The Wilderness of Ruin: A Tale of Madness, Fire, and the Hunt for America's Youngest Serial Killer

The Wilderness of Ruin: A Tale of Madness, Fire, and the Hunt for America's Youngest Serial Killer

by Roseanne Montillo
The Wilderness of Ruin: A Tale of Madness, Fire, and the Hunt for America's Youngest Serial Killer

The Wilderness of Ruin: A Tale of Madness, Fire, and the Hunt for America's Youngest Serial Killer

by Roseanne Montillo

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Overview

"A captivating tale of depravity in the Athens of America." —Mitchell Zuckoff, author of the New York Times bestsellers Lost in Shangri-La and Frozen in Time

In late nineteenth-century Boston, home to Herman Melville and Oliver Wendell Holmes, a serial killer preying on children is running loose in the city—a wilderness of ruin caused by the Great Fire of 1872—in this literary historical crime thriller reminiscent of The Devil in the White City.

In the early 1870s, local children begin disappearing from the working-class neighborhoods of Boston. Several return home bloody and bruised after being tortured, while others never come back.

With the city on edge, authorities believe the abductions are the handiwork of a psychopath, until they discover that their killer—fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy—is barely older than his victims. The criminal investigation that follows sparks a debate among the world’s most revered medical minds, and will have a decades-long impact on the judicial system and medical consciousness.

The Wilderness of Ruin is a riveting tale of gruesome murder and depravity. At its heart is a great American city divided by class—a chasm that widens in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1872. Roseanne Montillo brings Gilded Age Boston to glorious life—from the genteel cobblestone streets of Beacon Hill to the squalid, overcrowded tenements of Southie. Here, too, is the writer Herman Melville. Enthralled by the child killer’s case, he enlists physician Oliver Wendell Holmes to help him understand how it might relate to his own mental instability.

With verve and historical detail, Roseanne Montillo explores this case that reverberated through all of Boston society in order to help us understand our modern hunger for the prurient and sensational.

The Wilderness of Ruin features more than a dozen black-and-white photographs.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780062273482
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 12/08/2015
Pages: 320
Sales rank: 613,238
Product dimensions: 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.72(d)

About the Author

Roseanne Montillo holds an MFA from Emerson College in Massachusetts, where she teaches as a professor of literature. She is the author of The Lady and Her Monsters.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

1 The Inhuman Scamp 11

2 The Bridge 25

3 The Marble Eye 39

4 The Boundless Sea 59

5 The Great Fire 73

6 Loss of Innocence 89

7 Katie 119

8 The Wolf and the Lamb 143

9 The Twisted Mind 177

10 Patience Personified Pomeroy 199

11 Madness Unleashed 219

12 Unearthed 243

Epilogue 265

Acknowledgments 273

Notes 277

Bibiography 287

Index 301

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