Showing results by author "Laura Purcell" in All Categories

Homeless Bodies and Other Stories is an original fiction podcast featuring audio-exclusive short stories from award-winning authors and Sunday Times best-sellers, inspired by objects & artefacts from Wellcome Collection’s permanent exhibition, 'Medicine Man', in London. Exploring themes of otherness, humanity, history, society and belief, Homeless Bodies and Other Stories brings together a gripping collection of tales that are unsettlingly eerie and provokingly current.

Dorothea Truelove is young, wealthy, and beautiful. Ruth Butterham is young, poor, and awaiting trial for murder. When Dorothea's charitable work brings her to Oakgate Prison, she is delighted by the chance to explore her fascination with phrenology and test her hypothesis that the shape of a person's skull can cast a light on their darkest crimes. But when she meets one of the prisoners, the teenaged seamstress Ruth, she is faced with another strange idea.

Consumption has ravaged Louise Pinecroft's family, leaving her and her father alone and heartbroken. But Dr. Pinecroft has plans for a revolutionary experiment: Convinced that sea air will prove to be the cure his wife and children needed, he arranges to house a group of prisoners suffering from the disease in the caves beneath his new Cornish home.  

As the age of the photograph dawns in Victorian Bath, silhouette artist Agnes is struggling to keep her business afloat. Still recovering from a serious illness herself, making enough money to support her elderly mother and her orphaned nephew, Cedric, has never been easy, but then one of her clients is murdered shortly after sitting for Agnes, and then another, and another... Why is the killer seemingly targeting her business?

Einige Türen sind aus einem bestimmten Grund verschlossen... England, 1866: Als Elsie den reichen Erben Rupert Bainbridge heiratet, glaubt sie, nun ein Leben im Luxus vor sich zu haben. Doch nur wenige Wochen nach ihrer Hochzeit ist sie bereits verwitwet. Und dazu schwanger. Elsie bezieht das alte Landgut ihres verstorbenen Mannes. Da ihre neuen Diener ihr gegenüber äußerst reserviert sind, hat Elsie nur die ungeschickte Cousine ihres Mannes zur Gesellschaft. Zumindest glaubt sie das. Doch in ihrem neuen Zuhause existiert ein verschlossener Raum.