Books about Gallows from Amazon.com

Despite all that has been written about the April 1865 assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, the story of John Surratt--the only conspirator who got away--remains untold and largely unknown. The capture and shooting of John Wilkes Booth twelve days after he shot Lincoln is a well-known and well-covered story. The fate of the eight other accomplices of Booth has also been widely written about. Four, including Surratt's mother, Mary, were convicted and hanged, and four were jailed. John Surratt alone managed to evade capture for twenty months and escape punishment once he was put on trial. In this tale of adventure and mystery, Andrew Jampoler tells what happened to that last conspirator, who after Booth's death became the most wanted man in America.

As the first full-length treatment of Surratt's escape, capture, and trial, the book provides fascinating details about his flight from New York, where he was on a Confederate spy mission scouting the huge Union prisoner of war camp in Elmira, through eastern Canada to a hideout in Liverpool, England, and on to France and the Papal States. His twenty-month flight, including nearly one year of enlisted service in the Papal Zouaves (the pope's army), is a remarkable adventure through mid-century Europe and locations unknown to most Americans of the time. Despite an uncontrollable tendency to babble to strangers about who he really was and what he had done, Surratt, frequently sheltered by sympathetic Roman Catholic priests, managed to stay at large during a flight that took him across three continents and over the Atlantic Ocean and half the Mediterranean Sea. Finally caught in Alexandria, Egypt, he was returned to Washington to stand trial in 1867.

Jampoler brings Surratt to life as he traces the wily young man's remarkable journey and the bitter legal proceedings against him that bizarrely led to his freedom. After his trial, Surratt lived out his life peacefully in Baltimore, marrying a relative of Francis Scott Key and dying at the age of seventy-two. The book's cast of characters includes a menagerie of the nineteenth century's most colorful personalities..
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Former London policeman Alan Banks relocated to Yorkshire seeking some small measuer of peace. But depravity and violence are unfortunately not unique to large cities. His new venue, the quaint little village of Eastvale, seems to have more than its fair share of malefactors--among them a brazen Peeping Tom who hides in night's shadows spying on attractrive, unsuspecting ladies as they prepare for bed. And when an elderly woman is found brutally slain in her home, Chief Inspector Banks wonders if the voyeur has increased the awful intensity of his criminal activities. But whether relatied or not, perverse local acts and murderous ones are combining to profoundly touch Banks's suddenly vulnerable perosonal life, forcing a dedicated law officer to make hard choices he'd dearly hoped would never be necessary.

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HIS GUN SPEAKS FOR THE OPRESSED…

Former big city detective John McBride is an easygoing man— until a cold-blooded town sheriff warns him to mind his own business, or face a lynching

Driven by his sense of justice, McBride takes on the sheriff, an evil mayor and his cruel psychotic son, and a small army of hired gunmen.

Helped by a mysterious white-haired, quick-drawing preacher, McBride shoulders a task most men would flee from. But John McBride isn’t most men….
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In Death at Bishop's Keep, Kathryn Ardleigh captured the interest of detective Sir Charles Sheridan as they solved their first case together Now the demise of a local constable and the disappearance of a child have the sleuthing couple on the trail of deadly greed and criminal mischief once again. And with the help of a shy woman who calls herself Beatrix Potter, Kate intends to uncover the sinister secrets of Gallows Green....
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Role-playing takes on a terrifying cast when 17-year-old Sarah, who is posing as a fortune-teller for a school fair, begins to see actual visions that can predict the future. Frightened, the other students brand her a witch, setting off a chain of events that mirror the centuries-old Salem witch trials in more ways than one..
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The year is 1820. Rider Sandman, a hero of Waterloo, returns to London to wed his fiancée. But instead of settling down to fame and glory, he finds himself penniless in a country where high unemployment and social unrest rage, and where men—innocent or guilty—are hanged for the merest of crimes.

When he's offered a job as private investigator to re-open the case of a painter due to be hanged for a murder he didn't commit, Sandman readily accepts—as much for the money as for a chance to see justice done in a country gone to ruins.

Soon, however, he's mired in a grisly murder plot that keeps thickening. Sandman makes his way through gentlemen's clubs and shady taverns, aristocratic mansions, and fashionable painters' studios determined to rescue the innocent young man from the rope. But someone doesn't want the truth revealed.

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Never before published! Four plays written during the early 1940s, two by John Dickson Carr alone and two in collaboration with the BBC s Val Gielgud. -- Inspector Silence Takes the Air is set during World War II at emergency BBC studios in a provincial town. There, a murder takes place -- and the weapon disappears. -- In Thirteen to the Gallows, also set in a BBC studio, a woman falls to her death from a tower-- it is murder, but no one is near her, and the only clue is a scattering of Arum Lilies. -- Intruding Shadow is filled with mysteries within mysteries, as Carr expertly shifts the audience's expectations from one suspect to another. -- She Slept Lightly features the ghostly appearances of a young woman during the Napoleonic Wars. The book concludes with an alternate ending for one of the plays, cast lists, and contemporary reviews of the original productions. John Dickson Carr (1906-1977), one of the greatest writers in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, specialized in tales of seemingly impossible crimes. 13 to the Gallows is a major addition to his published works. The book is edited by Carr expert Tony Medawar. Cover by Deborah Miller.
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When Sandor snatched little Joe from the path of a London Tube train, he was quick to make clear the terms of the rescue. 'I saved your life,' he told the homeless youngster, 'so your life belongs to me now'. Sandor began to tell him a fairy-tale: an ageing prince, a kidnapped princess chained by one ankle, a missed rendezvous. But what did this mysterious story have to do with Sandor's preparations? Joe had only understood his own role: he was a gallowglass, the servant of a Chief...' On one level this is a novel about kidnapping. On another its concerns are obsession, the destructive nature of romantic illusions, and love. As Ms Vine unfolds it nothing is quite what it seems' - "Guardian"..
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Over the last three decades the United States has built a carceral state that is unprecedented among Western countries and in US history. Nearly one in 50 people, excluding children and the elderly, is incarcerated today, a rate unsurpassed anywhere else in the world. What are some of the main political forces that explain this unprecedented reliance on mass imprisonment? Throughout American history, crime and punishment have been central features of American political development. This book examines the development of four key movements that mediated the construction of the carceral state in important ways: the victims' movement, the women's movement, the prisoners' rights movement, and opponents of the death penalty. This book argues that punitive penal policies were forged by particular social movements and interest groups within the constraints of larger institutional structures and historical developments that distinguish the United States from other Western countries..
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Kevin Woods was sentenced to death in Zimbabwe and later jailed for life by Robert Mugabe. For more than five years of his detention he was held in the shadow of Mugabe's gallows, cut off from the world, naked and in solitary confinement. He had been a senior member of Mugabe's dreaded Central Intelligence Organization, the CIO, and was jailed for committing politically motivated offenses, on behalf of the white South African government, against the ANC in Zimbabwe.

From Mugabe's confidant to condemned prisoner, he recounts his life on the edge as a double agent. He explains the desolation of being abandoned by South Africa when he was compromised and he details his lone fight to maintain his humanity, self-dignity and sanity in a prison system that belongs to the Middle Ages.

This book will inspire you to take an introspective look at your own life, your careers, your aspirations and ambitions. His story, unlike so many others, has a happy ending with him hugging his now-adult children and meeting former President Nelson Mandela being the highlights..
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