Tag: true crime

Book Review – A Fatal Love by Louisa Treger @BloomsburyBooks

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About the Book

It is Easter Sunday in 1955 and a young man lies face-down on the ground covered in blood. A woman, blonde and petite, stands over him with a gun in her hand. This is the story of Ruth Ellis as never told before…

As Ruth awaits her trial in Holloway Prison, she recollects growing up in England during the Second World War and the events that led to the death of her lover, David Blakely.

Meanwhile, Kitty Carrington – the assistant to Ruth’s trial lawyer – tries to forge her own path through the male-dominated legal world of the 1950s and ensure that Ruth receives a fair trial.

Navigating secrets, betrayal and a broken justice system, Ruth and Kitty try to take control of their own lives and narratives. But do we ever really know the full story?

Format: Hardcover (240 pages) Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication date: 27th August 2026 Genre: Historical Fiction, True Crime

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My Review

A Fatal Love is the story of an addiction. Not to drugs or drink, although those do play a part, but to a person. That person was David Blakely, a man with whom Ruth Ellis was passionately in love despite his frequent infidelity and violence towards her.

The author takes the reader inside the mind of a woman who has had to fend for herself from an early age, to struggle to make a life for herself. A woman who has had to overcome the stigma of having a child out of wedlock, a failed marriage that ended in divorce, and working as a hostess in night clubs. But Ruth proves herself to be brilliant at the latter. Always gorgeously turned out, she knows just how to charm the male clientele to ensure the drinks, and the money, keep flowing. Ruth’s no angel. In return for a roof over her head she’s expected by the club’s owner to have sex with many of the men who frequent the club, even while her young son Andy sleeps in the next room.

Then one night, Ruth meets racing driver David Blakely. The physical attraction is instant and overwhelming. It’s the first step on a path that will destroy them both.

Blakely comes across as a needy, duplicitous waster – and that’s putting it kindly. It’s heartbreaking to see Ruth so in thrall to him, unable to resist letting him back in her life after each lie, each broken promise, each act of betrayal. ‘He was light and oxygen to her. There were times when it seemed she could not breathe outside his presence.’ At the same time as recognising the hold he has over her, she sees the impossibility of her ever having the strength to break free from him.

What she does on that Easter Sunday 1955 is an act of desperation and a kind of madness, enabled by another who was never held responsible.

The author introduces a fictional character, Kitty, assistant to John Bickford, the solicitor appointed to represent Ruth. I didn’t think Kitty’s back story contributed much but she did provide an important perspective on the conduct of Ruth’s trial. We see that Ruth was failed by everyone. The psychiatrist who interviewed her but failed to find evidence of mental illness. Her barrister who rejected provocation as a potentially successful line of defence. The presiding judge whose partial summing-up contributed to the jury’s guilty verdict. The Home Secretary who refused a request for clemency.

But perhaps a woman like Ruth could never have overcome the misogyny of 1950s society. As Kitty observes to Bickford during the trial, ‘Ruth is a threat to the social order. They’re out to break her… The police, the newspapers, even your colleagues. She was too ambitious. No respect for the boundaries of sex and class – broke every rule. To them that’s the real offence.’

The final section of the book describes in unflinching detail the period Ruth Ellis spent in Holloway Prison after her trial and before her execution. In the condemned cell she is never left alone and is only footsteps away from where she will be executed. The details of her final hours, the meticulous preparations for her execution, are distressing to read.

As the author sets out in the Afterword, Ruth’s actions had a lasting impact on her family, especially her son Andy, as well as for others involved in the case. But her case also fuelled the campaign to end the death penalty.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of Bloomsbury via NetGalley. A Fatal Love is book 7 of my 20 Books of Summer 2026.

In three words: Moving, gripping, powerful
Try something similar: The Unspeakable Acts of Zina Pavlou by Eleni Kyriacou

About the Author

Louisa Treger is the critically acclaimed author of four novels – The Lodger (2014), The Dragon Lady (2019), Madwoman (2022) and The Paris Muse (2024) – translated into several languages. Her work has twice been selected as The Times Historical Book of the Month, most recently for Madwoman, which was also a Book of the Month in the Independent.

She has written for numerous publications, including Financial Times, The Times, the Telegraph, Tatler, BBC History Magazine, and English Heritage. Radio appearances include BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking programme and BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. She appears regularly at literary festivals and cultural institutions, and is deputy chair of the board of the Oxford Literary Festival. (Photo: Amazon author page)

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Book Review – Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet

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About the Book

On 9 July 1857, Angus MacPhee, a labourer from Liniclate on the island of Benbecula, murdered his father, mother and aunt. At trial in Inverness he was found to be criminally insane and confined in the Criminal Lunatic Department of Perth Prison.

Some years later, Angus’s older brother Malcolm recounts the events leading up to the murders while trying to keep a grip on his own sanity. Malcolm is living in isolation, ostracised by the community and haunted by this gruesome episode in his past.

Format: Hardcover (170 pages) Publisher: Polygon
Publication date: 2nd October 2025 Genre: Historical Fiction, Crime

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My Review

Benbecula, part of the Darkland Tales series, is based on the true story of a gruesome triple murder carried out in July 1857 on a small island in the Outer Hebrides. The author fills in the gaps in the available documentary evidence about the case to explore the events leading up to the murder.

Our narrator is Malcom MacPhee, the elder brother of Angus, the man responsible for the murder who was committed to the Criminal Lunatic Department of Perth Prison following his trial. It’s many years after the murder and Malcolm is living alone in the family home. He lives in a state of squalor, rarely bathing or venturing outside. His days are spent reflecting on his role in past events, especially the increasingly erratic behaviour of Angus, and pondering on his own mental state. Perhaps it’s true, he thinks, his family is ‘a poisoned lineage’.

Shunned by most of the villagers, Malcom’s only visitors are the local priest and a Mrs MacLeod who, seemingly of her own volition, turns up periodically to clean the house, force him to bathe and cut his hair; the latter he finds strangely erotic.

As he looks back on the past, Malcolm paints a picture of a very strange family who scrape a meagre living from tending a small strip of land (a ‘rig’) and collecting kelp from the shoreline. The most, possibly only, sensible person in the household in his sister Marion but the island has nothing to offer her except years more of the same backbreaking mundane tasks. Malcolm’s father is mostly inebriated and his mother spends her days obsessively tending the fire, sitting in front of it with her legs splayed.

Uncontrollable sexual urges and a capacity for violence lurk just under the surface. In the case of Angus these emerge from time to time in manic episodes. Angus’s violent outbursts and strange behaviour are an increasing burden on the family. They cannot afford to have him confined to an institution so they must be constantly vigilant. In practice this task falls to Malcom and Marion.

But how much can we trust Malcolm’s account of events? After all, we learn Malcolm shares some of the same violent and sexual impulses as Angus. For example, he interprets a cat tormenting a half-dead mouse as an entertainment put on for his benefit. And although he manages to control – just – most of his impulses, instead acting them out in his imagination, there is one very chilling act he carries out in reality. Through these and Malcom’s own insights into his unstable mind, the author provides just enough ambiguity to leave us wondering if there’s more to events than meets the eye.

This is not a book in which the crime itself dominates. In fact, the description of the murders doesn’t come until late in the book. Instead it’s much more an exploration of notions of hereditary insanity and attitudes towards mental illness prevalent at the time. The afterword provides details of source documents but also of the cruelty endured by Angus during his long incarceration. If this all sounds pretty depressing, rest assured there are moments of absurdity and dark humour.

In three words: Unsettling, sinister, atmospheric
Try something similar: A Granite Silence by Nina Allan

About the Author

Graeme Macrae Burnet is the author of five novels: the Booker-shortlisted His Bloody Project, which has been published in over twenty languages; the Booker-longlisted Case Study (named as one of the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2022); and the Georges Gorski trilogy, comprising The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, The Accident on the A35 and A Case of Matricide. Graeme was born in Kilmarnock and now lives in Glasgow.

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