Passion. Betrayal. Murder. When you’re a private investigator, these are things you experience daily. But when you add capes to the mix-like Batman, Catwoman, and Harley Quinn? Things get even messier. The name’s Slam Bradley, and I’m telling you that this year’s Valentine’s Day special has more intrigue than you can shake a stick at. Ten tales of love-the kind of love that can push people over the edge. Don’t miss it...or I’ll make you pay.

Thirty real-life accounts of passion gone lethally wrong Celebrated mystery writer Howard Engel traces the history of the crime of passion through France, England, Canada, and the United States in his first nonfiction book. The story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England, is explored along with more familiar, modern cases, such as those of O. J. Simpson and Lorena Bobbitt. With each sordid tale, Engel explores the legal codes and moral implications surrounding crimes of passion throughout history. Careful research and a novelist’s eye for detail and dramatization bring each grisly case into chilling clarity. Crimes of Passion is a must-read for true crime enthusiasts, armchair historians, and fans of the macabre.

Originally published in 1800, Crimes of Passion contained eleven stories and an essay on the novel. The present book contains three abridged tales. In “Florville and Courval” we find not only a reinterpretation and elaboration of the Oedipus myth, but an unforgettable illustration of Donatien Alphonse François de Sade’s artistic creed. He was not simply an eccentric aristocrat with artistic pretensions, but a pathological rebel against the Age of Enlightenment, and a prisoner of the Prince of Darkness. The historical tale of “Juliette and Raunai” is sentimental and melodramatic. In it, virtue triumphs, but not before the lovers have run the gamut of human suffering. “Miss Henriette Stralson” has a contemporary setting and ranks above his historical tales. In it, virtue wins only a pyrrhic victory.

Bringing key Shakespeare texts into dialogue with feminist socio-legal research, this book investigates the notion of a ‘crime of passion’ – indicatively, wife-killing. Its key concern is to bring attention to a cultural and legal revolution widely overlooked even in the law field where it occurred. In 2009, the English Parliament passed a controversial law abolishing the defence of provocation. Explaining the new law, reformers said that this so-called ‘heat of passion’ defence had allowed men to get away with murder by blaming the victim. Abolishing it in cases of alleged ‘infidelity’ would ‘end the culture of excuses’. Unpacking what was at stake in the reformers’ revolutionary challenge to the English law of murder’s age-old concession to ‘human frailty’ in ‘red mist’ rage cases, this book charts passion’s progress in wife-killing cases over the centuries. It commences in the early modern era when jurists were busy distinguishing murder from manslaughter and, contemporaneously, Shakespeare set about querying culturally inscribed excuses for femicide in his plays, Titus Andronicus and Othello. This book will appeal to feminist and socio-legal scholars, criminologists and those working in the fields of law and literature, legal theory and Shakespeare studies. More widely, it will appeal to anyone interested in so-called ‘crimes of passion’.

Profiles a variety of murders and other crimes committed by women and men under the force of passion, from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century to the present day

Founded in 1798, Hamtramck shrank in size even as it grew in population. Stuffing tens of thousands of people in 2.1 square miles is bound to breed conflict, and many of those conflicts boiled over into murder. Sunday, September 7, 1884, was supposed to be a day of joy for Fritz Krum, whose child was being christened. Instead, it ended in a fatal stabbing. The 1930 killing of police officer Barney Roth in a reputed mob hit drew national attention. The murder of Hamtramck teen Bernice Onisko remains an open case today, more than eighty years after it occurred. Gathering cases from the late nineteenth century to more recent times, prolific local historian Greg Kowalski takes readers on a journey through Hamtramck homicide.