Paul Collins

Traces the scandalous murder of a Harvard Medical School graduate and the ensuing trial that riveted mid-nineteenth-century America, exploring how the case established important precedents in medical forensics and the definition of reasonable doubt.

Looming large in the popular imagination as a serious poet and lively drunk who died in penury, Edgar Allan Poe was also the most celebrated and notorious writer of his day. He died broke and alone at the age of forty, but not before he had written some of the greatest works in the English language, from the chilling "The Tell-Tale Heart" to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"--the first modern detective story--to the iconic poem "The Raven." Poe's life...