On November 7, 1974, a nanny named Sandra Rivett was bludgeoned to death in a Belgravia basement. A second woman, Veronica, Countess of Lucan, was also attacked. The man named in court as perpetrator of these crimes, Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, disappeared in the early hours of the following morning.
The case, solved in the eyes of the law, has retained its fascination ever since. Laura Thompson, acclaimed biographer of Agatha Christie, narrates the story that led up to that cataclysmic event, and draws on her considerable forensic skills to re-examine the possible truths behind one of postwar Britain’s most notorious murders.
A Different Class of Murder is a portrait of an era, of an extraordinary cast of characters, of a mystery, of a modern myth. Part social history, part detective story, it tells in masterly style of a case that has retained its fascination for decades. This is an updated edition following the death of Lady Lucan in February 2018.

On the night of October 3, 1922, as Edith Thompson and her husband, Percy, were walking home from the theatre, a man sprang out of the darkness and stabbed Percy to death. The assailant was none other than Edith’s lover, Freddy Bywaters. When the police discovered his relationship with Edith, she denied knowledge of the attack but was arrested as his accomplice. Her passionate love letters to Bywaters, read out loud at the ensuing trial, sealed her fate, even though Bywaters insisted Edith had no part in planning the murder. They were both hanged. Freddy was demonstrably guilty, but was Edith? This engrossing examination of the Ilford murder, which became a legal cause ce’le’bre in the 1920s, charts the course of the liaison in shattering detail and with masterful emotional insight, investigating what this troubling case tells us about perceptions of women, innocence, and guilt.

This audiobook is read by the author.

New York Times bestselling author Laura Thompson returns with Heiresses, a fascinating look at the lives of heiresses throughout history and the often tragic truth beneath the gilded surface.

Heiresses: surely they are among the luckiest women on earth. Are they not to be envied, with their private jets and Chanel wardrobes and endless funds? Yet all too often those gilded lives have been beset with trauma and despair. Before the 20th century a wife’s inheritance was the property of her husband, making her vulnerable to kidnap, forced marriages, even confinement in an asylum. And in modern times, heiresses fell victim to fortune-hunters who squandered their millions.

Heiresses tells the stories of these women: Mary Davies, who inherited London’s most valuable real estate, and was bartered from the age of twelve; Consuelo Vanderbilt, the original American “Dollar Heiress”, forced into a loveless marriage; Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress who married seven times and died almost penniless; Patty Hearst, heiress to a newspaper fortune who was arrested for terrorism. However, there are also stories of achievement: Angela Burdett-Coutts, who became one of the greatest philanthropists of Victorian England; Nancy Cunard, who lived off her mother’s fortune and became a pioneer of the civil rights movement; Daisy Fellowes, elegant linchpin of interwar high society and noted fashion editor.

Heiresses is about the lives of the rich, who–as F. Scott Fitzgerald said–are ‘different’. But it is also a bigger story about how all women fought their way to equality, and sometimes even found autonomy and fulfilment.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.

The eldest was a razor-sharp novelist of upper-class manners; the second was loved by John Betjeman; the third was a fascist who married Oswald Mosley; the fourth idolized Hitler and shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany; the fifth was a member of the American Communist Party; the sixth became Duchess of Devonshire.

They were the Mitford sisters: Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah. Born into country-house privilege in the early years of the 20th century, they became prominent as “bright young things” in the high society of interwar London. Then, as the shadows crept over 1930s Europe, the stark–and very public–differences in their outlooks came to symbolize the political polarities of a dangerous decade.

The intertwined stories of their stylish and scandalous lives–recounted in masterly fashion by Laura Thompson–hold up a revelatory mirror to upper-class English life before and after WWII. The Six was previously published as Take Six Girls.