Wow. I really loved Rubenhold’s other historical novel following the women who were victims of Jack the Ripper. This one felt very separate and I didn’t feel like I got any particular insight into his second wife Cora at all. I wish that we hadn’t spent so much time devoted to Crippen’s mistress. It seemed very obvious to me she knew what Crippen did. I wish we had followed up with her family a bit more. I do have to say that this is the first that I had read that Crippen was married before Cora so that piece of information was very interesting and I do thank her for delving into that.
“Story of a Murder” follows Hawley Harvey Crippen. Many people may be familiar with the man who tried to poison his wife, lied about her whereabouts and tried to escape with his mistress overseas.
I do think as I said above that Hallie Rubenhold did a great job of setting up the initial backstory to Crippen and his first wife Charlotte. She has a way of painting a scene that made you think you were in Hell’s Kitchen in the late 1800s ready to pass out from the smell, noise, etc. I also had zero idea that man had any offspring until this book. Rubenhold also did a great job of pointing out what homeopathy really was back in Crippen’s heydey and how women’s “hysterics” were being treated. I do think that if you already didn’t totally despise Crippen, this book is definitely going to help with that. But it wasn’t just his attitude towards women, it was most of society’s thoughts about them.
Pros for me was reading about how nursing came to be, what doctors and nurses did to get their degrees, and even what was allowable and deemed not allowable back then.
I think up until the story moves with Crippen and his second wife Cora to England, the book was engrossing. I just don’t think that part of the story added anything more from what I read.
And the last bit focusing on Crippen’s mistress, Ethel Le Neve was just a bit scattered. I do think that Rubenhold wanted to show her obvious assistance to Crippen in the murder of Cora. But it’s very apparent that something was seriously wrong with her after this whole thing based on stories that were told about her from her family. It didn’t seem to me that she escaped permanent justice afterwards, she was definitely an unhappy and very nervous woman who seemed to have zero friends (outside of her sister) and barely tolerated her husband and children.
I just think I wanted to be blown away while reading this like I was her other novel, but I found myself getting really bored after a while.
I read this for Halloween Bingo: Arsenic and Old Lace