In late nineteenth-century Boston, home to Herman Melville and Oliver Wendell Holmes, a serial killer preying on children is running loose in the city a wilderness of ruin caused by the Great Fire of 1872 in this literary historical crime thriller reminiscent of The Devil in the White City. In the early 1870s, local children begin disappearing from the working-class neighborhoods of Boston. Several return home bloody and bruised after being tortured, while others never come back. With the city on edge, authorities believe ...
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In late nineteenth-century Boston, home to Herman Melville and Oliver Wendell Holmes, a serial killer preying on children is running loose in the city a wilderness of ruin caused by the Great Fire of 1872 in this literary historical crime thriller reminiscent of The Devil in the White City. In the early 1870s, local children begin disappearing from the working-class neighborhoods of Boston. Several return home bloody and bruised after being tortured, while others never come back. With the city on edge, authorities believe the abductions are the handiwork of a psychopath, until they discover that their killer fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy is barely older than his victims. The criminal investigation that follows sparks a debate among the world s most revered medical minds, and will have a decades-long impact on the judicial system and medical consciousness. The Wilderness of Ruin is a riveting tale of gruesome murder and depravity. At its heartis a great American city divided by class a chasm that widens in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1872. Roseanne Montillo brings Gilded Age Boston to glorious life from the genteel cobblestone streets of Beacon Hill to the squalid, overcrowded tenements of Southie. Here, too, is the writer Herman Melville. Enthralled by the child killer s case, he enlists physician Oliver Wendell Holmes to help him understand how it might relate to his own mental instability. With verve and historical detail, Roseanne Montillo explores this case that reverberatedthrough all of Boston society in order to help us understand our modern hunger for the prurient and sensational. The Wilderness of Ruin features more than a dozen black-and-white photographs. "
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Seller's Description:
New in New jacket. 12mo-over 6¾-7¾" tall. 1st Printing. This is a New and Unread copy of the first edition (1st printing). Includes illustrations, Index, Bibliography.
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Seller's Description:
New. Brand New! Not Overstocks or Low Quality Book Club Editions! Direct From the Publisher! We're a small town bookstore that loves books and loves it's customers! Buy from US! Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 320 p.