Kirjahaku

Book seventeen in the Inspector Lestrade series. Everybody, they say, has a book in them. Retired Chief Inspector Walter Dew certainly did. And it took him back to the good old days, when coppers lived in station houses, that nice Mr Campbell-Bannerman was at Number Ten and Britain had the biggest empire in the world. But, under the streets of London, something stirred. More than that, there was a muttering that grew to a grumbling and the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling. Then out of the houses, the bodies came tumbling Superintendent Sholto Lestrade, with Dew by his side and the rookies Bang and Olufsen in his wake, must go Below to face their demons, to find a murderer whose machinations will upset the infrastructure of the richest city on earth. Will any of them live to tell Dew's tale? The tale of a rat.

Book eighteen in the Inspector Lestrade series. Many readers of the Lestrade books wonder what is fact and what is fiction - and the author is delighted that they can't always tell So, for all the readers out there who have ever asked that question, here is the World of Inspector Lestrade. In this book, the lid is taken off the Victorian and Edwardian society in a way you've never seen before. Lestrade knew everybody, from Oscar Wilde in the Cadogan Hotel, to General Baden-Powell, cross-dressing on Brownsea Island, to the hero of Damascus, General Allenby - 'you can call me Al.' Have you ever wondered whether Howard Vincent, Director of the brand new CID really had a pet iguana? Find out inside. The Lestrade canon features the great and not so good of Britain when London stood at the heart of the Empire, the biggest in the world on which the sun never set. The novels on which this book is based are genuine whodunnits, with gallows humour and laugh-out-loud moments. Here you will find all the little peccadilloes that Lestrade took for granted. This is history as it really was - and I bet you wish you'd paid more attention at school now

For centuries, it was believed that a corpse would ‘bleed anew’ in the presence of its murderer. Chaucer wrote about it; so did Shakespeare. Only slowly, as the Renaissance and the Age of Reason drove away the shadows of superstition, did forensic science find its feet. From the Ratlciffe Highway murders of 1811 to the first murder trial with fingerprint technology (the Stratton brothers in 1905), In the Shadow of the Ripper charts the grisly history of crime and focuses on the technological developments that brought real justice just a little closer. General practitioners, police surgeons, anatomists, chemists and many others argued with each other in spectacular cases like the Ripper murders in 1888, the poisonings of William Palmer, Florence Maybrick and the axe frenzy of Lizzie Borden. And if the expert witnesses disagreed, how were juries, ‘twelve men and true’, with no scientific knowledge supposed to come to a verdict at a murder trial? Today, we take forensic science with all its brilliance for granted. In the Shadow of the Ripper looks at how it all began. The Ripper case is a shining example of the fact that it does not matter how many forensic advances are made, a killer in the shadows can sometimes outwit the police and science for over 135 years … and counting.