Female Executions

Martyrs, Murderesses and Madwomen

  • Imprint: Summersdale
  • Format: Ebook
  • Pages: 304
  • Price: £6.99
  • Publication date: 5 August 2013
  • ISBN: 9780857659866

About the book

The fairer sex get it in the neck in these grisly tales from the gallows, guillotine and gas chamber. You have been warned.

From Nan Hereford, the cloaked highwayman who held up coaches with just her fists, to the woman who survived the gallows and took her empty coffin away with her, Female Executions illuminates history’s darker periods with a detailed and factual approach. Grimly funny and darkly gripping, interspersed with unusual last requests and black and white illustrations throughout, this is history at its most morbidly fascinating.

About the author

Geoffrey Abbott served in the RAF for 35 years before becoming a ‘Beefeater’ at the Tower of London. He wrote more than 24 books on torture and execution, appeared in numerous TV documentaries as consultant or executioner and, by invitation, wrote entries on torture and execution for the Encyclopedia Britannica. He once stood on the ‘drop’ trapdoors in the execution chamber of Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow (as a fact-finding author, not a convicted criminal!) and also experienced having a noose placed around his neck by a professional hangman – the late Sydney Dernley, a man endowed with a great, if macabre, sense of humour! 

Reviews

‘Abbott has a fine sense of gallows humor’

‘turns macabre stuff into a light read.’

Publishers Weekly