Showing results by author "Alana Sanchez" in All Categories

In nineteenth-century Edinburgh, bodies disappeared from the city’s poorest streets and reappeared on the dissection tables of its medical schools. History remembers the men who supplied them. This book tells a different story. The Silent Partner examines the Burke and Hare murders through the life and trial of Helen McDougal, the woman who lived inside the household where the killings occurred and who survived when the law demanded a single villain. Acquitted with the verdict Not Proven, McDougal was released into a city that no longer distinguished between suspicion and guilt. Drawing ...

In late-Victorian London, Minnie Pheby became a scandal: a young woman accused of burglary at a time when breaking into houses was considered a man’s crime. Branded by the press as the “lady burglar”, she was hunted, punished, and turned into a cautionary tale. Catwoman of West London reconstructs her story from surviving records — and reveals what her crimes exposed about class, gender, and the fragile promise of the Victorian home.

In the 1840s, the workhouse was the centre of Britain’s response to poverty. This book tells the story of one such institution — Southwell Workhouse — during a single Victorian decade, when the New Poor Law was working exactly as intended. Based entirely on contemporary records, this is not a novel and not a work of fiction. It reconstructs daily life inside the workhouse through its own rules, registers, and reports: admission, classification, routine, labour, diet, punishment, illness, authority, and exit. Families were separated, work was enforced, hunger was regulated, and decline...

In the glittering halls of Versailles, power was theatre — and belief was everything. In 1785, a diamond necklace worth a fortune vanished into the shadows of Paris. The crime that stole it was audacious: forged letters, a counterfeit Queen, secret meetings beneath moonlit gardens, and a cardinal desperate to regain royal favour. Yet the greatest twist was this — Marie Antoinette never ordered the necklace at all. And still, the scandal wrapped itself around her name like a noose. At the centre of the deception stood Jeanne de la Motte, a woman with noble blood and empty pockets, who ...

A nun who fled enclosure. A soldier who crossed oceans. A case that forced power to decide. Born in early seventeenth-century Spain and raised within convent walls, Catalina de Erauso escaped a life of enclosure and moved through the Spanish Empire under a male identity. She worked, travelled, fought, and survived in worlds governed by violence, honour, and rigid social control—until repeated conflict and custody brought her life under institutional scrutiny. The Lieutenant Nun reconstructs Catalina’s life as a historical case, following the points where private survival collided with ...

When Care Decides is a meticulously researched true-crime narrative that examines how trust, authority, and institutional silence enabled one of history’s most disturbing medical crimes. Through the life of Jane Toppan, a nurse who killed her patients while acting in the name of care, this book exposes the systems that failed to see — and the quiet decisions that proved fatal. Written with restraint and insight, When Care Decides is not a story about madness, but about what happens when care is given the power to choose.

London, 1932. In a Knightsbridge mews house where the parties ran past dawn, a young man was shot dead. The woman arrested for his murder was Elvira Barney—glamorous, connected, and already whispered about in the bright rooms of fashionable society. What followed was a trial that gripped London: conflicting testimony, a shadowed household, a dangerous weapon, and a jury asked to decide what happened in the worst seconds of a long night. Acquitted of murder and manslaughter but convicted of possessing a firearm, Elvira stepped out of the Old Bailey into a different kind of sentence—...

They were only children. In 1917, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths produced photographs that appeared to show fairies at Cottingley Beck. The images were declared genuine, published worldwide, and championed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Years later, the truth emerged. The Fairy Case examines the photographs, the experts, the silence, and the human need that turned five simple plates into proof.

Between 1871 and 1873, travellers vanished along a lonely Kansas trail. The Bloody Benders is the true story of America's first known serial killer family. Reconstructed from historical records, newspaper archives, and modern criminological analysis. This is not folklore, this is history.

House of Bourbon is a sweeping, factual narrative of the dynasty that helped shape modern Europe. From Henry IV’s hard-won settlement after the French Wars of Religion to Louis XIV’s Versailles state, from the fall of Louis XVI and the fate of Marie Antoinette and Marie Thérèse Charlotte to the Bourbon transformation of Spain, this book traces how power is claimed, defended, and reinvented across centuries. Moving between Paris and Madrid, revolution and restoration, constitution and dictatorship, it follows the Bourbons as a living case study in legitimacy: how rulers win obedience, ...

In the quiet town of Correggio , Leonarda Ciunciulli was known as a respectable shopkeeper, a devoted mother, and a woman other trusted with their fears. She sold soap. She offerred advice. She listened. Told in Leonarda's own voice, I AM THE SOAP MAKER, is a literary true-crime novel inspired by the crimes of Leonarda Ciunciulli.

In the desolate plains of Kansas, Kate Bender became a name whispered with fear. But there is more to a woman than a crime. Now she tells her own story - the choices, the darkness, and bestrewn road to survival. Evil is not just born. It is made. And some lines were never meant to be crossed.

In 1880s Britain, the chemist’s shop stood at the centre of a quiet revolution. Behind its polished counter were the substances that eased pain, soothed nerves, and saved lives — and the same substances that could quietly kill. As pharmacy professionalised and poison laws tightened, Victorian society struggled to balance access with safety, privacy with accountability, and relief with risk. The Victorian Chemist explores the uneasy coexistence of medicine and poison in an age of rapid chemical progress. Through regulation, scandal, courtroom testimony, and everyday trade, this book ...

In early nineteenth-century Leeds, fear was common and answers were scarce. Mary Bateman sold both. Branded the “Yorkshire Witch”, she promised cures and protection, drawing desperate families into rituals, payments, and obedience. Then a woman died — and the story turned from superstition to murder. The Yorkshire Witch: The Mary Bateman Case is a chronological account grounded in the historical record, separating provable fact from legend while restoring the victims to the centre of the narrative. A true-crime manuscript of fraud, belief, and poison hidden in the domestic world.

Darya Saltykova was a Russian noblewoman who exercised near-absolute authority over the people bound to her estates. For years, violence unfolded within that private world, sustained by serfdom, silence, and a system that treated suffering as an internal matter. In The Lady of the Estate, Alana Sanchez examines Saltykova’s case not as an isolated act of cruelty, but as a study of private power. Drawing on petitions, legal process, and the political context of Catherine II’s Russia, this book traces how abuse persisted, why intervention was delayed, and how punishment ultimately served ...

What if the dead were the price of medical progress? In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, Britain’s medical schools faced an impossible dilemma: anatomy demanded human bodies, yet the law provided almost none. The result was a hidden trade in the dead—grave robbing, body snatching, and, in its darkest moments, murder. The History of Grave Robbing traces the rise and fall of the resurrection men, the legal contradictions that enabled them, and the social inequalities that made the poor uniquely vulnerable in death. From the Burke and Hare murders to the Anatomy Act of 1832, from ...

Darling thought the curse that once claimed her had been broken. She was wrong. Pregnant and newly married, Darling begins to still again — not as a relapse, but as an evolution. As her body slows, the world around her adapts. Mannequins move when necessary. Silence becomes communication. Protection becomes instinct. As external pressure closes in and the past resurfaces, Darling, her husband John, their friend Ben, and the creations she brought into the world must act as a single system — not driven by fear, but by care. Inheritance of Stillness is a quiet, unsettling novel about love ...

She was trusted with society’s most vulnerable. What she did instead shocked Victorian England. In the shadowed streets of 19th-century Britain, where poverty and desperation left countless women with impossible choices, one figure lurked behind a façade of compassion. Amelia Dyer, known as the baby farmer, offered relief to desperate mothers — for a price. What followed was one of the most chilling true crime stories in history.

An unflinching examination of trust inside the private household. In the early nineteenth century, Anna Margaretha Zwanziger moved quietly through respectable homes in the German states, working as a housekeeper in a world that relied on discretion, obedience, and trust. When illness and death followed her presence, private fear became public reckoning. The Woman in Service traces Zwanziger’s life from childhood and guardianship through marriage, widowhood, and domestic labour, placing her actions within the fragile systems that shaped women’s lives and work. Rather than ...

Paris. The late reign of Louis XIV. A death that should have been ordinary. On 31 July 1672, a man is found dead in his Paris rooms—and an inventory opens a locked cassette that should never have been opened. Inside: “diverse vials” and nine letters linked to Marie-Madeleine d’Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers. In the official account, those letters point to an unthinkable claim: that a noblewoman poisoned her own father (1666) and two brothers (1670). And the vials? “Virulent poisons” said to leave little trace—perfect for a world where illness already looked like death. What ...