44 Books Like The Cater Street Hangman

It is a book that deep dives into a historical event, in this case, the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. Check. It is a nonfiction book that reads like a gripping thriller, in this case, the serial killer H.H. Holmes, who built a three-story building featuring secret rooms, torture chambers, and a crematorium. Check. Chicago leaps off the page. By the end of the book, I was able to envision the massive exposition, its hundreds of temporary buildings, all white colored, interlaced with ponds and canals.

Much like that exposition helped raise Chicago up from its Great Fire, so I could see a Chicago of the past, in a glorious triumph of industry and innovation. Oh, and yeah, a serial killer constructing a horrific murder building.

This book wrecked me; it’s such a deep dive into the lives of the woman brutally murdered by Jack the Ripper. Rubenhold reconstructs their lives with great empathy, bringing them to the forefront of the story. The five were real women who felt love, pain, and hope—not faceless victims of sensationalized murder.

These women are often portrayed as “five prostitutes” in pop culture, but Rubenhold shows that there is no evidence of sex work for most of the women. This book pulls back the curtain on the tension, violence, poverty, and heartbreak in Victorian London. This book brought me to absolute tears. 

I’ve always thought that this is one of the most brilliantly constructed plots in literature. First serialized in 1859-60, Collins’ story revolves around the mysterious figure of the Woman in White, who always induces a shiver of dread and pity, even on subsequent re-readings. And I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a more terrifyingly memorable mastermind villain than the one Collins gives us here.

Threatened innocence, eerie encounters, dastardly deeds—this book has it all. But best of all is the character of Marian Halcombe, who breaks gender barriers to defend her sister. She is one of the models for my own intrepid Victorian detective, Esther Hardy.

The story may evoke the rip-roaring thrillers of yore in terms of probability, but dang, from the first lines, I was hooked. There is nothing like seeing 19th-century Egypt through the eyes of Amelia Peabody.

I could practically hear the calls of the crowded streets of Cairo, feel the warmth of the desert sand and the spookiness of a night in a canyon. It was not intentional, I promise, but Miss Peabody’s voice may have had the tiniest bit of influence on a certain Victorian lady that I write about–and this book is why.

Benjamin January is a rarity in New Orleans 1830s; a free Black man. He is free because his mother is a place, the mistress of a wealthy white planter. Ben is educated and smart, but the casual racism of the times means he makes a living as a musician instead of a surgeon.

Despite his papers, he is always afraid of being kidnapped and sold into slavery, and that fear casts a shadow over his life.

When a beautiful quadroon is murdered, and no one cares, Ben’s sense of justice inspires him to investigate, despite risking his own freedom.

I love the exotic setting and reread every few years. I marvel at the way Hambly threads the mystery through this unusual culture.

Lady Audley’s Secret—another famous example of a Sensation novel or a thrilling tale with a central secret—kept me turning the pages into the middle of the night. Like Wilkie Collins, Braddon was an immensely popular novelist in the 1860s, churning out potboiler after potboiler and raking in a nice profit along the way.

“A book without a murder, a divorce, a seduction, or a bigamy is not apparently considered worth either writing or reading,” observed Fraser’s Magazine in what sounds to me like priggish disapproval. But I sympathize with those avid readers of the day—many of them women who were denied agency and full personhood.

As a student of history I am impressed with the research that underpins this series, and especially the life of ordinary people in Ireland following the  Easter 1916 uprising. The whole Bess Crawford series tells the story of Bess, a strong-willed, independent woman who serves as a battlefield nurse in World War One. She needs all her courage and intelligence to survive then and in all of her ventures. Society’s expectations of women and how they should behave were dramatically changed during and following the Great War. How was it possible to expect a woman who had nursed on battlefields or driven an ambulance through enemy territory to return to a life of ‘proper’ behaviour, of tea and cucumber sandwiches, and absolute obedience to her husband?

An Irish Hostage finds Bess in Ireland at the wedding of a friend, only to become embroiled in the trouble and treachery following the… show more.

As in all the books I have recommended the research is impeccable and there is much to be learned about the eras in which the novels are set. And, always, the woman at the heart of each story displays a great strength of character that carries her through adversity.

A Sunlit Weapon is the most recent book in the Maisie Dobbs series. In Maisie, we meet a young woman who began her life “below stairs” and who has grown up, again rising above almost impossible circumstances to gain an education, become a nurse in the Great War, marry into the upper classes only to lose her titled husband in a flying accident and finally, to set up her own business as a Psychologist and Investigator.

The information about France after the first defeat of Napoleon, and the seething unrest of the populace under the rule of the restored Bourbons is fascinating to someone like me who has always been passionate about history. C.S. Harris weaves her backstory into the tale without ever boring the readers.  

When Blood Lies is the 17th in the Sebastian St. Cyr series. It is set in France in 1815, after the fall of Napoleon, when the Bourbon dynasty has been once again been elevated to the throne of France. It is the Regency period in England, and the book has vivid descriptions of both Paris and London of the time. The protagonist is Viscount Devlin, and his wife, Hero, who is careful to appear to be compliant with all that period’s restrictions on women. While she hides her strength and intelligence, she quietly pursues her own, socially unacceptable interests, including… show more.

This historical work is fiction but based on the true story of Edgar Degas and his models. It was a revelation for me to learn about the brutish lives led by the dancers in the ballet and the hard lives of most women outside the middle and upper class in Paris in 1878. We are taken behind the scene in the ballet, into cramped, unheated, dirty living quarters, brothels, and prisons. Of the three sisters in the story, only one will manage to make a marriage that will lift her out of the inevitability of having to survive through a life of thievery and prostitution on the mean streets of Paris. Unlike the first four books I recommended, this is not a story of a woman’s triumph, but rather one of how incredibly difficult it was for a girl without the trappings of wealth, to simply survive.