A fledgling community in the midst of stunning natural scenes, the St. Paul of yesteryear had a well-earned reputation for beauty and danger. Whiskey made the river city a byword for peril. Men brawled over small offenses and killed one another with near impunity. As crime flourished beyond the power of police control, vigilantes patrolled the streets. Irresponsible speculation and white-collar crime wrecked the local economy, devastating families and driving thousands out of town. The remaining St. Paulites rebuilt their community and economy, stimulating immigration, but more people meant more crime. In the 1870s, vice and violence spiraled into the Bloody Fall of '74, and St. Paul regained its reputation as a "dead tough" town. Historian Ron de Beaulieu reveals the past travails of life in this turbulent city.

This true crime history recounts more than a century of crime, deviousness, and disaster in the North Star State. In Minnesota Mayhem, local historian and author Ben Welter explores the best of the state's worst moments. Culled from the archives of the Minneapolis Tribune and its successor newspapers, these stories and photos range from the catastrophic to the chillingly curious and the simply strange. Among the true tales told in these pages, Welter recounts the career of a successful con man in 1871; an 1881 fire that destroyed the State Capitol; a flu outbreak that killed more than 10,000 Minnesotans in 1918; the arrest of Frank Lloyd Wright at a Lake Minnetonka cottage in 1926; an arrested stripper who claimed wardrobe malfunction in 1953; and the 1977 murder of a wealthy matron in Duluth.

On September 27, 1839, the battered body of a middle-aged Irishman was found by some Dakota Indian boys. The corpse washed up along the Mississippi River shore, about seven miles downstream from Fort Snelling near the ancient Indian landmark the non-Indians called Carver's Cave. It was the body of Sgt. John Hays, a popular former soldier, who, prior to his disappearance twenty-one days earlier, had been sharing a log shanty a few miles upriver from the cave with his friend and business partner, Edward Phelan (or Phalen). Before the year was over, Phelan was arrested and charged with the murder of his friend. This is the first book to focus on this historic murder and the first thorough biography of Phelan, a notorious pioneer intimately involved in the making of St. Paul and founding of Minnesota. Was he guilty? All investigative reports and records of Phelan's trial were mysteriously lost and no newspapers covered the story. However, in 1994, St. Paul historian Gary Brueggemann made an amazing discovery in the Minnesota Historical Society archives: hidden in the papers of Joseph R. Brown was Brown's original Justice of the Peace casebook which included his handwritten transcription of the Hay's murder hearing. Using this record, other primary sources, and drawing from decades of studying Minnesota and St. Paul history, the author theorizes a logical solution to Minnesota's oldest unsolved murder. Book jacket.

The Strand is one of London's most iconic streets - today the bustling and thriving home of West End theatres and the luxurious Savoy hotel; in the Victorian era, the Strand was a much more seedy and destitute part of the city. Barry Anthony here explores the criminal and socially subversive behaviour which abounded in and around the Victorian Strand. He introduces us to a vast range of personalities - from prostitutes, confidence tricksters, vagrants and cadgers to the actors, comedians and music hall stars who trod the boards of the Strand's early theatres.

This funny book takes a piercing look at the gringos living in the central highlands of Mexico. Maybe it is the altitude of 6,500 feet, or maybe it is a privilege of wealthy people, but Americans are pretty independent cusses when they settle in San Miguel de Allende. Jack and Penny Battle live in San Miguel, where he writes pretty poor detective novels and his beautiful wife pas the bills. They solve the murder of an old dear who writes pornography in the first story. Political activists make fools of themselves in the second story, and one of them is killed for political correctness and money. In the third story the Battles make a dangerous political force out of their gardener. Then a promoter of shady subdivisions defrauds the whole American colony, and is pulled up short by Penny Battle who pays no attention to Jack's advice to stay out of it. To know these people is to laugh, as much with them as at them. Pull up a tall drink and enjoy yourself.

St. Lawrence County is known for its picturesque waters and pristine seasons. But underneath this fair faade lies a sordid past, rife with tales of killings and cunning, like the man who slashed his wife to death after instructing a constable to close the door and depart; a robbery that descended into the brutal axing of a mother and her two small children; the unsolved case of a young woman bludgeoned to death on school grounds in an upscale neighborhood; and the gruesome poisoning of one man at the hands of his son, his wife and her lover. Join author Cheri Farnsworth as she investigates these and other notorious cases of murder and mayhem in New York's North Country. Book jacket.

In the grand manner of Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice's new novel moves across time and the continents, from nineteenth-century Vienna to a St. Charles Greek Revival mansion in present-day New Orleans to dazzling capitals of the modern-day world, telling a story of two charismatic figures bound to each other by a passionate commitment to music as a means of rapture, seduction, and liberation.