What I'm Reading

I binge-read Swans of Fifth Avenue, and needless to say, I really enjoyed it. As I mentioned, it's a novel based on fact, and the author has an afterword where she says people are curious as to what is real and what she made up. She says, of course, that she made up the conersations but all the facts and perceptions of the people are true. It made me go and look up the various characters on line, study their bios and photos on Wikipedia, etc. It also sort of made me curious to reread Capote's book In Cold Blood which I read when it was first published in 1966. That's a book that stayed with me, and I remember a few of the details all these years later.

So from Fifth Avenue to Kidbrooke Lane outside of London...

If you can't read the subtitle its' "A true story of Victorian Law and Disorder" and I'll let Amazon describe it more succinctly than I would:

On April 26th, 1871, a police constable walking one of London’s remotest beats stumbled upon a brutalized young woman kneeling on a muddy road―gashes were cloven into her skull; her left cheek was slashed open and smashed-in; her right eye was destroyed; and above it a chunk of the temporal bone had been bashed out. The policeman gaped in horror as the woman held out her hand before collapsing into the mud, muttering “let me die” and slipping into a coma. Five days later, she died, her identity still unknown.

Within hours of her discovery on Kidbrooke Lane scores of the officers of Greenwich Division were involved in the investigation, and Scotland Yard had sent one of its top detectives, John Mulvany, to lead it. After five days of gathering evidence, the police discovered the girl’s identity: Jane Maria Clouson, a maid in the house of the renowned Pook family . . . and she was two months’ pregnant with Edmund Pook’s child when she died.

Murphy carefully reviews the evidence in the light of 21st century forensic science in order to identify Jane’s killer as Edmund Walter Pook. Using a surprisingly abundant collection of primary sources, Murphy aims to recreate the drama of the case as it unfolded, with its many twists and turns, from the discovery of the body to the final crack of the gavel―and beyond. 16 pages of color and B&W illustrations

me again: So far, the woman has been found; she's in the hospital in a coma and loads of people are coming to look at her to try to identify her. She's still alive and the police and Scotaland Yard are gathering evidence.