Deacon Brodie, pillar of the Establishment turned arch-criminal, terrified late-18th-century Edinburgh. This book tells of the two Edinburghs - the respectable lawyers' capital and the lurid underworld of thieves and whores - in which Brodie led his dual existence, culminating in the armed theft of Scotland's revenues and Brodie's escape to Holland, whence he was brought back to be tried and executed. This extraordinary tale gave rise to the idea of Jekyll and Hyde in the fertile imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson almost a century later.

When respected Gentleman and City Councillor, Deacon William Brodie, chases his love of gambling, he is drawn deep into a double life. Before long the open respectability of day gives way to a hidden life of crime at night, and soon, Brodie is on a trajectory to disaster - one which leads him to the gibbet. Set in the Edinburgh of 1788, Deacon Brodie: A Double Life is a fact-based novel which shows Brodie's love for gambling and risk sweeping him into a life of crime. Betrayed by an accomplice, and revealed as a "Gentleman by day, thief by night", Brodie escapes the city, is captured in Holland, then faced with a trial before a city where once he was a leading citizen. When he is sentenced to be hanged, his closest friend has a different idea and, in full view of everyone, Brodie takes his riskiest gamble yet . . .

Dorothy Sayers called William Roughead "the best showman who ever stood before the door of the chamber of horrors," and his true crime stories, written in the early 1900s, are among the glories of the genre. Displaying a meticulous command of evidence and unerring dramatic flair, Roughead brings to life some of the most notorious crimes and extraordinary trials of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and Scotland. Utterly engrossing, these accounts of pre-meditated mayhem and miscarried justice also cast a powerful light on the evil that human beings, and human institutions, find both tempting to contemplate and all too easy to do.