The Courtesan And The Gigolo

The intrigue began with a triple homicide in a luxury apartment building just steps from the Champs-Elyseés, in March 1887. A high-class prostitute and two others, one of them a child, had been stabbed to death—the latest in a string of unsolved murders targeting women of the Parisian demimonde. Newspapers eagerly reported the lurid details, and when the police arrested Enrico Pranzini, a charismatic and handsome Egyptian migrant, the story became an international sensation. As the case descended into scandal and papers fanned the flames of anti-immigrant politics, the investigation became thoroughly enmeshed with the crisis-driven political climate of the French Third Republic and the rise of xenophobic right-wing movements. Aaron Freundschuh's account of the "Pranzini Affair" recreates not just the intricacies of the investigation and the raucous courtroom trial, but also the jockeying for status among rival players—reporters, police detectives, doctors, and magistrates—who all stood to gain professional advantage and prestige. Freundschuh deftly weaves together the sensational details of the case with the social and political undercurrents of the time, arguing that the racially charged portrayal of Pranzini reflects a mounting anxiety about the colonial "Other" within France's own borders. Pranzini's case provides a window into a transformational decade for the history of immigration, nationalism, and empire in France.

Flying from sin. . . Andrew Rossiter has used his gorgeous body and angelic face for all they're worth--shocking the proper, seducing the willing, and pleasuring the wealthy. But with a tiny son depending on him for rescue, suddenly discretion is far more important than desire. He'll have to bury his past and quench his desires--fast. And he'll have to find somewhere his deliciously filthy reputation hasn't yet reached. . . ..into seduction Miss Gemma Peartree seems like a plain, virginal governess. True, she has a sharp wit and a sharper tongue, but handsome Mr. Ross wouldn't notice Gemma herself. Or so she hopes. No matter how many sparks fly between them, she has too much to hide to catch his eye. But with the storms of a Scottish winter driving them together, it will be hard enough to keep her secrets. Keeping her hands to herself might prove entirely impossible. . . Praise for Maggie Robinson's Novels "Deliciously wicked." --Romance Junkies (5 stars) on Mistress by Midnight "A fun read that will keep you turning pages into the night." --Affaire de Coeur (4.5 stars) on Mistress by Mistake

Struggling to hold on to his career while endeavoring to redeem a scandalous past that estranged him from his family, actor Tennyson Hardwick finds himself accused of murder in the aftermath of his strict LAPD captain father's stroke. Reprint.

Finalist for the 2022 Cheiron Book Prize​ An Organ of Murder explores the origins of both popular and elite theories of criminality in the nineteenth-century United States, focusing in particular on the influence of phrenology. In the United States, phrenology shaped the production of medico-legal knowledge around crime, the treatment of the criminal within prisons and in public discourse, and sociocultural expectations about the causes of crime. The criminal was phrenology’s ideal research and demonstration subject, and the courtroom and the prison were essential spaces for the staging of scientific expertise. In particular, phrenology constructed ways of looking as well as a language for identifying, understanding, and analyzing criminals and their actions. This work traces the long-lasting influence of phrenological visual culture and language in American culture, law, and medicine, as well as the practical uses of phrenology in courts, prisons, and daily life.

7 Adjusting to a New Reality: The Army and the Imminent Independence -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Breaking the Codes is a cultural history of the fin-de-siecle that uses the "problem" of the criminal woman to examine both the debates around the appropriate place of women in French society and the ways in which issues of gender were central to the most important cultural transformations of the period. The author asserts that "female criminality" was a code that condensed and obscured larger concerns. For example, to what degree and in what ways did the symbolic overtones of female criminality connect to the substantive issues that appeared over and over again in the stories of women's crime? How were the crimes of domestic violence, infanticide, and abortion interpreted in the context of broader debates about divorce, depopulation, sexuality, and women's roles in the public sphere? What was the role of expert commentary - from the forensic psychiatrist, the criminologist, the legal scholar - in producing a normative code for female behavior? And how did this code accommodate or resist the newly recognized voice of popular opinion and changing notions of citizenship? This study demonstrates both the inadequacy of the categories of public and private as they have been conventionally used to segregate the subjects of historical inquiry and the artificiality of the boundaries between high and low culture. Instead, it moves between domestic life and public courtrooms, between social science literature and popular journalism, analyzing the complex responses to female crime among different constituencies and through different genres. In so doing, the author sheds light on various overlapping processes of cultural negotiation in a period of profound change.

Although Truman Capote's last novel was unfinished at the time of his death, its surviving portions offer a devastating group portrait of the high and low society of his time. • Includes the story La Cote Basque featured in the major FX series Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans. "Prose that makes the heart sing and the narrative fly." —The New York Times Book Review Tracing the career of a writer of uncertain parentage and omnivorous erotic tastes, Answered Prayers careens from a louche bar in Tangiers to a banquette at La Côte Basque, from literary salons to high-priced whorehouses. It takes in calculating beauties and sadistic husbands along with such real-life supporting characters as Colette, the Duchess of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead. Above all, this malevolently finny book displays Capote at his most relentlessly observant and murderously witty.