely vigilance. When La Reynie was done, 2,736 lanterns illuminated the majority of Paris' streets."

"Plants such as celery, fern, juniper and parsley were long believed to stimulate menstruation; and marjoram, peony, marigold and pennyroyal were lauded for being able to cause abortions."

"A laundress could wash a shirt with an arsenic-based soap and when worn would cause blisters, vomiting and death. The family, seeing the rash, would diagnose the man with a pernicious case of syphilis."

"Louis signed a lettre de cachet, ultimately banishing Anthenais' cuckolded husband. She announced to family, friends and the couple's 5-year old daughter and three-year old son that the marquise was dead and following a symbolic funeral at the local church, ordered the household to wear black in a gesture of mourning."

"At a ball at the couple's home, Philippe appeared in a dress and joined a cluster of women...A smartly dressed man approached and bowed to the group. Henrietta Anne's husband lifted the sides of his dress demurely and curtsied to the chevalier of Lorraine. The two men glided into the center of the ballroom and performed a perfectly choreographed minuet."

"Louis needed someone Charles II trusted to help broker the deal. There was no better person for the job than Henrietta Anne, the king's own sister...For two weeks, Henrietta Anne helped craft a treaty on which the 'fate of Europe had depended," while her husband seethed."

"In France there were two levels of postsentencing torture, the Question Ordinaire and the Question Extraordinaire. Torture took four main forms: strappado, water torture, brodequins, and the rack."

"As the soldiers broke in to the dining room to arrest her, Brinvilliers smashed a glass on the table and frantically shoved the shards into her mouth in a suicide attempt. After a short struggle, the officers stopped her before she had a chance to swallow the fragments."

"Twelve years earlier Lesage had been sentenced to the galleys for life for tricking customers into believing that he could communicate with the devil. He was freed just five years later, after a lady of quality successfully petitioned the king for his release...Rumors swirled that he and Voisin had been lovers."

"Voisin implicated Olympe Mancini, one of Louis XIV's first mistresses. She never fully recovered from his decision to abandon her in favor of her younger sister, and later for the Louise de la Valliere. Olympe spat out that she wanted to see Louise dead for having stolen the king from her, and, if that was not possible, she would take her vengeance even farther up."

"Filastre said Montespan wanted Mlle de Fontanges poisoned and also needed stronger magical powders to make the king love her again. This was why, Filastre confessed, she had tried to secure a place in Fontange's household, and it was also why she made a pact with the devil while she was in labor."

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Finished reading Unnatural Murder: Poison at the Court of James I by Anne Somerset
Pages: 466
Words: bastinado,
Notes: "In early 17th century England the age of consent was 12 for a girl and 14 for a boy. Nevertheless, although ti was legal to marry once those ages had been attained, many people felt that it was inadvisable to do so."

"In 1614 Suffolk was appointed Lord Treasurer, but 4 years later he was dismissed and he and his wife were charged with embezzlement...it emerged that it was Lady Suffolk who had instigated the corrupt transactions, including misappropriating funds destined for the army in Ireland and extorting money from England's leading trading company, the Merchant Adventurers."

"...by a statute dating from the reign of Henry VIII, sodomy was a felony, punishable by hanging. Admittedly, the purpose of that act had been as much political as moral. It was passed, not because Henry felt concerned by a supposed upsurge in homosexuality, but because he wished to reduce the power of the church courts, which hitherto had had jurisdiction over such cases."

"In 1616, after it had emerged that the Countess of Somerset had been a client of several cunning men, Lord Chief Justice Coke mounted a purge of these practitioners of magic."

"Simon Forman, in 1592, gained immense kudos during an epidemic of the plague. Fearing infection, many members of the College of Physicians had fled the disease-ridden capital, leaving the populace to fend for itself. Forman, however, had stayed behind. He created a sensation when he cured himself and members of his household of an illness diagnosed as the plague by lancing the sores and administering distilled liquors."

"Mary Woods, otherwise known as 'Cunning Mary', came from a village near Norwich. She claimed to be skilled at palmistry, telling fortunes, and finding lost property with the aid of familiars...As security, Frances gave her a diamond ring worth 60 pounds which the Earl of Essex had purchased for her while on his travels."

"Although divorce was not an option for English couples, it was theoretically possible to procure an annulment as... promulgated by Pope Gregory IX in the 13th c. If a husband testified under oath that he was impotent, and his wife confirmed this, then their marriage could be considered void. The drawback was that, if the husband had successful sexual relations with another woman, he would be guilty of perjury."

"Although he had offered no proof to substantiate his allegations, Frances's lawyers believed that decisive action was necessary to counter them. In order to refute Essex's claim that Frances was physically incapable of the sexual act, while simultaneously establishing that she was a virgin, they proposed that Frances submit myself to a gynecological examination by a panel of midwives and married ladies."

"...never before been a case in English law in which a man had been recognized as impotent towards his wife but virile with other women...contended that King Henry VIII's divorce from Anne of Cleves furnished the commissioners with the precedent they needed...he implied that he had tried and failed to consummate his marriage. The King's physician, Dr. Butts, also gave evidence that Henry 'thought himself able to do the act with other but not with her...proceeded to annul Henry's marriage they did so, not on the basis of this testimony, but rather because Anne had earlier been precontracted to a son of the Duke of Lorraine."

"Since Abbot could not accept that witchcraft was responsible for Essex's condition, he concluded that Essex's failure to consummate the marriage was an act of will, arising simply from the fact that he did not loves Frances...For one thing, James was annoyed by Abbot's contention that scripture could settle all disputes, for this seemed to him 'preposterous, and one of the Puritans' arguments."

"Sir Thomas Overbury, for on Sept 15 1613, the latter had died in the Tower of London...As Ms Turner looked on, Frances explained to Weston that, in return for a substantial reward, she wished him to administer to Overbury "a water" which she would arrange to have delivered to the Tower. She said that it would do Sir Thomas no harm, but stressed that Weston must not sample the liquid himself. Weston later admitted that he 'at least suspected it should be poison."

"James Franklin was reputed to have poisoned his first wife, who died in agony after Franklin had given her a powder, supposedly for medicinal purposes...At this meeting the Countess told Franklin that aqua fortis had such violent effects that it was bound to arouse suspicion if administered to Overbury...In all, Franklin claimed to have supplied her with seven varieties: aqua fortis, mercury water, white arsenic, powder of diamonds, lapis cosmatis, 'great spiders' (an unidentified substance) and cantharides, or Spanish fly."

"The fact that Overbury was a patient of Dr. Mayerne, who regarded issues in the back as a sovereign remedy, raises the possibility that, while in the Tower, Sir Thomas had agreed to supplement the existing issue in his arm with another one between his shoulder-blades."

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Finished reading Heaven's Ditch: God, Gold and Murder on the Erie Canal by Jack Kelly
Pages: 264
Words: None.
Notes: "Ginseng grew wild in Vermont hills. Joseph Smith, Sr. amassed a large quantity of it, and he and his wife boiled it in sugar to preserve it for transport..."

"In 1812, typhoid swept Vermont...all Smith children became ill. They survived, but a lingering infection invaded the bone of young Joe's leg. Twice, a physician laid open his shin from ankle to knee...chiseling away the infected bone. His father held him while the doctors removed three fetid chunks of his shin bone. The wound finally healed, but Joe spent the next three years on crutches."

"The New York state legislature voted to form a 7-man commission that included Clinton, a Jeffersonian Republican; Gouveneur Morris, a Federalist, and Stephen Van Rensselaer, a landed Dutch patroon from Albany."

"Deists - President Jefferson was one - believed that God was the prime cause of reality. But after the creation, they reasoned, the Almighty stepped back and allowed the world to operate according to natural laws. They viewed the world as a rational place."

"James Geddes led the team that plotted the route through the most remote section of the waterway, from east Palmyra to Lake Erie. The commissioners assigned the middle section to Benjamin Wright...Charles Broadhead, another surveyor, would cover most of the upper Mohawk Valley, from Utica eastward."

"William Morgan had tried the pirate's life, a rumor had it, crewing with Jean Lafitte. Captured, Morgan had been dragooned into the U.S. Army. He claimed that during the War of 1812 he had fought under Gen. Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, rising to the rank of captain."

"Finney's sudden ardor for religion, combined with his native intelligence, enabled him to squeeze all the preparation he felt he needed into less than two years. At the end of 1823, Presbyterian officials in northern NY gave him a provisional license as an evangelist."

"The states were also in the process of weaning congregations from their tax revenues: in 1833, Massachusetts would be the last state to end public subsidies of religion."

"The swamps west of Montezuma were the worst...Swarms of mosquitoes competed with deer flies and black flies to worry and sting the workers. The men resorted to hanging tin pots filled with smoldering leaves around their necks. The smoke from these "Montezuma necklaces" was hardly enough...Malaria was common. Aided by dysentery and typhoid fever, it killed perhaps a thousand men just in the 30-mile stretch..."

"When Joseph was 14, around the time of his epiphany in the forest grove, he tried to use a seer stone owned by a local girl named Sally Chase."

"Josiah Stowell had heard accounts of Joseph's treasure hunting and called upon him to find a Spanish silver mine that Stowell had searched for in vain on his property. The agreement allotted the Smith's 2/11ths of all the property obtained. The Smiths spent a month searching but uncovered nothing."

"When the time came for the Irondequoit Valley to be bridged...a 70 foot high wooden trestle was built quickly as a cheaper alternative to Geddes earth-moving project. It was the largest wooden bridge in the world and 15 months after its completion in 1818, it crashed into the river below."

"A man need not go to a tavern: he could stop for a glass of whiskey at a grocery or candy store. He could down a shot of whiskey at a barber shop. Theaters served strong drink... The typical canal worker drank at least a pint, often a quart, of whiskey daily."

"Women and girls instigated the nation's first industrial strike, known as the 1824 Pawtucket Factory Strike."

"In 1830, the year after Joseph Smith finished his translation, the Scottish scientist Sit Charles Lyell published his work Principles of Geology. The volume challenged readers to apprehend spans of time far beyond what they had heretofore imagined."

"Women play a large role in the revival. In general, men go to church as a matter of show; women out of faith. Finney enlists them to help convert their husbands. He organizes women's prayer groups. He sends them door to door to visit potential converts."

"The dignitaries rode the boat called Seneca Chief, but the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois Confederacy, through whole ancestral land the canal had been carved, was represented by only two Indian boys aboard the last boat in line. This vessel, designated Noah's Ark, carried curiosities in the form of a bear, a couple of fawns, two eagles and numerous "creeping things." Noah's Ark later fell behind the other boats and had to drop out of the parade."

"Married four years, Emma Smith had buried three children...The wife of another Mormon follower died in childbirth the day after Emma's heartbreak, leaving behind twins of her own. Their father offered the babies to the Smiths, who took them in and raised them."

"Cordyn Fox, a carriage driver, watched a man being led by the arm and was told to drive six miles north to Ft Niagara. Fort Niagara had been left in charge of Colonel Ezeniekl Jewett, a Freemason, and watched as Morgan was placed under guard at the fort. Later, Edward Giddins helped row the prisoner across the river to Canada. The Canadian Masons who were to take charge of him did not show up. The American Masons returned Morgan to the fort and imprisoned him in the magazine."

"Finney's reforms attacked the time-wasting leisure activities of the working class...It seemed all too convenient that the moneyed mill owners, who profited from an orderly work force, were eager to promote religious dogma that imposed just the kind of discipline they wanted."

"If Smith was to indulge his desire for women, it had to be in the context of marriage, however ad hoc the ceremony...Over time, Joseph constructed an elaborate rigmarole to justify and regulate polygamy...Years later, Joseph Smith would make a sexual proposition to Sarah Pratt, the wife of the missionary Orson Pratt, who had baptized the Harrises...Sarah expressed her concern to Mrs. Harris who said she had been Smith's mistress for four years now...In 1841, Joseph Smith instructed Joseph Noble to marry him to Noble's sister-in-law Louisa Beaman whom Joseph had met when she was a teenager...He said an angel had threatened to kill him if he did not take additional wives...Emma, his lawful wife, was very bitter and full of resentment and anger."

Rating: 3 out of 5

Finished reading The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London by Sarah Wise
Pages: 311
Words: detritus; "staunch" also means tight-lipped, private, or close; "stirabout": slang for prison, after the maize and oatmeal staple jail diet; New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language; cognoscenti
Notes: Too many for here.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Finished reading The Murder of Dr. Chapman by Sarah Wise
Pages: 239
Words: cholera morbus
Notes: "Those who wanted to become Americans had to reside in the country at least 5 years before filing papers indicating they intended to become citizens and had subsequently to wait another 3 years before they could achieve that goal."

"In 1814 while William was a soldier, after being threatened with execution along with other mutineers...He began to speak without stammering."

"By 1820, a year that saw the establishment in Philadelphia of two institutions, one public, one private, for teaching sign language to the deaf and dumb, William was working as both an accountant and a speech therapist, and planning to open an institution of his own, the United States Institution for the Treatment of Defective Utterance."

"Joseph Bonaparte had come to American in 1815, lived for a time in Philadelphia, and ended up purchasing a vast tract of land in Bordentown, New Jersey, some twenty miles from Andalusia."

"A local woman named Joanna Clue, who'd been on trial for poisoning her husband with arsenic, had just been set free because the jury couldn't agree whether the unfortunate Clue had died naturally or been murdered."

"The pharmacy on Chestnut and Sixth was the handsomest drugstore in the city, the creation of Elias Durand, an emigre from France. Durance had studied his profession in Paris and served Napoleon as a pharmacist in the Grand Armee, and he still bought all his medications and chemicals from France, which led the world in the manufacture of drugs."

"Durand was the inventor of an apparatus for carbonating water who would soon open the first soda bottling company in America."

After his capture, he managed to distract Sheriff Morris and slip a knife into his mattress and scraped it into a tiny saw using the walls of his cell...He then tied a chip of wood to a piece of string, extricated another small brand from his hearth, burned a hole over the latch of his inner cell door and with its glowing point, and passed the woodchip-weighted string through the hole. He dangled the strong until he heard the chip hit the floor and then slowly, he worked the strong along the far side of the door until he felt that it was juts below the latch and tried to jerk the wood up so that it would spring open the door hook...To get through the outer door, he pulled on the bit of grating in the center of the metal until he made a space wide enough for his fingers to go through. Using the handle of his knife, wrenched off the outer padlock....He and another prisoner escaped into the yard but could not scale the wall. The other prisoner used an axe to break the lock and he and the other prisoner managed to squeeze through.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading Death of an Assassin: The True Story of the German Murderer Who Died Defending Robert E. Lee by Ann Marie Ackermann
Pages: 150
Words: vomito (yellow fever of Veracruz);
Notes: "only murder case ever solved in the United States by a third person"

"Henry Lee tried to defend a friend's newspaper press from a rioting mob. He was beaten senseless and then mutilated. Fiends stuck penknives into his flesh, poured hot candle wax into this eyes to see if he was still alive and tried to cut off his nose. He survived but was left crippled and an invalid."

"Christian Wachter had just lost his left thumb to a firearm accident in the churchyard. His pistol, probably loaded with too much powder, had exploded."

"The killer had used a variety of shot sizes, a mixture of buckshort and birdshot....because the pellet weighed more than it should have, it might had pointed to irregular or homemade shot."

"Takedown rifles could be quickly disassembled into pieces, sometimes within seconds. And because they were illegal, they were often hand-constructed...Criminals misused takedown rifles frequently enough that Wurttemberg outlawed them in 1821, 14 years before the murder."

"Had the investigator asked if there was anybody out there who was angry enough with the forestry department and with the forest ranger in particular, to pin a murder on him, it might have taken a different course. A review of the forestry personnel files and recent job applications could have led him to the assasin..The assassin had recently applied for a lateral position as a game warden...He didn't get the job and for that he blamed Mayor Rieber. He concluded that his rejection was a bad job recommendation from Bonnigheim's mayor."

"In 1829, Gottlob was accused of severely wounding a man from a neighboring town. He was charged with battery. On June 16, 1829, the court absolved him of criminal liability but made him pay the court costs."

"Reub had continual problems on the job and every couple months asked his father to bail him out of debt."

"For Reub, the first leg of the journey was to Pittsburgh, and form there, he traveled by boat down the Ohio River. From there the first regiment of Pennsylvania would go down the Mississippi to New Orleans. There, the regiments waited for ships to transport them to Mexico."

"San Juan de Ulua became the most celebrated fortress of North America; for over three centuries, it served as Spain's foremost military stronghold in the Americas. And when Mexico won independence from Spain, it became a symbol of Mexico's independence."

"I knew the murderer of your mayor. He told me everything in Philadelphia back then when he arrived from Europe. Then he became a soldier here and had to go to Mexico, and was killed in action under General Taylor."

Rating: 3 out of 5

Finished reading Killer Colt: Murder, Disgrace, and the Making of an American Legend by Harold Schechter
Pages: 318
Words: star jelly; peregrinations;
Notes: "Benjamin Colt was the manufacturer of the first scythe in America."

CONSUMPTION
"THERE is a sweetness in woman's decay,
When the light of beauty is fading away,
When the bright enchantment of youth is gone,
And the tint that glow'd, and the eye that shone,
And darted around its glance of power,
And the lip that vied with the sweetest flower,
That ever in Pæstum's garden blew,
Or ever was steep'd in fragrant dew,
When all that was bright and fair, has fled,
But the loveliness lingering round the dead."

"Before her death, Sarah Colt bestowed on Samuel a military horse pistol that her father had wielded in the Revolutionary War."

"On July 4, 1830, Samuel Colt, Alphonso Taft (future attorney general under Grant) and Robert Purvis (later famous abolitionist) snuck onto Gen. Ebenezer Mattoon's property to discharge the cannon that Mattoon had brought back from the Battle of Saratoga in 1777."

"Nitrous oxide, first identified in 1773, set off a craze of public demonstrations in England and the U.S. The resulting behavior - laughing, singing, dancing, leaping on the stage, served as a rich source of amusement for the spectators .Sam Colt assumed the role of the "Celebrated Dr. Coult of New York, London and Calcutta."

"In 1838, Sam Colt personally transported ten cases of his rifles - one hundred pieces altogether - to the Florida Everglades where U.S. forces were bogged down in a bloody effort to dispossess the native Seminoles from their rightful lands."

"When President Tyler failed to respond to his letter, Sam turned to two supporters who could provide him with an entree. One was Senator Samuel L. Southard of New Jersey, previously secretary of the navy under James Monroe and John Quincy Adams. The other was John Howard Payne."

"On Sept 17, the day that James Gordon Bennett broke the news about the discovery of Mary Rogers' belongings in the thicket in Weehawken, New Jersey - John Colt paid an early morning visit to Charles Wells' bindery at no. 65 Gold Street."

"Several men hoisted the crate onto the middle deck, where the lid was knocked off. The stench caused several of the men to flee, but those who remained saw a semi-naked, grotesquely contorted male body, trussed up with rope and partly covered with a piece of window awning...The whole of the forehead was beaten in, also the right eye and a part of the right cheek...There was also a fracture on the left side of the head, a little behind and above the ear, in which there was a round, clean hole, as if made by a musket ball..."

"...an elderly Southerner, 70 year old John Davis, went on a rampage in a Greenville, SC boardinghouse when another lodger disturbed him from his sleep. Leaping from his bed, David commenced an indiscriminate slaughter, stabbing six men with a knife, two of whom were killed."

"On February 18, 1844, recently appointed secretary of state Abel Upshur was killed on board the newly commissioned warship USS Princeton when one of her massive guns exploded during a demonstration." The disaster killed more top U.S. government officials in one day than any other tragedy in American history. President John Tyler survived and was uninjured because he was below decks.

"The full story would not be made public for many years, when Sam Colt's most authoritative biographer revealed that the beautiful un-schooled 16 year old Sam had so impulsively married during his early trip to Scotland was Caroline Henshaw. Once Sam decided that so humble a bride was no worthy partner for him he cast about a way to extricate himself from the inconvenient union. Compounding his predicament was the the fact that Caroline was pregnant with Sam's child. It was John who, out of either pity or duty, took the pregnant Caroline and became her protector and lover. When all the efforts to save John from the gallows failed, :Sam saw a way out." The macabre wedding ceremony in the Tombs prison was his doing. By agreeing to the "secretly bigamous and semi-incestuous" marriage to her condemned brother-in-law on the day of his death, Caroline, already effectively discarded by Sam, was not only spared the stigma of divorce but guaranteed his grateful, lifelong support. John, who had nothing to lose, was able to repay his brother's unwavering devotion during his darkest hours. And Sam had his freedom."

Rating: 5 out of 5

Finished reading The Last Pirate of New York by Rich Cohen
Pages: 219
Words: "Kossuth hat"
Notes: "The deck was besmeared with blood...Forward of the mast there was some light-colored hair and blood; the blood had run on both sides of the vessel; when we hauled the sail up it was found to have covered up a great quantity of blood...On two places there were blood outside the rail, rubbed on, as if a bleeding body with clothes on had been thrown overboard."

The search ended at the rail on the starboard side, where Captain Weed found a bloody handprint...There, on deck, was all that remained of the crew of the E.A. Johnson - four severed fingers and a thumb."

"At these run-down hotels, an agent would comb the lobby bar for a mark. At some point, he would dose the mark's drink with a mickey - usually laudanum, which was one part opium and many parts canary wine. When the mark stumbled to bed to sleep the agent followed with a blackjack, then delivered the blow that sent the mark into deep unconsciousness. The most storied crimps were built on piers with trapdoors that led directly from the bedrooms to the river, where a rowboat was waiting. By the time the mark awoke, he was bound for China - "shanghaied."

"An 1850 police report estimated the presence of between 400 and 500 pirates in New York City...Most river pirates were boys, 12 to 18 years old."

"Oyster sloops carried fragile cargo, so the purchase would have to be made in cash." They were known for carrying large stacks at a time."

"When Oliver turned again, Hicks swung the axe, driving it into the back of the young man's head. Oliver cried out, fell to his knees, then on to his face...Hicks struck him again to be sure. Oliver's brother Smith, having heard the commotion, came up the ladder and stuck his head out the cabin door...Hicks brought the axe down on his neck. Smith's head came off and rolled into the shadows as the body fell back into the cabin...Burr got Hicks on the floor and his hands around his neck, but Hicks was too strong.. He rolled away and stood. Burr grabbed Hicks by the coat. Hicks threw him off, and managed a good swing at Burr's face."

"Oliver Watts, axe wounds in his head and back, had gotten to his feet and was coming at Hicks slowly, like a corpse, arms raised, reaching out for his killer...Hicks pushed across the deck and threw him over the side. Yet somehow Watts, as he was falling, caught the rail and hung on...Hicks brought down the axe, severing his fingers and sending him into the sea."

"Hicks quickly mastered the art of revolt, establishing a wildly effective pattern. He'd join a crew, labor till bored, then begin working on the other sailors, paying special attention to the angry and outcast. He'd stoke their resentment till it was red hot, then use a random incident to touch off a melee, kill the officers, get into the booze and flee with the money."

"Hicks and Stone believed that many of their deeds were mistakenly credited to Joaquin Murrieta, a Mexican bandit who'd become a populist hero in gold country, robbing the rich, killing the arrogant, hounding the Yankees."

Rating: 3 out of 5

Finished reading Blood & Ivy: The 1849 Murder that Scandalized Harvard by Paul Collins
Pages: 270
Words: "gutta-percha trade"
Notes: "Prof. Bigelow's lungs had suffered from youthful overindulging in nitrous oxide back in his Davy clubhouse days..."

"Phineas Gage was a foreman on a construction gang for the Rutland & Burlington Railroad. The previous autumn, an errant detonation had sent a 13-pound crowbar through the bottom of Gage's head and clean out the top of his skull; the iron bar sailed high in the air and cam clattering down 80 feet away. He proceeded to vomit blood and brain but was stubbornly alive...He faced two months of fevers and fungal infections, during which he'd wander deliriously into the street, his head still clotted with gore..."

"Decomposition not only rendered the aitr unbreathable, it snuffed out the janitor's candle and made it impossible for him to see inside."

"Harvard had some legal right to unclaimed indigent bodies but for years had quietly supplemented its supply of cadavers by buying them in bulk on the Manhattan black market."

"...and one Madame Hufeland, an abortionist whose office doubled as a fence for melting down stolen flatware."

"Dr. George Parkman's older brother, the Reverend Francis Parkman was subject to depression an dhad a full mental breakdown for a substantial part of 1844 and 1845. Nor had his namesake son, Francis Jr. escaped the curse. Just 26, the young man was surpassing his father's fame with his newly published account The Oregon Trail. One of his driving motives for traveling west was to cure his "abnormal condition."

"Eugene Aram - the English schoolmaster hanged for murder a century before, betrayed at the height of his scholarly powers by the discovery of buried bones from a disappearance 14 years earlier."

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Finished reading The Peculiar Case of the Electric Constable by Carol Baxter
Pages: 349
Words: None.
Notes: "Many would later honor Morse as the Father of the electric telegraph, conveniently ignoring the fact that Wheatstone and Cooke had the first electric telegraph patent as well as years of commercial operations before Morse's evocative yet tardy message was sent."

"The Quakers, with their reputation for honesty and integrity, were the guardians of much of England's gold...The only criminal in the history of that sect was forger named Joseph Hunton, who had been executed a couple decades ago."

"Whenever Friends married out, they were disowned by their brethren. This punishment lost to the society not only once-valued members but the birthright membership of their progeny, shrinking the next generation's marriage pool even further. Once 60,000 strong, England's Quakers numbered less than 14,000 by the time Sarah's gaze fell upon John."

"The Friends had no formal admission guidelines and applicants could be rejected on spiritual, doctrinal or political grounds, or merely for reasons that reflected the austere sect's exclusivity and suspicion of strangers."

"Disownment meant that John could no longer attend official meetings, or hold any official roes, or contribute to Quaker funds. Still, he could attend worship meetings, register his children's births and be buried in a Quaker burial ground."

"John's youngest son William was only 21 when he died of consumption...Mary had the disease as well - as did their newly married eldest son."

"Sarah Hart had died from the effects of prussic acid - or, to use its scientific name, "hydrogen cyanide."

"Prussic acid was prescribed mostly for diseases of the skin and cancerous eruptions, and that the average dose was 5 minims of Scheele's - that is, about 1/20 of a grain of pure prussic acid."

"In the 1780s Captain Donellan was convicted of killing his brother-in-law with deadly laurel water, a distillate of cherry leaves which themselves contained cyanide, but, in the decades since, so cyanide deaths had led to murder convictions."

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Finished reading: Myth, Monster, Murderer by Jackie Anderson and Ciara Wild
Pages:194
Words: None
Notes: Too many for here.

Finished reading: American Lightning by Howard Blum
Pages: 321
Words: None
Notes: "Otis set out to raise the money needed to keep the Times going. When he succeeded, he was rewarded with a quarter interest in the struggling paper. Four years later in 1886, he acquired total control. Otis was now sole owner, publisher and editor in chief...he transformed it into a fiercely conservative, anti-union journal...He mounted a cannon on the hood of his limousine and made sure his chauffeur was prepared to repel, at his command, any enemy. He modeled the paper's new printing plant on a fanciful vision of a fortress, complete with battlements, sentry boxes, and firing holes offering protected lines of fire at any mob that dared to storm his citadel. He called himself "The General' and his home "the Bivouac."

"It was not a package. It was a bomb. Thirty nine sticks of dynamite, fuses attached, had been tied into a bundle. The watchman began to detach the fuses from the explosives. The work was agonizing. But he managed to get it done. Not long after that the train carrying President William Howard Taft crossed the El Capitan Bridge...It was never determined who had planted the dynamite, but Taft ordered that the federal government would join the legal fight against the Structural Iron Workers union.

"Protect Los Angeles Homes!" shouted the Times, "Socialism in the saddle will mean less civic and private credit, less building, less industry and thereby less work and wages."

"The circle of wealthy industrialists had purchased tens of thousands of acres in the San Fernando Valley to reclaim and turn into a giant suburb, and reap millions. If Harriman was elected, the scheme would fall apart. The Socialists would insist that the water belonged to the city and not to the Suburban Home Company."

"President Warren G Harding appointed William Burns as the first director of the Bureau of Investigation, the agency that would later become known as the FBI...He became embroiled in the Teapot Dome oil scandal and two weeks later he resigned. His young assistant, J. Edgar Hoover became director."

Rating: 3 out of 5

Finished reading: The Midnight Assassin by Skip Hollandsworth
Pages: 270
Words: None
Notes: "Blood had dripped off one side of the bed and formed a puddle on the floor. At the foot of the bed was a bloodstained axe."

"Meanwhile Tom Chalmers began cleaning the blood off the walls and the floor of Mollie's quarters. He threw out her clothes and discarded the broken mirror on her wall. Chalmers wanted everything to be perfectly spotless by the time his brother-in-law returned to Austin...as if nothing at all had happened there..."

"The young woman, a recent immigrant from Germany, saw a man standing by her bed...Four nights later, a black cook was awakened by the violent shaking of the locked door to the servants' quarters...Within an hour, two young black women were awakened by the rattling of a locked doorknob..."

"Col. J. H. Pope's two servant girls, Swedish immigrants, were in their room when a pistol shot came through the window...after barricading their door another shot was fired through a window into their quarters. The bullet hit Christine between her shoulder blade and spinal column..."

"One of the black neighborhoods known as Clarksville, had been built on several acres of land that a former governor of Texas, Elisha Pease, had given to his emancipated slaves at the end of the Civil War, twenty years ago. The typical house consisted of 3 rooms, one room directly behind another. Sometimes as many as 10 family members of a family lived in a house."

"Compared to older blacks who had been raised in slavery, the whites believed that the new generation didn't seem as "deferential" or "respectful." As a result, young black men were constantly blamed for all sorts of crimes simply because they were young and black.

Retrograded: a term used by racist whites to describe the new generation of black people who had not the chance to "experience the benefit of slavery" which had functioned as "a civilizing force."

"According to one rumor circulating up and down the Avenue, the gang worked for a black labor union that had been trying to recruit the city's servant women to join and demand higher wages - fifteen dollars a month - from their white employers. The gang supposedly had been hired to attack those women who wouldn't sign up."

"Robert Weyermann and other family members found their 30 yr old black cook, lying on the ground. Her right arm was nearly severed in two. A long horizontal gash extended halfway around her head, from her right eye past her right ear."

"Chenneville and his officers did the only thing they knew to do - arresting more black men, for various infractions...Oliver Townsend was arrested and was chained to an iron ring cemented to the floor, he was beaten. And still he confessed to nothing."

"Rebecca didn't have a chance to draw a breath, let alone scream, before he slammed the club against the side of her head. He grabbed her little daughter Mary who was found later, alive, but whenever she took a breath, blood poured out of her ears. He had jammed some sort of long iron rod into the cavity of one of Mary's ears, piercing one side of the brain - essentially lobotomizing her."

"Trigg worked as a waiter at the Carrolton House, the very hotel where the Noble men were staying. Obviously, many residents surmised, Hennessey and his assistants had gotten to know Trigg and persuaded him - perhaps even bribed him - to make up a story fingering Townsend and Woods...Trigg went to the newspaper reporters and accused Marshal Lee and the Noble detectives of wrapping a rope around his neck as if to hang him..."

"One black woman in Austin who was too old to move was an 80 yr old former slave known fondly around town as Aunt Tempy. She was so terrified of being killed that she not only kept the doors and windows of her shanty bolted and barred, she left a lamp burning next to her bed throughout the night. In early November, a few hours before sunrise, the lamp fell onto the bed. Within seconds, her sheets and blankets were on fire and in minutes her shanty was in flames..."

"In late 19th c. America the term serial killer didn't exist. It wasn't that people were unfamiliar with the concept. One of the most famous maniacs was a 12 yr old boy in Boston names Jesse Pomeroy..."

"On Christmas Eve, Susan Hancock became the first white woman to be murdered. Her husband, Moses, told police he had found her in their backyard."

"When Mayor Robertson had sent his telegram to the Pinkerton Agency, he assumed it would be delivered to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, but instead it was taken to the Pinkerton & Co. U.S. Detective Agency. Matt Pinkerton had been fired from the National Agency for incompetence and set up his own agency, capitalizing on his name."

Rating: 3 out of 5

Finished reading: Conan Doyle for the Defense by Margalit Fox
Pages: 254
Words: Reset: A Scottish legal term denoting the receipt or resale of stolen goods, or the illegal harboring of a criminal
Notes: "At her death, the jewelry collection, comprising nearly a hundred items, was valued at nearly $400,000 today...The back windows were kept locked and no less than three locks on the house door...There is evidence to show that, when alone, she would admit no one except by pre-arranged signal."

"Dr. Adams surmised that the assault was committed by a number of heavy blows with the chair..."

"The trouble...with all police prosecutions, is that, having ince got what they imagine to be their man, they are not very open to any line of investigation which might lead to other conclusions."

"The Aliens Act of 1905 was widely understood to have been aimed at Eastern European Jews, who in the late 19th c., fleeing pogroms and penury, had begun arriving in Britain."

"Crime was increasingly seen as a form of contagion - a kind of 'social pathology' - and the new scientific method as a tool with which to track it down and wipe it out."

"A goal of these new sciences was the creation of narrative - a narrative of things past, often long past, that could be assembled only through the close reading, painstaking analysis, and rigorous chronological ordering of what could be discerned in the present."

"In the 1870s, Alphonse Bertillon, a civilian employee of the French police, sought a better way to identify repeat offenders. Exploiting the relatively new medium of photography, he created what we now call the mug shot: full-face and profile images of a convict, affixed to a card. To this card, he added copious data about the convict would be rigorously measured and the results compared against the sets of measurements already on file. The system, known as bertillonage, was widely adopted by police departments in Britain and the U.S."

"That the clue foundered scarcely mattered, for Slater's capture and conviction remained a fourfold coup: in one blow, the city would be rid of a foreigner, a Jew, a gambler, and a member of the lower classes."

"Unlike their English and American counterparts, Scottish trials have no opening statements by counsel, instead cutting straight to the examination of witnesses."

"For all his alleged debauchery, he had seemed, until the murder case against him, neither desperate nor depressed - he appeared in fact, almost constitutionally cheerful. Slater's entire mien confounded the protective ease with which social diagnoses were traditionally made."

"Why would an intruder disdain jewelry to go after papers? It might be said that save a will it would be difficult to imagine any paper which would account for such an enterprise." Though the fact would not be well known until 1914, members of Miss Gilchrist's family had begun wrangling over her estate even before she died. Afterward, they began quietly accusing one another of her murder."

"The subject had been under high-level private discussion as early as 1924, when Slater was approaching the 15 year mark at Peterhead, the standard length of time before parole could be considered. As the memorandums make clear, the Crown did not want him to stay in Britain after his release but was uncertain whether it could deport him back to Germany. As British officials eventually learned, a German who had lived outside Germany for more than a decade automatically lost his citizenship."

"Among the thousand were Slater's sister Phemie, murdered at Treblinka, and his beloved sister Malchen, murdered at Terezin - racialized, identified, apprehended, transported, exterminated."

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Finished reading: Starvation Heights by Gregg Olsen
Pages: 411
Words: osteopath; The Gospel of Health
Notes: Too many for here.
Rating: 5 out of 5

Finished reading: The King of Confidence by Miles Harvey
Pages: 306
Words: None.
Notes: Too many for here.
Rating: 5 out of 5

Finished reading: Furious Hours by Casey Cep
Pages: 276
Words: None.
Notes: "In 1912, some scouts searched for a site for a new dam. They settled on the Cherokee Bluffs. Two power companies had tried to build there before. The first attempt was in 1896, but was thwarted by an outbreak of yellow fever. The second, in 1898, by the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, which left investors unwilling to gamble with their money...When they were done it temporarily transformed the area into one of the largest settlements in the region. It also created the largest man-made lake in the world at that time...3000 workers moved houses, breaking down barns, relocating gristmills, digging up hundreds of bodies from a dozen cemeteries and reinterring them elsewhere."

"It was thanks to the state's vibrant revival culture that by 1970 one in four Alabamans was Baptist."

"America's pulp industry had moved south in the early decades of the 20th century, after New England's forests were depleted and a Georgia chemist figured out how to make newsprint from southern pine despite its high resin levels."

"Devout Christians were not meant to concern themselves with the details of their deaths. Thus was the life insurance industry caught between a math problem and God...To make matters worse, the overall reputation of the insurance industry had been tarnished by the sale of speculative policies, a practice barely distinguishable from betting. You could buy speculative policies with payouts contingent on anything...like in one infamous case, if a well-known transgender 18th century French diplomat was a man or a woman."

"If earthquakes were not divine punishments but geological inevitabilities, then perhaps insuring oneself against death was not contrary to God's plans but a responsible and pious way to provide for one's family."

"In two years, Maxwell had collected almost a hundred thousand dollars in life insurance, well over half a million dollars today."

"African American policyholders were routinely required to pay more money for less valuable coverage, refused consolidation offers for discounts on multiple policies, forced to pay premiums exceeding the value of the payout, and denied benefits base don capricious claims of lapsed coverage...Some companies simply refused to insure black lives at all. Black families were also disproportionately targeted for the predatory policies known as burial insurance."

"Apportionment had barely changed in Alabama since 1901, the year that the state had ratified a new constitution, but while Tom was celebrating, a federal court found that demographics had shifted substantially and ordered the state to redistrict."

"There was Willie Edwards Jr., the truck driver forced off a bridge to his death by 4 Klansmen in Montgomery. There was William Lewis Moore, the man from Baltimore shot and killed in Attalla, while trying to walk a letter denouncing segregation 385 miles to the governor of Mississippi. There were 4 young girls, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley killed by the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. There was Jimmie Lee Jackson, beaten and shot by state troopers in Marion while he tried to protect his mother and grandfather during a protest. There was the Reverend James Reeb, the Unitarian minister beaten to death in Selma. There was Viola Gregg Liuzzo, shot by Klansmen while trying to ferry marchers between Selma and Montgomery. There was Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a seminarian registering black voters who was arrested for participating in a protest and then shot by deputy sheriff in Hayneville. There was Samuel Leamon Younge Jr. murdered by a gas station owner after arguing about segregated bathrooms."

"Two police officers inside the chapel had heard Burns as he stood over the body of the Reverend Willie Maxwell and said, "You have mistreated my family long enough," but to Radney's mind that was closer to eavesdropping than to obtaining a confession. Burns had also confessed in the backseat of the police cruiser as he was being driven away from the funeral home, but he hadn't been read his rights until he arrived at the police station. Worse, the man to whom Burns confessed was his brother, who although he had been deputy sheriff in the years past, had been deputized only for the purpose of driving suspects and prisoners in custody and wasn't on duty the day of the funeral."

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Finished reading: Did She Kill Him? by Kate Colquhoun
Pages: 334
Words: morphia
Notes: "Liverpool's connection with America's Southern cotton growers was so close that the city had supported the Southern states during the American Civil War, hoisting Confederate flags on its public buildings. Cotton was the king: around 6 million bales arrived each year from America's Atlantic and Gulf ports, accounting for almost half of Liverpool's imports, destined for the 40 million spindles and half a million looms of the Lancashire cotton mills. Its renaissance was rooted in the dirty profits of the slave trade."

"Florence was just 17 when she and her mother boarded the SS Baltic in New York and set out for Liverpool to marry James, a 41 British bachelor...Sixteen months later he and Florence were married at Christopher Wren's St. James' Church, Piccadilly...But Florence's promised fortune had turned out to be a little more than a meager annuity."

"Pick-me-ups known as nerve tonics had become increasingly popular during the 19th c., touted as effective in fortifying the nerves against malaise or undefined illness."

"Her bruised eye was painful, but since wife-beating was tacitly accepted if it sprang from 'aggravation' on the part of the wife, and if it didn't go too far, no great fuss would be made about her face."

"Plummer's liver pills containing antimony, an aperient or mild laxative and a tonic of nux vomica containing 0.125% strychnine...Fowler's Solution, a proprietary medicine, it contained a solution of potassium arsenite with a drop of lavender...it was being taken for anemia rheumatism, typhus, syphilis, morning sickness, diabetes, parasites, rickets, lumbago, snake bites and more generally as a prophylactic against infectious disease."

"Redrafting his will, James left everything to his two children, with his brothers as trustees. Florence could be allowed to remain under the same roof as her children only so long as she did not remarry."

"Scheele's Prussic Acid, contained 4% of hydrogen cyanide in water; even its vapour was highly poisonous and the fatal dose was just one or two milliliters."

"New medicines were directed: antipyrine (an analgesic also used as a tranquilizer) for restlessness and to relieve his throat, tincture of jaborandi (a herbal remedy for diarrhea) and a few drops of chloride water as a mouthwash."

"To some, she was proof of the link between female ideologies; to others she represented oppression within marriage, tied inescapably to an unfaithful husband whom she had some to find physically repulsive. Too much spirit or too little independence, depending on the point of view."

"On 13 August 1904, accompanied by solicitor Samuel Hayden and his wife, Florence embarked on the SS Vaderland in Antwerp, under the assumed name of Rose Ingraham. 9 days later she arrived in New York where she was, for a while, hailed as a wronged daughter. Her American citizenship was restored...She never saw her children again. Her mother promised at the time to play an active role in their care but was never able to find them. Her m other died penniless in a convent in Paris in 1910 and was buried beside her son in the Passy cemetery. The following year, Florence's 29 yr old son, now a mining engineer known as James Fuller, died after drinking potassium cyanide at the Le Roi goldmine in British Columbia. It was said he accidentally grabbed the beaker instead of a glass of water."

Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading: The Burning of Bridget Cleary by Angela Bourke
Pages: 239
Words: pishrogue
Notes: "It was not unusual for people to stay up late, talking and swapping stories, when they visited neighbors: the Irish word airnean, which has no precise equivalent in English, means just this sort of gathering."

"The Synod of Thurles in 1850 was the first formal meeting of the Irish bishops since 1642, and many of its prescriptions were designed to centralize religious activity in church buildings, and put an end to the tradition of administering the sacraments in private homes."

"People in their 50s and 60s were described as old, because they had survived the Famine of 1845-49. They were often thin, missing teeth, poor eyesight and other results from being malnourished."

"Caretakers" also known as property defense protectors, but colloquially called "emergencymen" were deeply unpopular. William Simpson and his family occupied a farm from which Lindsay had been evicted the earlier tenants some years previously. They paid a special low rent, for no local person would have taken up the lease on such as farm."

"The term boycott was coined by a priest in County Mayo from a land agent's surname in 1880, when social and commercial ostracism became the standard - and highly effective - weapon of an outraged tenantry."

"Bridget Cleary's body was found on March 22, in a hole about 18 inches deep, wrapped in a sheet. It was badly burned, and lay in a crouched position, the knees drawn up and the arms folded across the breast. The head was covered in a sack, and was undamaged; there was a gold earring in the left ear. The only clothing, apart from some scraps of rag which were stuck to the body, was a pair of black stockings."

"Fairies are jealous of Christians, and often do them harm, but they are not totally malevolent since they still hope to get back into Heaven one day. To do so, however, they must have at least enough blood in their veins to write their names, and so far they have not even that much....Fairies are not human, even though they resemble humans and live lives parallel to theirs, with some significant differences: they keep cows, and sell them at fairs; they enjoy whiskey and music; they like gold, milk, and tobacco, but hate iron, fire, salt and the Christian religion...Sometimes it is said that there are no women among the fairies. In any case, they steal children and young women and occasionally young men, and leave withered, cantankerous changelings in their place. They can bring disease on crops, animal and humans, but by and large, if treated with neighborly consideration, they mind their own business and even reward favors."

"The first full and accurate census of population was taken in 1841 and was repeated every 10 years until 1911. After the Famine, Sir William Wilde, the Dublin physician and later Oscar Wilde's father, was commissioned to interpret medical statistics gathered by the 1851 census. He was a noted antiquary and folklorist, who often bargained with his country patients for stories, instead of fowl or eggs, as payment for his services. After this death, his widow published two volumes of the material he had collected. Wilde's note on marasmus - emaciation and wasting in children - places scientific and vernacular taxonomies of illness side by side."

"Only 11 years before Bridget Cleary's death, Ellen Cushion and Anastatia Rourke were arrested at Clonmel on Saturday charged with cruelly ill-treating a child three years old, named Philip Dillon. The neighbors fancied that the boy, who had not the use of his limbs, was a changeling left by the fairies in exchange for their original child. While the mother was absent, the prisoners entered her house and placed the lad naked on a hot shovel under the impression that this would break the charm. The poor little thing was severely burned and is in a precarious condition."

"Among the documented cases of changeling-burning in Ireland in the 19th century, Bridget Cleary's is the only one that involves in adult victim."

"The first milk given by a cow after calving is also known as beestings or "nus" in Irish."

"May Eve - the opposite point on the calendar to Halloween - was the temporal focus of anxiety about milk and butter, and the occasion when most precautions were taken. Women strewed primroses on their doorsteps, or tied red threads, rags, or ribbons to their cows' tails, but most important was that nothing whatever - tools, tackle, or farm produce, and most emphatically not milk, milk products, fire, or even a spark to light a pipe - should be allowed to leave the premises. Stories are told of a hare seen sucking milk from cows at night: when a man with a gun shoots the hare and injures it, he follows it to a house, where he finds an old woman sitting by the fire, her leg bleeding. To succeed in shooting one of these milk-stealing witches, the hunter must use a silver bullet - usually made from a silver sixpence."

"Young women taken by the fairies bear on their bodies the marks of their adventures: some are unable to speak until the fairies' 'bioran suain,' a kind of tranquilizer dart or 'slumber-pin' is discovered and removed; others are immobilized by painful swellings, caused by invasion of their flesh by some foreign body, and cured only when the offending matter is expelled."

"Superstition is a problematic word: beliefs and practices can appear bizarrely irrational when the system of which they were once part has begun to disintegrate."

Rating: 3 out of 5

Finished reading: Violette Noziere by Sara Maza
Pages: 282
Words: None.
Notes: Too many for here.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading: The Devil's Rooming House: The True Story of America's Deadliest Female Serial Killer by M. William Phelps
Pages: 251
Words: purpura or peliosis
Notes: "Inmate was a socially acceptable term used at that time to describe residents of psychiatric hospitals, institutions, insane asylums, prisons, or nursing homes similar to Amy's."

"Since she'd opened, Amy had lost nearly two dozen inmates in four years."

"The problem with Amy's training at Bellevue is that there is no record anywhere to document that she had even set foot in the hospital, as patient or nurse trainee."

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Finished reading: The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town by Helmut Walser Smith
Pages: 216
Words: atavistic; petechiae
Notes: "...smashing windows with stones, and calling "hep-hep" (a popular anti-Semitic catchword) whenever they spied a Jew."

"..the Action Francaise emerged from the Dreyfus Affair as an anti-Semitic movement that would powerfully influence the politics of the Third Reich...On April 1, 1899, the "bloodless" body of the seamstress Agnes Hruza was found in a wood outside the small Boheian town of Polna. Convinced from the start that it was ritual murder, the people of Polna immeditatelyty accused the Jews - in partuicular Leopold Hilsner. He served 19 years in prison until he was pardoned but not cleared."

"The anti-semitic accusation of ritual use of blood by Jews was a German invention. It was mentioned for the first time in 1236 in the Annals of Marbach. The reference is to the Fulda case of 1235. While a miller and his wife attended mass on Christmas Day, their mill, which was outside the city walls, burned down and their five sons perished. They accused the Jews of killing the boys, drawing thei blood and carrying ti away in wax bags, and using it for curative or religious purposes."

"In Oberwesel, the corpse of the tortured 14 yr old "good Werner" supposedly swam up the Rhine River and healed the sick."

"The Hep-Hep riots of 1819, the spillover violence of the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and smaller tremors in between."

"Ritual murder charges also served to obscure the mistreatment of children. This happened in Labischin in June 1894, when the Kuniszewskis seemed to have lost their 5 yr old son. He was found hastily buried in the woods nearby. The mother, it turned out, had badly maltreated him and buried him alive. The Jews, she had told both her husband and the authorities, had taken the boy away."

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Finished reading: American Demon by Daniel Stashower
Pages: 308
Words: None.
Notes: "1931:...the murder trial of "Pittsburgh Hymie" Martin, a rumrunner accused in the vicious slaying of a city councilman named William E. Potter, whose injuries included a skull-crushing blow from the butt of a revolver."

"Eliot Ness was named for British novelist George Eliot, but it is not clear if his parents, for whom English was a second language, understood this to be the pen name of a female author. Peter and Emma Ness had emigrated from Norway some 20 years earlier, arriving at Ellis Island in 1881."

"Other investigators, taking note of the victim's Hungarian descent, believed the crime might have had its roots in a blood feud...at a time when Cleveland boasted one of the largest Hungarian populations outside of Budapest."

"Bertillonage was a system of classifying and idetifying criminals pioneered in France by Alphonse Bertillon in 1879...Over the course of nearly 40 years of continuous service, he amassed a catalog of more than 125,000 'Bertillon cards' and some 70,000 photographs.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Finished reading: Thunderstruck by Erik Larson
Pages: 388
Words: None.
Notes: "His father, Giuseppe Marconi, was a prosperous farmer and businessman...his mother, Anne Jameson, a daughter of the famous Irish whiskey empire..."

"In ancient Greece, with a gentleman named Thales, who discovered that by rubbing amber he could attract to it small bits of things, like heard hair and lint. The Greek word for amber is elektron."

"The Leyden jar consisted of a glass container with coatings of foil on the inside and outside. A friction machine was used to charge, or fill, the jar with electricity. When a wire was used to link both coatings, the jar released its energy in the form of a powerful spark...Georg Richman, in 1753, attempted to harness lightning to charge an electrostatic device, a huge spark leaped from the apparatus to his head, making him the first scientist to die by electrocution."

"Hydrobromide of hyoscine, derived from the nightshade family, was employed in asylums as a sedative to quell patients suffering delirium an dmania, and to treat alcoholics suffering delirium tremens."

"The emanations from Palladino's body prompted Richet to invent a new word to describe such phenomena: ectoplasm..."Let it be noted that ectoplasm proper is more than a secretion or extrusion of material: if genuine, it has powers of operating, it can exert force, and exhibit forms. A mere secretion from the mouth, which hangs down and does nothing, is of no interest."

"In the mid-1890s Britain had 150 Spiritualist societies; by 1908 there would be nearly 400."

Since he was a foreigner, Preece argued that "he cannot do much without our assistance and his system can scarcely be made practical for telegraphy by any one in this country but by ourselves.' But just five days later Marconi founded his new company, Wireless Telegraph and Signal Co. in London. Jameson Davis became managing director with the understanding that once the enterprise was well established he would resign...Within 6 months, the value of Marconi's stock tripled and suddenly his 60,000 shares were worth 180,000 pounds, about $20 million today. At 23, he was both famous and rich."

"Lord Kelvin insisted on paying Marconi for his message, the first paid wireless telegram, and incidentally, the first revenue for Marconi's company."

"When you meet Marconi you're bound to notice that he's a foreigner. His suit of clothes is English. In stature he is French. His boot heels are Spanish military. His hair and moustache are German. His mother is Irish. His father is Italian. And altogether, there's little doubt that Marconi is a thorough cosmopolitan."

"Instead of selling equipment, Marconi could provide customers with a wireless service that, if structured carefully, would skirt the postal monopoly."

"Beatrice told Marconi, gently, that she would not become his wife...He fled for the Balkans, and there he contracted malaria, which would plague him with intervals of fever and delirium for the rest of his life."

"A German governess in the O'Brien family happened to read in a European newspaper that Marconi had been spotted often in the company of a Princess Giacinta Ruspoli. Worse news followed the next day. Another item reported that Marconi and the princess were engaged."

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Finished reading: Twilight at the World of Tomorrow by James Mauro
Pages: 350
Words: None.
Notes: "From the turn of the century through the early 1930s, the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company, owned and operated by a tightfisted Tammany man named John 'Fishhooks' McCarthy, dumped more than a hundred railroad cars of ash, trash, and even animal carcasses a day into its repository in a Queens neighborhood called Flushing Meadows Corona Park."

"Mayor La Guardia banned all privately owned dumping grounds within city limits; Fishhooks sold his dump to the city for $2.8 million...in its place an exposition more than three times the size of Chicago's 'A Century of Progress; World's Fair just 6 years earlier...That such an undertaking could be conceived at all during the height of the Great Depression is staggering..."

"When Charles Lindbergh made his historic flight from New York to Paris in 1927, Grover Whalen was the last man to shake his hand before takeoff at the Roosevelt Field airstrip on Long Island and the first man to welcome him upon his return to the city."

"On Opening Day, two of its pavilions represented countries that, for all practical purposes, no longer existed: Austria and Czechoslovakia. Before the Fair's end, Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, among others, would be added to the list..During the second season, the Polish exhibit would be draped in black, marking exactly half of the Fair's major European pavilions as now under the control of Nazi Germany."

"Einstein gave a notorious speech on Opening Day that ended in a spectacular power failure; he wrote a message for the time capsule that was both prophetic and terrifying; and most significantly, he was chosen over key Zionist leaders to dedicate the opening of the Palestine Pavilion, an honor that propelled him out of the quiet privacy of scientific study and into the stormy political arena as a de facto leader of the Jewish people."

"Fifteen years later, close to death, Einstein would recall his actions during 1939 and 1940, the course of the World's Fair, as the 'one great mistake in my life."

"The Declaration of Independence was merely that, he told her - a declaration, the signing of a document that spelled out only what the Founding Fathers intended to do. The nation, Shadgen believed, wasn't really 'born' until it elected its first president, George Washington, in 1789."

"Before Einstein's final departure in 1932, the American Women's Patriotic Organization lodged a complaint against him with the State Department, demanding that the United States deny him entry visa and calling him a Communist."

"Two days after raiding his country home, the Nazis seized his bank accounts, appropriating the 30,000 marks to 'prevent their use for treasonable purposes.' They confiscated his beloved sailboat, as well as a motorboat that had in better times been a gift to him from the city of Berlin."

"Lynch also got rid of the central office of the Homicide Squad, making it publicly known that out of 228 murders in the last year, the police had arrested exactly two suspects."

"Whalen understood that they were going to have to sell the idea that corporations weren't the bad guys everyone was making them out to be."

"Joe Healy spotted a big bill in the register, and then watched as Martha turned her back to him...but Martha returned and grabbed a sharp butcher's knife and ordered him out of the store. They struggled...and in a fit of panic he swiped the blade at her throat..."

Rating: 3 out of 5

Finished reading: The Killer of Little Shepherds by Douglas Starr
Pages: 249
Words: anthropometrics; "sang a la une!": the bloodiest stories should go on page one; lividity
Notes: "...diagnosed him as having 'nervous exhaustion' and gave him a four-month medical leave. He immediately headed to Baume-les-Dames, stopping to buy a revolver along the way."

"The first bullet entered her mouth, shattered two teeth, ripped through her tongue and exited her cheek...Then Vacher turned the gun on himself, firing two bullets into his face...Both survived, because the dealer who had sold Vacher the revolver loaded the cartridges only with half charges - just enough powder to stop an aggressor but not necessarily to kill him."

"The local court issued a finding of not guilty by reason of insanity, transforming Vacher's legal status from that of an accused criminal to that of a mentally damaged ward of the state..."

"Londoners learned to fear the 'residuum,' New Yorkers saw the rise of ethnic street gangs, and Parisians knew to avoid the 'apaches' - roaming bands of youths who swarmed over the gentry who might wander from the beaten path."

"Dr. Jean-Alexandre-Eugene Lacassagne had helped devise many new techniques in crime-scene analysis, such as determining how long a body had been putrefying and how to match a bullet to a gun."

"To fulfill his military obligation, he traveled to Algeria...He became fascinated by the miscreants in his care. Many bore tattoos with strange and exotic images: Joan of Arc, the scales of justice, hearts pierced by knives, two hands clasped with a flower rising between them, and naked women..."

"Rollet recorded that a given gender and race and general age cohort, the length of individual long bones of the skeleton bore a constant correlation to the overall body length. For example, a man's thighbone measuring 1ft 5" corresponded to a body height of 5'3". If his upper arm measured 1ft 2" he probably stood at 5'11"."

"Finally, in May 1890, a Frenchman living in Havana recognized Eyraud and alerted Cuban police. His girlfriend, meanwhile, had stayed in Vancouver, where she met and fell in love with an American adventurer. Eventually, he persuaded her to turn herself in...Bompard and Eyraud had known of Gouffe's wealth and reputation for sexual adventure...Eyraud went to Bompard's apartment, where he attached an iron ring tot he ceiling in an alcove behind her divan...then his the aparratus and himself behind a curtain...She persuaded him to go back to her apartment...Eyraud who affixed them to the rope and pulling with all his might, hanged Gouffe before he could react...Eyraud received the death penalty and Compard was sentenced to 20 years in prison. On Feb 4, 1891, Eyraud went to the guillotine...Street vendors circulated among them, selling miniature replicas of the infamous trunk. Inside each was a toy metal corpse bearing the inscription 'the Gouffe Affair."

"Eugenie's body, only 200 yards from the factory door, looked like it had been attacked by a wild beast...Under French law, any local doctor could be required to perform an autopsy if called upon by the authorities to do so...He had stabbed her several times...He repeatedly stomped her around the torso, chest and pubis. He then used his knife to dig out the areola of her right breast and threw the bloody tissue away. There was no evidence of rape. In the end, the killer dragged his victim away from the crime scene and left her behind the hedge."

"For this miserable, dangerous work, doctors would receive 25 francs for an ordinary autopsy, 35 francs if the job required an exhumation, and from 15 to 25 francs for a newborn, depending on whether it was fresh or had to be exhumed."

"The blood seemed exceptionally red...The doctors also noticed tiny particles of a local beetle species in the cadavers fecal matter and vomit...They had never been this poison before nor isolated it from the victims' stomachs or tissues."

"Lacassagne helped create a field known as 'medical archaeology' in which he used the tools of modern forensics to explore the lives and deaths of historic characters. In one study, he and a colleague re-created the 1793 assassinated of Jean-Paul Marat..."

"In Lyon, the 'floating morgue' as it was called, sat on a barge in the Rhone River, chained to a pier in front of the Hotel Dieu Hospital. The facility consisted of a wooden building 20 meters square, with a large 'exhibition room' where next of kin could view the cadavers, a small autopsy room, and a bedroom for the guard. Every year, scores of bodies of the anonymous and indigent would arrive for identification and autopsy...Bilge pumps fought a constant battle against flooding. Storms on the river caused the morgue to break free, smashing against the bridgeworks and spilling its cargo...When steamships churned by, their wakes would cause the barge to heave; sometimes the chains would snap and it would drift away."

"Two weeks later, an elderly couple was slaughtered in their home...she was felled by no fewer than nine stab wounds...He was killed and mutilated with 15 savage blows. The killer or killers stole 600 francs and made off with a sack of wheat...Vacher committed 3 murders in two weeks..."

"In 1885, France had passed a law prescribing life sentences for vagabonds and habitual criminals, many of whom went to the penal colony of Devil's Island off the coast of Guyana."

"Megnin specified 8 squads, or 'laborers of death,' whose presence could date a body within discrete time windows from one day to 3 years. The first squad, for example, consisted of houseflies and blowflies, which deposited their eggs at or just before the moment of death and bed on the body for about a month. Next would come several generations of brilliant metallic green bottle flies, large gray flesh flies and two other species, which would dominate the cadaver from one to three months. From the third month to the sixth, a third squad would take over, comprising the larvae and adults of flesh-eating beetles. The progression would continue, one collection of species after the next, until the body was little more than a fibrous husk still being gnawed on by certain beetles and moths."

"On the morning of his execution, Gaumet conveyed a message to Lacassagne. He was so impressed with the power of science, he said, that he wished to donate his skeleton to the professor's laboratory. It has been hanging in the display case ever since."

"One group, which he called 'criminaloids,' had none of the stigmata of the born criminal, but these individuals became involved in crime later in life and committed less serious crimes. Another group comprised of criminals of passion: otherwise upstanding citizens who committed violence on impulse, perhaps against an unfaithful spouse, and immediately repented. Another group, 'mattoids' included political criminals, such as anarchists and assassins, who were mentally unbalanced but not atavistic."

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Finished reading: The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston
Pages: 315
Words: fregatura
Notes: "Between 1974 and 1985, 7 couples - 14 people in all - were murdered while making love in parked cars in the beautiful hills surrounding Florence. The case had become the longest and most expensive criminal investigation in Italian history. Close to a hundred thousand men were investigated and more than a dozen arrested."

"Locally, these voyeurs were known as Indiani, or Indians, because they crept around in the dark. Some carried sophisticated electronic equipment...The Indiani had divided the hills into zones of operation, each managed by a group or "tribe" who controlled the best posts...Then there were people who preyed on the Indiani themselves, a subculture within a subculture. They would take note of their cars, license plate numbers, and other telling details - and then they would blackmail the Indiani..."

"In 1960, almost nobody in Sardinia spoke Italian, using instead a language all their own, Logudorese, considered to be the oldest and least contaminated of all the Romance languages. The Sardinians lived with indifference to whatever law happened to be imposed by sos italianos, as they referred to the people on the mainland. They followed their own unwritten laws, the Barbagian code, born out of the ancient region of central Sardinia called La Barbagia, one of the wildest and least populated areas in Europe."

Rating: 3 out of 5