Here are 65 books that The Fatal Passion of Alma Rattenbury fans have personally recommended if you like
The Fatal Passion of Alma Rattenbury.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I have been researching, curating, and writing women’s history for 30 years. I curated the suffragette exhibition Purple, White, and Green at the Museum of London. I wrote The Suffragettes in Pictures; Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick; Elsie and Mairi Go To War: Two Extraordinary Women on the Western Front; The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton, and Rise Up, Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes.
I am a public historian, devoted to sharing my research and writing with all. I am a keen podcaster, Youtuber, and guest on television and radio. You could say I’m a heroine addict.
I hope you love my recommendations.
This is an extraordinary story of a group of wives and mothers whose lives connected through a magazine called The Cooperative Correspondence Club. It is a brilliant read: a moving and intimate collection of personal stories and inseparable friendship covering the 1920s to the 1970s. I enjoyed every page, it was an exhilarating read, well written, and well researched. Anyone interested in twentieth-century women’s history must read this book.
In 1935, a young woman wrote a letter to Nursery World magazine, expressing her feelings of isolation and loneliness. Women from all over the country experiencing similar frustrations wrote back. To create an outlet for their abundant ideas and opinions they started a private magazine, The Cooperative Correspondence Club. The deep friendships formed through its pages ensured the magazine continued until 1990, fifty-five years after the first issue was put together.
I have been researching, curating, and writing women’s history for 30 years. I curated the suffragette exhibition Purple, White, and Green at the Museum of London. I wrote The Suffragettes in Pictures; Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick; Elsie and Mairi Go To War: Two Extraordinary Women on the Western Front; The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton, and Rise Up, Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes.
I am a public historian, devoted to sharing my research and writing with all. I am a keen podcaster, Youtuber, and guest on television and radio. You could say I’m a heroine addict.
I hope you love my recommendations.
This is the very best book on nursing during the First World War. Packed with first-hand accounts of the ‘roses’ and their heroic efforts to nurse the wounded during and after that ghastly war that killed so many and destroyed the lives of many more who survived. Expertly contextualized, the author included the memories of the soldiers who were nursed and comforted by these extraordinary women who rose to the Government’s plea to ‘do their bit’. It is a profoundly moving book that should be read by anyone interested in the First World War and its painful aftermath.
Lyn Macdonald's The Roses of No Man's Land is a compelling look at the women who risked their lives on the Western Front.
'On the face of it,' writes Lyn Macdonald, 'no one could have been less equipped for the job than these gently nurtured girls who walked straight out of Edwardian drawing rooms into the manifest horrors of the First World War ...'
Yet the volunteer nurses rose magnificently to the occasion. In leaking tents and draughty huts they fought another war, a war against agony and death, as men lay suffering from the pain of unimaginable wounds or…
I have been researching, curating, and writing women’s history for 30 years. I curated the suffragette exhibition Purple, White, and Green at the Museum of London. I wrote The Suffragettes in Pictures; Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick; Elsie and Mairi Go To War: Two Extraordinary Women on the Western Front; The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton, and Rise Up, Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes.
I am a public historian, devoted to sharing my research and writing with all. I am a keen podcaster, Youtuber, and guest on television and radio. You could say I’m a heroine addict.
I hope you love my recommendations.
The leading authority on the history of divorce in England, Lawrence Stone’s brilliantly researched books are scholarly and highly readable. Road to Divorce is a frank and intimate account of the changing moral views of the past. It is utterly engrossing, full of drama, and leads readers to appreciate what a shocking prison marriage proved to be for hundreds of thousands of couples who, until 1857, needed an Act of Parliament to escape a bad marriage. Wives found it far harder than husbands to get a divorce as the legal obstacles were greater.
The first full study of a topic rich in historical interest and contemporary importance
Despite the infamous divorce of Henry VIII in 1529, subsequent moral, political, and religious attitudes ensured that until 1857, England was the only Protestant country with virtually no facilities for full divorce on the grounds of adultery, desertion, or cruelty. Using a mass of transcribed legal testimonies, taken from hitherto unexplored court records, Professor Stone uncovers the means by which laity and lawyers reformed the divorce laws, and offers astonishingly frank and intimate insights into our ancestors' changing views about what makes a marriage.
I have been researching, curating, and writing women’s history for 30 years. I curated the suffragette exhibition Purple, White, and Green at the Museum of London. I wrote The Suffragettes in Pictures; Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick; Elsie and Mairi Go To War: Two Extraordinary Women on the Western Front; The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton, and Rise Up, Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes.
I am a public historian, devoted to sharing my research and writing with all. I am a keen podcaster, Youtuber, and guest on television and radio. You could say I’m a heroine addict.
I hope you love my recommendations.
At last! A book that places Byron’s wife, Annabella Milbank, and mathematician daughter, Ada Lovelace, centre-stage instead of the dusty wings of all previous books about this notorious and complicated man. It is the perfect book for anyone interested in Byron and his world, and more importantly for readers keen to consider a more nuanced account of his wife and daughter.
In 1815, the clever, courted, and cherished Annabella Milbanke married the notorious and brilliant Lord Byron. Just one year later, she fled, taking with her their baby daughter, the future Ada Lovelace. Byron himself escaped into exile and died as a revolutionary hero in 1824, aged 36. The one thing he had asked his wife to do was to make sure that their daughter never became a poet.
Ada didn't. Brought up by a mother who became one of the most progressive reformers of Victorian England, Byron's little girl was introduced to mathematics as a means of calming her wild…
I’m a multi-genre writer who loves hearing the characters’ voices and getting their stories out there in the world. A lot of my characters are shaped by their gifts, whether they have supernatural ones or not. The things that happen to them shape who they are and how they react to future events. I exist on sarcasm, sass, and hot tea, so many of my characters do too.
Logan loses it all. Then her best friend’s charged with murder. Time’s running out and a deranged killer wants her dead.
In the first novel of Davisson’s thrilling, best-selling series, Logan loses her husband, her illusions, the company they built together, her music, and now, probably her job. But when a young glassblower is brutally killed at the local arts festival and her good friend, Thomas Delgado, a Native American artist, is accused of the crime, Logan drops everything to come to his defense.
It doesn’t help that Thomas is refusing to defend himself. As Logan struggles to maintain her…
I’m an author, reader, and cinephile with a real appetite for all things crime. If it’s a mystery, if it’s a detective story, if there are questionable morals at play in a story with no easy answers and no clear way out, then count me in. I’m also fascinated by the WWII era and was spellbound by the stories my maternal grandfather told me about his time as an infantry soldier in Italy during the war. These passions moved me to write my own novels and continue to inspire me in my embrace of art. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I do!
Winner of the 2022 Edgar Award for Best Novel, James Kestrel’s Five Decembers tells a gripping story of survival that spans the entirety of World War II.
It’s got it all, man, and it is a helluvafantastic read. The story begins in Honolulu, Hawaii, and follows detective Joe McGrady on the trail of a murder that takes him far from home and far from the woman he loves.
Before he knows it, he’s in the middle of the war, in Japan, no less, and nothing for him will ever be the same.
Don’t walk for this one, run, and keep a copy on your shelf. You’re sure to reread it a few times and the cover’s a true beaut.
"War, imprisonment, torture, romance...The novel has an almost operatic symmetry, and Kestrel turns a beautiful phrase." -New York Times
Five Decembers is a gripping thriller, a staggering portrait of war, and a heartbreaking love story, as unforgettable as All the Light We Cannot See.
NOMINATED FOR BEST THRILLER IN THE 2022 BARRY AWARDS
FINALIST FOR THE HAMMETT PRIZE 2021
"Read this book for its palpitating story, its perfect emotional and physical detailing and, most of all, for its unforgettable conjuring of a steamy quicksilver world that will be new to almost…
I come from a rather strange background: southern Italian and Eastern European Jewish. As a child, I heard both Italian (Neapolitan dialect) and Yiddish. I later learned that my maternal grandmother’s brother was the well-known Yiddish poet and playwright, Jacob Adler, creator of Yente (who wrote under the name B. Kovner to avoid confusion with the great actor by that name). I have been involved with what some call the “occult,” “paranormal,” or “supernatural” for many years, and these appear in much of my recent writing. Moreover, The Ibbur’s Taledraws on various elements drawn from the history of my mother’s family, including the fate of some during the Holocaust.
Zimler’s earlier novel,The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, presented masterful prose in the genres of historical fiction, mystery, and thriller.
The Warsaw Anagrams continued in this vein: a murder mystery set amidst the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto. For me, it was a “can’t-put-it-down” novel, and I was absolutely captivated by the author’s design. He has the ibbur– in this case, the late Dr. Erik Cohen – tell the story to Heniek Corben, and what a profound tale it is!
To the best of my knowledge, The Warsaw Anagrams was the first novel to present an ibbur, and it prompted my own efforts. I hope that my novella will in turn encourage other authors to consider using this material from the Jewish shtetlach of a lost era.
Autumn 1940. The Nazis seal 400,000 Jews inside a small area of the Polish capital, creating an urban island cut off from the outside world. Erik Cohen, an elderly psychiatrist, is forced to move into a tiny apartment with his niece and his beloved nine-year-old nephew, Adam.
One bitterly cold winter's day, Adam goes missing. The next morning, his body is discovered in the barbed wire surrounding the ghetto. The boy's leg has been cut off, and a tiny piece of string has been left in his mouth.
Soon, another body turns up - this time a girl's, and one…
At twenty-six I was living in Wuhan. I had been in China for a couple of years and was looking for a change. Not ready to go back home to New Zealand, I made my way across Europe, through the USA, and on to Argentina. Since that visit, I’ve followed Argentina's economic crises and scoured its newspapers for quirky crime stories. I started to send out true crime articles to various magazines. Eventually, I had enough material to write a novel. For years I’ve wanted to find a literary yet straightforward crime novel set in Argentina. The search goes on, but below are the best I’ve come across so far.
An Agatha Christie-style mystery set in Buenos Aires. At two in the morning, Pancho Soler returns drunk to his apartment building on Santa Fe Avenue. He presses the button for the lift, and it arrives with a surprise inside: a beautiful blonde woman, sitting upright, but dead. Many of the suspects who live in the building are recent immigrants from Europe and, as the novel is set in the 1950s, their memories and secrets from WW2 are still fresh. Boris, a Bulgarian chemist who worked for the Nazis, is the most entertaining of the lot. There are the usual red herrings and revelations in the search for the murderer. The young Argentinian detective is a little flat by Christie's standards, but this is a satisfying whodunnit.
Frida Eidinger is young, beautiful and lying dead in the lift of a luxury Buenos Aires apartment block.
It looks like suicide, and yet none of the building's residents can be trusted; the man who discovered her is a womanising drunk; her husband is behaving strangely; and upstairs, a photographer and his sister appear to be hiding something sinister. When Inspector Ericourt and his colleague Blasi are set on the trail of some missing photographs, a disturbing secret past begins to unravel...
One of Argentina's greatest detective stories, Death Going Down is a postwar tale of survival and extortion, obsession…
My love of British crime fiction began when, as a young teen, I discovered Agatha Christie on the shelves of my local library. With Scottish grandparents, I was already well indoctrinated in the “everything British is best” theory, but it was as a student at St. Clare’s College, Oxford, that I fell totally under the spell of the British Isles. No surprise, then, that my Kate Hamilton Mystery series is set in the UK and features an American antiques dealer with a gift for solving crimes. I love to read the classic mysteries of the Golden Age as well as authors today who follow that tradition.
For my last pick, I’ve chosen a novel published near the end of the Golden Age (roughly the 1920s through the 1950s). Author and solicitor Michael Gilbert set his novel in the chambers of Horniman, Birley, and Craine. After the death of the firm’s senior partner, a hermetically sealed deed box is opened, revealing the corpse of Marcus Smallbone, a co-trustee with the late Mr. Horniman of the valuable Ichbod Trust. With the help of newly qualified solicitor Henry Bohun, Chief Inspector Hazelrigg sorts through a maze of lies and misdirection to uncover the surprising perpetrator and motive. Martin Edwards, in the foreword to the Poisoned Pen Press edition, said, “The book blends in masterly fashion, an authentic setting, pleasingly differentiated characters, smoothly readable prose, and a clever puzzle.”
Discover the captivating treasures buried in the British Library's archives. Largely inaccessible to the public until now, these enduring classics were written in the golden age of detective fiction.
"A first-rate job"—New York Times
"A classic of the genre"—Guardian
Horniman, Birley and Craine is a highly respected legal firm with clients drawn from the highest in the land. When a deed box in the office is opened to reveal a corpse, the threat of scandal promises to wreak havoc on the firm's reputation—especially as the murder looks like an inside job. The partners and staff of the firm keep a…
I am a storyteller and I conceived The Life of Crime as the ‘life story’ of a fascinating and truly diverse genre. I’ve always been intrigued by the ups and downs of literary lives, and the book explores the rollercoaster careers of writers from across the world. The chapter endnotes contain masses of trivia and information, as well as some original research, that I hope readers will find enjoyable as well as interesting. But The Life ofCrimeisn’t an academic text. It’s a love letter to a genre that I’ve adored for as long as I can remember.
Haycraft was an American commentator and this survey of the history of crime writing up to the Second World War is soundly written and sympathetic. Interestingly, he believed that the locked room puzzle was played out and that authors should avoid it, whereas this type of mystery has enjoyed a significant revival in recent years. Predicting how crime writing will evolve in the future is fraught with danger! Inevitably, Haycraft’s focus was mainly on American and British crime fiction. The limited number of translated mysteries in those days meant that the global reach of crime writing, and the achievements of authors whose first language is not English, has long been under-estimated. Only now is this problem being addressed.
"Genuinely fascinating reading."—The New York Times Book Review "Diverting and patently authoritative."—The New Yorker "Grand and fascinating … a history, a compendium and a critical study all in one, and all first rate."—Rex Stout "A landmark … a brilliant study written with charm and authority."—Ellery Queen "This book is of permanent value. It should be on the shelf of every reader of detective stories."—Erle Stanley Gardner Author Howard Haycraft, an expert in detective fiction, traces the genre's development from the 1840s through the 1940s. Along the way, he charts the innovations of Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan…
