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A Serpent In Eden

CWA Daggers: Non-fiction, 2005

Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780349115412

Price: £10.99

ON SALE: 6th July 2006

Genre: Biography & True Stories

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Night comes quickly to the Bahamas. That of 7 July 1943 was unpleasantly close and humid, for though the rains were nearing their end, the air was heavy with an approaching storm. It struck Nassau soon after midnight. By the time it had blown itself out, one of the world’s richest men, Sir Harry Oakes, had been murdered in his own bedroom. He had been burned alive, then had his skull broken by four blows to the head. When the body was found at daybreak, bloody handprints marked the walls of the room, while a fan stirred small white feathers that clung to the charred corpse on the bed. Beyond it, the window stood wide open. Even in the middle of wartime, Oakes’s death commanded front-page headlines in the world’s newspapers, and began a series of events whose protagonists included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Ernest Hemingway, two French aristocrats, a suspected Nazi and a grey Maltese cat, and which culminated in the sensational trial and acquittal of Oakes’s own son-in-law for the crime. Owen’s brilliant telling of the story stands alongside James Fox’s WHITE MISCHIEF as a true-crime classic as well as an extraordinary portrait of a glamorous and corrupt society.

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Reviews

A fascinating book written with exemplary thoroughness...the last word on this endlessly compelling tale.
William Boyd, DAILY TELEGRAPH
His book drips with the hothouse milieu of wartime Nassau. His exposition of the trial is both lively and convincing in its analysis... Lucid and ingeniously argued.
SUNDAY TIMES
James Owen has re-examined the evidence and produced a fascinating account of the murky lives of the idle rich.
MAIL ON SUNDAY
Fascinating in its evocation of life in Nassau during World War II.
DAILY MAIL