Purcell ( The Silent Companions, 2017) cleverly plays two unreliable narrators off each other here. Meanwhile, Dorothea, who is secretly being courted by police constable David, must fend off her widowed father’s efforts to betrothe her to Sir Thomas Biggleswade. The rational Dorothea believes Ruth is lying, but the girl's phrenological profile reveals a “wonderfully retentive memory' and a tendency toward honesty. Of her victims, some were accidents, she tells Dorothea, but others she hated, like Rosalind Oldacre, her tormentor from school, and the abusive Metyards.

A talented sewer, Ruth is convinced she has a supernatural ability to kill as she stitches her emotions into the garments she makes.

Convinced that a person’s character, including “the propensity to kill,' is mapped out on the cranium, she is eager to interview her subject, 16-year-old Ruth Butterham, who stands accused of murdering her mistress, “slowly, by degrees.” With each visit, Ruth tells Dorothea the sad and brutal story of grinding poverty and devastating loss that led to her involuntary servitude and appalling abuse at the dressmaking shop of Mrs. When she receives a note from the prison matron informing her that “ we another one,” Dorothea is thrilled because this is her chance to prove her ideas about the science of phrenology. Wealthy heiress Dorothea Truelove devotes her charitable work to visiting the female inmates of Oakgate Prison.

A Victorian do-gooder meets a young seamstress, on trial for murder, who confesses to killing her employer with just a needle and thread.

Laura purcell the poison thread