These helped her to discover the subjects for her tales of true crime.
Previously, she was General Editor of the Biographical Database of Australia and, before that, Project Officer of the Australian Biographical and Genealogical Record, in which roles she edited many records relating to convicts transported to Australia to serve out their sentences. A full-time wri Carol Baxter is the prize-winning author of three popular histories with a criminal bent – ' An Irresistible Temptation', ' Breaking the Bank' and ' Captain Thunderbolt and His Lady' – all of which have been published to critical acclaim in her native Australia. She is a Fellow of the Society of Australian Genealogists and an adjunct lecturer at the University of New England (NSW).
(Oct.Carol Baxter is the prize-winning author of three popular histories with a criminal bent – ' An Irresistible Temptation', ' Breaking the Bank' and ' Captain Thunderbolt and His Lady' – all of which have been published to critical acclaim in her native Australia. There are occasional rhetorical excesses (“Still, doubt was pushing his foot through the door he had just opened”), but most of the prose is understated and precise.
Along the way, the story takes several unexpected twists, and Baxter does a stellar job of integrating details about the nascent forensic science of the time, questions about the role of expert witnesses in jury trials, and the insatiable public hunger for salacious details about the case. With a novelist’s flair for drama, using details that were painstakingly extracted from the historical record, Australian popular historian Baxter (An Irresistible Temptation) recreates the life of suspect John Tawell, a Quaker who had been transported for forgery, the events leading up to his apprehension on suspicion of having poisoned Sarah Hart, and his prosecution. Fans of Erik Larson’s true-crime thrillers will be pleased by this gripping account that presents a tipping point in the public acceptance of the telegraph: its use in 1845 to alert the authorities in London that a murder suspect had boarded a train headed there.
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