Hell's Princess
Books | Biography & Autobiography / Criminals & Outlaws
3.6
(72)
Harold Schechter
"A deeply researched and morbidly fascinating chronicle of one of America's most notorious female killers." --The New York Times Book Review An Amazon Charts bestseller. In the pantheon of serial killers, Belle Gunness stands alone. She was the rarest of female psychopaths, a woman who engaged in wholesale slaughter, partly out of greed but mostly for the sheer joy of it. Between 1902 and 1908, she lured a succession of unsuspecting victims to her Indiana "murder farm." Some were hired hands. Others were well-to-do bachelors. All of them vanished without a trace. When their bodies were dug up, they hadn't merely been poisoned, like victims of other female killers. They'd been butchered. Hell's Princess is a riveting account of one of the most sensational killing sprees in the annals of American crime: the shocking series of murders committed by the woman who came to be known as Lady Bluebeard. The only definitive book on this notorious case and the first to reveal previously unknown information about its subject, Harold Schechter's gripping, suspenseful narrative has all the elements of a classic mystery--and all the gruesome twists of a nightmare.
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More Details:
Author
Harold Schechter
Pages
316
Publisher
Amazon Publishing
Published Date
2018
ISBN
1477808957 9781477808955
Community ReviewsSee all
"2.5⭐<br/><br/>"She is entitled to be known to future generations as the arch fiend of the twentieth century." <br/><br/>Hell's Princess is a good introduction to Belle Gunness if you don't know anything about her. If you are familiar with her story, you're probably going to be pretty bored. There's just so little information on Belle Gunness, it's tough to write a full book on her. <br/><br/>It got pretty disjointed, and I feel like Schechter tried way too hard to create filler for this book. There were a lot of parts about people's speculations, and a large chunk of the book was about Ray Lamphere's trial (I skimmed this). After dragging on, the book ends pretty abruptly, and it was a strange way to organize it. <br/><br/>Harold Schechter also writes with an incredibly misogynistic tone, and it's very clear that he believes women are supposed to look a certain way (not like Belle Gunness, or not old, or not too underweight, etc. So ridiculous). He also uses a very racist term more than once because of a name the townspeople called someone, and I believe we would have gotten the idea from him just writing it once. All of it was unnecessary.<br/><br/>Overall, I wasn't impressed, and was disappointed after looking forward to this book for a while. I gave it 2.5⭐. This book is about 260 pages, and it took me about 4 days to get through it. It's very dry, and I didn't really learn anything new."
Emily
"Schecter relays the fascinating and twisted facts of the Belle Gunness case, letting the reader come to their own conclusion.<br/><br/>"
Ricki Marking-Camuto
"Wow! This woman had balls! Can't say much without spoilers."
A W
Ann Whisenhunt