"DeLuca keeps readers guessing. Minette Walters fans will be pleased." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Perfect for fans of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace and Hannah Kent's Burial Rites, this taut psychological thriller offers a delicious take on deviant and defiant Victorian women in a time when marriage itself was its own prison. England, 1873. Clara Blackstone has just been released after one year in a private asylum for the insane. Clara has two goals: to reunite with her husband, Henry, and to never—ever—return to the asylum. As she enters Durham, Clara finds her carriage surrounded by a mob gathered to witness the imprisonment of Mary Ann Cotton—England’s first female serial killer—accused of poisoning nearly twenty people, including her husbands and children. Clara soon finds the oppressive confinement of her marriage no less terrifying than the white-tiled walls of Hoxton. And as she grows increasingly suspicious of Henry’s intentions, her fascination with Cotton grows. Soon, Cotton is not just a notorious figure from the headlines, but an unlikely confidante, mentor—and perhaps accomplice—in Clara’s struggle to protect her money, her freedom, and her life.

August 1872. Clara Blackstone, travels up to Durham City to meet her husband, Henry, a newly appointed Professor of Mathematics at Durham University. It is supposed to be a fresh start - a chance to put recent troubles and nightmarish events behind her. But after a tense reunion, their carriage runs into a mob gathered to witness the mass murderer Mary Ann Cotton being brought into Durham Jail. Buried memories of Clara's second tragic miscarriage begin to resurface, and her inability to recall events of the months leading up to her subsequent committal to a private asylum, cause her to question her husband's motives for placing her there. When Clara befriends Catherine, an outspoken Suffragist, she joins her as a prison visitor, working with female inmates. The childless Clara encounters Mrs. Cotton and becomes increasingly fascinated with her story and when she learns the murderer is pregnant the obsession grows. As she uncovers more details about the murders, she's tormented by the idea that a mother could poison her own children. A disturbing encounter finally unlocks the truth behind the terrible events surrounding her miscarriage, but when her husband falls under the controlling influence of a devious colleague, Clara is soon fighting for her sanity, her freedom and her grandmother's inheritance. Meanwhile public outrage grows about Mrs. Cotton, a woman who would go against her God-given instincts and murder her own children and several husbands by poisoning, a 'woman's choice' of weapon. Newspaper articles about "the monster" incite fresh debate about the natural place of women in the latter decades of the 19th century while Clara struggles to save her fortune, her freedom and her life.

A spellbinding literary thriller about terror, war, greed, and the darkest secrets of the human soul, by the author of the million-copy bestseller The Interpretation of Murder. Under a clear blue September sky, America's financial center in lower Manhattan became the site of the largest, deadliest terrorist attack in the nation's history. It was September 16, 1920. Four hundred people were killed or injured. The country was appalled by the magnitude and savagery of the incomprehensible attack, which remains unsolved to this day. The bomb that devastated Wall Street in 1920 explodes in the opening pages of The Death Instinct, Jed Rubenfeld's provocative and mesmerizing new novel. War veteran Dr. Stratham Younger and his friend Captain James Littlemore of the New York Police Department are caught on Wall Street on the fateful day of the blast. With them is the beautiful Colette Rousseau, a French radiochemist whom Younger meets while fighting in the world war. A series of inexplicable attacks on Rousseau, a secret buried in her past, and a mysterious trail of evidence lead Young, Littlemore, and Rousseau on a thrilling international and psychological journey-from Paris to Prague, from the Vienna home of Dr. Sigmund Freud to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., and ultimately to the hidden depths of our most savage instincts. As the seemingly disjointed pieces of what Younger and Littlemore learn come together, the two uncover the shocking truth behind the bombing. Blending fact and fiction in a brilliantly convincing narrative, Jed Rubenfeld has forged a gripping historical mystery about a tragedy that holds eerie parallels to our own time. Watch a video

A boy tells about a story he wrote when dealing with his father's death about a savage kid living in a ruined chapel in the woods--and the tale about the savage kid coming to life in the real world.

This book is the third in my series of four books dealing with Intelligence, Instincts, and Consciousness. The simple and truthful realization of what we are, and how we got to where we are within nature's world, is the ultimate truth that any philosophy could ever propose to know. It is ultimately the most powerful state that any human mind can ever attain. It is a true kind of nirvana. It is with this knowing state of mind that we can make ever-new beginnings and provide for a future where our chances are best for surviving whatever random hells that nature will with great certainty rise up against us. The fact that we might have to eventually face up to what we are as completely definable creatures in terms of a very complex organization of billions of very simple structures is not in anyway whatsoever a degradation of the truth of our humanity. Understanding what we are has led us to realize both the miraculous and morally good achievements of our kind, and also to an understanding of the basic nature of our more hidden ugly and evil actions.

If you were penniless and lonely, and you'd lost all hope, would you let Santa, the Billionaire grant you a wish? I fell in love with Nick Prince the day I started work as his PA, but I knew it would never work for two reasons: a) He was married, and b) his wife was my best friend. Boy, do I know how to pick 'em. So I ignored my feelings, and I got on with my life as best as I could. Then Olivia died, leaving us both devastated. Two years later, he's still grieving. I don't think he's ever going to get over losing her. He doesn't feel the same way I do, and he's never going to be mine. I don't want to spend the rest of my life waiting for him, and anyway, I have to leave. My sister is in trouble and needs my help - not that I have any money left to give her. I'm broke, and I can't afford to keep flying up to see her. I need to move closer to her, and keep her safe from her abusive husband. I go into Nick's office to hand in my resignation, and I discover him in a Santa suit. He's off to the local children's hospital to hand out teddies from his toy store. And then he points to the mistletoe hanging from his office door... I'm ready to move on with my life. It's too little, too late. I'm over him, and my priorities have changed. The last thing I want is a Christmas kiss from Saint Nick, even if the look in his eyes is anything but saintly. Oh... who am I kidding? Maybe just one before I go...

It is paradoxical that instinct became a central term for late Victorian sexual sciences as they were elaborated in the medicalized spaces of confession and introspection, given that instinct had long been defined in its opposition to self-conscious thought. The Ploy of Instinct ties this paradox to instinct’s deployment in conceptualizing governmentality. Instinct’s domain, Frederickson argues, extended well beyond the women, workers, and “savages” to whom it was so often ascribed. The concept of instinct helped to gloss over contradictions in British liberal ideology made palpable as turn-of-the-century writers grappled with the legacy of Enlightenment humanism. For elite European men, instinct became both an agent of “progress” and a force that, in contrast to desire, offered a plenitude in answer to the alienation of self-consciousness. This shift in instinct’s appeal to privileged European men modified the governmentality of empire, labor, and gender. The book traces these changes through parliamentary papers, pornographic fiction, accounts of Aboriginal Australians, suffragette memoirs, and scientific texts in evolutionary theory, sexology, and early psychoanalysis.