Tom Hughes – författare

In March 1912, Gene Grace, a young Atlanta businessman, was found shot in the locked bedroom of his fashionable home "between the Peachtrees." Daisy Grace, his flashily dressed Yankee wife from Philadelphia, was soon arrested on a charge of assault with intent to murder. Gene Grace was left paralyzed but, more importantly, he was powerless legally. Under Georgia law, he could not testify against his wife. Prosecutors were forced to rely instead upon the circumstantial evidence of an alleged "diabolical plot." The Atlanta newspapers--led by the Georgian, under the very new control of Mr. Hearst, that giant of "yellow journalism"--covered the case relentlessly. Papers across the country followed the drama for months, which concluded with a five-day trial held in the searing heat of a Georgia summer. This is the never-before-told story of the tragic romance between "the Adonis of a country town" and the woman known to all as "Daisy of the Leopard Spots."

"One of the most despicable scandals ever enacted in an English household."In the 1880s, Lord Chief Justice Coleridge was the senior and deeply respected 'celebrity' judge in the land. After the premature death of his adored wife, his unmarried daughter Mildred, in her early thirties, was expected to serve as his housekeeper, hostess and companion. But Mildred wanted to marry Charles Warren Adams, the irascible secretary of the `Victoria Street 'anti-vivisection' Society for which Mildred worked. After much-disputed accounts of an incident 'in a darkened room,' Lord Coleridge forbade the two to meet. And so began the scandal that intrigued London society for years.The dispute ended in libel proceedings that revealed every squalid detail of the Chief Justice's tyranny over his daughter, and ended in total public humiliation of Lord Coleridge who became a defendant in his own court, when he was cross-examined by his would-be son-in-law. Such a situation is entirely without precedent in English legal history. Worse was to follow - the threat of breach of promise action as Lord Coleridge tried to end his infatuation for a younger woman with whom he had conducted an affair on a steamship returning from America. A second marriage was the solution.Tom Hughes has written the first full-length account of a scandal that enthralled Britain for more than a decade. Based on Lord Coleridge's personal family papers, this compelling and brilliantly told story of social attitudes and behaviour that are beyond anything we can imagine today provides fascinating insights into 'a family which has gone to ruin itself.'