On the morning of 31 January 1917, the Midlands town of Derby awoke to find itself the focal point of one of the most sensational developments of the First World War. Four members of a Derby family had been arrested and charged with conspiring to murder the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and a member of his War Cabinet, Arthur Henderson. The Old Bailey trial that followed gripped the nation. It turned out to be one of the blackest episodes in British political history - a provincial family had apparently been framed by a government desperate to discredit the pacifist movement. In this perceptive account of this disturbing case, Nicola Rippon describes in vivid detail the lives of Alice Wheeldon and her family, their extraordinary arrest and detention, and the conduct of the subsequent court case. She shows that, far from being potential murderers, the Wheeldons were almost certainly victims of a government plot aimed at discrediting the anti-war faction at a time when many people in Britain were beginning to turn against the conflict and question the justifications for it.

Had the Jack the Ripper murders taken place in 1988 not 1888 then our response to them would have been markedly different. Since those dark days in Victorian London we have learnt much about this type of killer: their damaged childhoods, misfit adulthoods and psychopathic alienation from the human race. But can this new knowledge help to solve a mystery that has been eluding generations of policemen and historians? William Beadle, using his Ripper psychological profile in conjunction with newly unearthed evidence, presents a compelling account with a fresh body of incrimination evidence that could finally answer the question of the true identity of the infamous Jack the Ripper.