**"A captivating tale of depravity in the Athens of America." --Mitchell
Zuckoff, author of the New York Times bestsellers Lost in Shangri-La
and Frozen in Time
**
In late nineteenth-century Boston, home to Herman Melville and Oliver
Wendell Holmes, a serial killer preying on children is running loose in
the city--a wilderness of ruin caused by the Great Fire of 1872--in this
literary historical crime thriller reminiscent of The Devil in the
White City.
In the early 1870s, local children begin disappearing from the
working-class neighborhoods of Boston. Several return home bloody and
bruised after being tortured, while others never come back.
With the city on edge, authorities believe the abductions are the
handiwork of a psychopath, until they discover that their
killer--fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy--is barely older than his
victims. The criminal investigation that follows sparks a debate among
the world's most revered medical minds, and will have a decades-long
impact on the judicial system and medical consciousness.
The Wilderness of Ruin is a riveting tale of gruesome murder and
depravity. At its heart is a great American city divided by class--a
chasm that widens in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1872. Roseanne
Montillo brings Gilded Age Boston to glorious life--from the genteel
cobblestone streets of Beacon Hill to the squalid, overcrowded tenements
of Southie. Here, too, is the writer Herman Melville. Enthralled by the
child killer's case, he enlists physician Oliver Wendell Holmes to help
him understand how it might relate to his own mental instability.
With verve and historical detail, Roseanne Montillo explores this case
that reverberated through all of Boston society in order to help us
understand our modern hunger for the prurient and sensational.
The Wilderness of Ruin features more than a dozen black-and-white
photographs.
