Ruth Ellis was, as everyone knows, the last woman in Britain to be hanged – her case a catalyst for the abolition of the death penalty. But is the story we are all so familiar with the whole one? Louisa Treger, a seasoned teller of tales of extraordinary women, brings Ellis to life in a new novel. A Fatal Love presents us with a remarkable woman who committed a remarkable crime.

In 1955, when Ellis shot her lover David Blakely outside a pub in Hampstead, domestic violence was seen by the police as a ‘private matter’. ‘Coercive control’ had yet to be coined as a term, and was half a century from being criminalised. In this literary, dialogue-driven thriller, we learn that Ellis’s violent, alcoholic father had also sexually abused her.

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It was while she was working at the Little Club in Knightsbridge that Ellis met and fell in love with Blakely, an upper-class man from a very different background to hers. She was a beautiful,........

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