Paul Collins

Collins recounts how a grisly discovery in 1897 New York plunged detectives headlong into the era's most perplexing murder. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus.

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.

The sensational story of the last two centuries of the papacy, its most influential pontiffs, troubling doctrines, and rise in global authority. "In 1799, the papacy was at rock bottom: The Papal States had been swept away and Rome seized by the revolutionary French armies. With cardinals scattered across Europe and the next papal election uncertain, even if Catholicism survived, it seemed the papacy was finished. In this gripping narrative of religious...