Showing results by author "Alana Sanchez" in All Categories

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 ...

Before she became a legend, she was a woman who learned how power looked — and how to wear it. Remembered across the Russian Empire as Sonya Golden Hand, Sofia Ivanovna Blyuvshteyn has long been immortalised as thief, impostor, society woman, escape artist, and criminal queen. In popular memory she glides through hotels, railway carriages, and jewellers’ shops in silks and diamonds, dazzling the wealthy before vanishing with their valuables. But behind the glittering myth stood a far more complex and dangerous woman. Queen of Thieves, strips away the easy romance of criminal legend to ...

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 December 1786, a small Connecticut town gathered behind its meeting house to witness a hanging. The condemned was Hannah Ocuish, twelve years old. Told through the surviving record—especially the execution sermon printed on the day she died— Hannah: The Condemned Child traces the case from a summer morning on the road outside New London to the courtroom, the gaol, the pulpit, and the scaffold. It asks how fear hardens into certainty, how a child’s words are filtered through adult authority, and how print can turn a girl into an “example” for generations to come. Written in a ...

She called herself a countess. Europe believed her. In the grand hotels of the Belle Époque, a woman known as the Comtesse de Monteil drifted through the Riviera’s glittering corridors—charming the elite, earning their trust, and leaving behind empty jewel cases and unanswered questions. Police traced her across Brussels, London, Nice, and beyond, but her disguise held until one night in 1908, when she was finally caught in the act. The Comtesse of Crime is a glam-noir true crime story of deception, luxury, and the dangerous power of belonging—told through verified contemporary ...

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.

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...

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, ...

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.

Seven Victorian cases. Seven women. One court that turned private life into public evidence. Women of the Old Bailey follows a nurse in the sickroom, a servant inside the house, a respectable wife under scrutiny, a sensational defendant made into warning, a poisoner explained through obsession, a baby-farmer in a hidden economy of shame, and a household where cruelty was made routine. Drawn from the Old Bailey record, this narrative history traces how the Victorian courtroom judged women—by class, by respectability, by domestic role—long before any verdict was spoken.

Founded in New York in 1875, the Theosophical Society emerged at a moment of profound intellectual upheaval. Science was challenging scripture, empire was reshaping cultures, and modernity was unsettling inherited certainties. Into this fractured world stepped a movement that claimed to reconcile evolution with spiritual law, religion with reason, and East with West. In The Theosophical Society, Alana Sanchez offers a meticulously researched historical study of one of the most influential—and controversial—spiritual movements of the modern age. Moving beyond caricature and ...

Rome whispers about a poison that looks like holy water. They call it Aqua Tofana—a saint-faced bottle passed hand to hand, a rumour with a price, a promise made to desperate wives behind shuttered windows. Men call it evil. Priests call it temptation. The streets call it justice. But Giulia knows what it really is: a brand built in the cracks of a city that leaves women no safe exits. When a quiet network of laundresses, servants and midwives begins to fray under pressure—boots on stone, coins offered for silence, and the Church leaning close—Giulia must protect the one person she ...

In the early twentieth century, Linda Burfield Hazzard claimed she could cure disease through fasting. Patients came to her retreat seeking health, discipline, and certainty. Many left dangerously weakened. Some did not leave at all. The Woman with the Cure examines the rise and fall of Hazzard and her infamous sanitarium, known as Starvation Heights. Through careful historical analysis, this book traces how authority, belief, and isolation combined to turn care into coercion — and why intervention came too late. A sober work of historical true crime, this is not a story of spectacle, but...

On 5 November 1878, Ella Hearn was shot in her family home in Pocomoke City, Maryland. The accused was Lillian Duer—her closest companion. What followed was a month-long vigil, a fugitive escape, a coroner’s inquest, and a sensational trial in Snow Hill. Based on surviving 19th-century reporting, The Duer–Hearn Case reveals a story of obsession, coercive control, and a justice system shaped by gender and class.

Florence Cook was a teenager when her name became evidence. In Victorian England, séances promised proof of life after death. Cabinets were built, conditions negotiated, and belief tested under dim light. At the centre of one of the era’s most disputed cases stood Florence Cook, a young medium whose performances drew the attention of scientist William Crookes—and ignited a controversy that would never fully close. This book examines the Florence Cook case as historical true crime: not as ghost story, and not as spectacle, but as an investigation into procedure, reputation, power, and ...

She offered youth for a price, and discretion as part of the deal. In the fashionable heart of Victorian London, Madame Rachel built a beauty empire on fear: fear of ageing, fear of judgement, fear of being replaced. This historical true crime account follows the clients who came to her, the methods that held them, and the trial that exposed what polite society preferred to keep hidden.

Madame Restell was the most famous abortion provider in nineteenth-century America. She advertised openly in New York newspapers, built a lucrative business serving women in secret, and became a household name—denounced from pulpits, pursued by reformers, and feared by authorities. In Madame Restell: Abortion, Secrecy, and the Making of a Public Enemy, traces how a single woman came to embody a private market the public refused to acknowledge. Drawing on court records, contemporary reporting, and modern scholarship, this book reconstructs Restell’s rise, her repeated encounters with the...

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 ...

Sophie Lyons was trained to steal as a child and spent decades moving through the crowded cities of the nineteenth century, surviving by skill, performance, and constant motion. In The Woman on the Circuit, Alana Sanchez traces Lyons’ life across New York, Canada, and the wider urban crime circuit, not as spectacle, but as labour. Drawing on court records, newspaper reporting, and Lyons’ own writing, this book examines the systems that shaped her choices: women’s criminal networks, policing and courts, public morality, and the narrow paths available to women who lived outside ...

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.