This book tells the stories of crimes committed in the frenzies and frustrations of love - violent and tragic endings to a love story that has gone wrong. Passion, jealousy, revenge, and despair are the themes, and the eternal triangle is often the pattern. Here are true-life tales of romance, mystery and horror!

Passion. Betrayal. Murder. When you’re a private investigator, these are things you experience daily. But when you add capes to the mix-like Batman, Catwoman, and Harley Quinn? Things get even messier. The name’s Slam Bradley, and I’m telling you that this year’s Valentine’s Day special has more intrigue than you can shake a stick at. Ten tales of love-the kind of love that can push people over the edge. Don’t miss it...or I’ll make you pay.

Bringing key Shakespeare texts into dialogue with feminist socio-legal research, this book investigates the notion of a ‘crime of passion’ – indicatively, wife-killing. Its key concern is to bring attention to a cultural and legal revolution widely overlooked even in the law field where it occurred. In 2009, the English Parliament passed a controversial law abolishing the defence of provocation. Explaining the new law, reformers said that this so-called ‘heat of passion’ defence had allowed men to get away with murder by blaming the victim. Abolishing it in cases of alleged ‘infidelity’ would ‘end the culture of excuses’. Unpacking what was at stake in the reformers’ revolutionary challenge to the English law of murder’s age-old concession to ‘human frailty’ in ‘red mist’ rage cases, this book charts passion’s progress in wife-killing cases over the centuries. It commences in the early modern era when jurists were busy distinguishing murder from manslaughter and, contemporaneously, Shakespeare set about querying culturally inscribed excuses for femicide in his plays, Titus Andronicus and Othello. This book will appeal to feminist and socio-legal scholars, criminologists and those working in the fields of law and literature, legal theory and Shakespeare studies. More widely, it will appeal to anyone interested in so-called ‘crimes of passion’.

Thirty real-life accounts of passion gone lethally wrong Celebrated mystery writer Howard Engel traces the history of the crime of passion through France, England, Canada, and the United States in his first nonfiction book. The story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England, is explored along with more familiar, modern cases, such as those of O. J. Simpson and Lorena Bobbitt. With each sordid tale, Engel explores the legal codes and moral implications surrounding crimes of passion throughout history. Careful research and a novelist’s eye for detail and dramatization bring each grisly case into chilling clarity. Crimes of Passion is a must-read for true crime enthusiasts, armchair historians, and fans of the macabre.

LIFE magazine presents stories of crimes of passion.

Originally published in 1800, Crimes of Passion contained eleven stories and an essay on the novel. The present book contains three abridged tales. In “Florville and Courval” we find not only a reinterpretation and elaboration of the Oedipus myth, but an unforgettable illustration of Donatien Alphonse François de Sade’s artistic creed. He was not simply an eccentric aristocrat with artistic pretensions, but a pathological rebel against the Age of Enlightenment, and a prisoner of the Prince of Darkness. The historical tale of “Juliette and Raunai” is sentimental and melodramatic. In it, virtue triumphs, but not before the lovers have run the gamut of human suffering. “Miss Henriette Stralson” has a contemporary setting and ranks above his historical tales. In it, virtue wins only a pyrrhic victory.

From R. Barri Flowers, award-winning criminologist and bestselling author of Murdered by the King of Western Swing, Murder at the Pencil Factory, Murder of the Doctor’s Wife, and Murder During the Chicago World’s Fair, comes the gripping historical true crime short, Murder of the U.S. Attorney: Congressman Sickles’ Crime of Passion in 1859. On February 27, 1859, Philip Barton Key II, the forty-year-old U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, was gunned down while standing in Lafayette Square, a public park across from the White House. His killer was Rep. Daniel Sickles, a thirty-nine-year-old New York congressman and lawyer whose striking young wife, Teresa Sickles, Key had been having an affair with. Upon discovering his wife’s infidelity, Sickles became enraged and had the deadly encounter with her suitor. Afterward, he surrendered to authorities, confessed, was charged with murder, and went to trial. In spite of the cold-blooded and premeditated nature of the attack, Sickles used a defense of temporary insanity for his actions, the first such time this type of legal defense was employed in the United States. He was acquitted as a result and the “temporarily insane” justification for homicide or other serious intimate-involved offenses became a common defense for so-called crimes of passion. Sickles, who was no stranger to public scandals and controversy, was able to effectively get away with murder. He would reconcile with his wife for a short time, continue his career in politics, and become a decorated soldier for the Union Army during the Civil War, and a diplomat, before dying in his nineties. His long life notwithstanding, taking the life of his wife’s lover, Philip Key, in a fit of jealousy would forever remain a major part of Daniel Sickles’ legacy, as chronicled in this compelling trip back in time of more than 150 years. Bonus material includes a complete and riveting historical true crime short, Dead at the Saddleworth Moor: The Crimes of Serial Killers Ian Brady & Myra Hindley; and excerpts from the author’s bestselling true crime anthologies, The Dreadful Acts of Jack the Ripper and Other True Tales of Serial Murder and Prostitutes, and Murder and Menace: Riveting True Crime Tales (Vol. 3).

From the characterological struggle that leads to the breakup through the difficult adjustments that come after the marriage is over, this volume examines the emotional process of divorce. Illustrated throughout with evocative case examples, this book explores why marriages fail, the feelings and reactions of both the rejecting and the rejected partners, the psychodynamics of jealousy, the possibility of reconciliation, and the impact of divorce on children.

Wisconsin's most notorious crimes and criminals are profiled in this book of the Crimes of the Century series. Read about the killer dairy princess and meet notorious fiends Edward Gein, Jeffery Dahmer, and others.

A new translation of Lombroso's L'Homme Delinquente, with a new scholarly introduction.