Book Review – 17 Deadly Women Through The Ages (Bus Stop Reads) By Stephanie Glover

This is another free ebook I have no idea how I came across it, possibly in the top 100 but I cannot be sure…

It does not feature on Goodreads but here is what the blurb on Amazon says about it…

TRUE CRIME: WOMEN SERIAL KILLERS
Our society can barely account for evil in males, let alone imagine it in females. The female nests, creates, and nurtures doesn’t she or is it that we just want to believe in the intrinsic non-threatening nature of women?
Yet, history is full of instrumentally violent women: women who have fought wars and battles throughout the world, with no less ferociousness than men, women such as Dynamis of Bosphorous, who starved her husband to death and took control of his kingdom, or Artemisia, the queen of Halicarnassus in the 5th century, who conducted a brilliant but brutal military campaign against the Greeks. Mary Tudor, Queen Mary 1 of England, in 1553 became known as “Bloody Mary,” for her extreme cruelty and willingness to execute people.
In this short book meet 17 less known but equally murderous cold blooded women. After reading it you may find your perception of the gentler sex changed irrevocably. Enjoy.

I am going to do this review in two parts first what I thought of the book but secondly some issues I had with it.

First up it does deliver what is says on the front, short stories which you could indeed read at a bus stop or as I prefer either on the bus or in the bath.  I really like the fact the author does not take the easy option and stick to the same few cases which so many books on female crime do, the stories she share span hundreds of years and every continent, she gives enough facts for you to feel like you have the story in the majority of cases though there may be the occasional one where you wish you knew more but I suspect in those cases she has been limited by available source material. So you might wonder from all of that what I found wrong with this book well…

The book is not so much a book as an extensive advert for a number of other books! The book is divided into sections of two or three stories for each historical period, however the stories are ‘extracted’ from books on that time period which is then advertised at the end of that section.  My issue with this is, fair enough this book is free but then she is wanting people to go buy a book which they have already read 20-25% of, if she had added different stories and then advertised if you enjoyed these find more like them here that would not have annoyed me as much but to ask people to buy a book they have already read a proportion of the stories for is wrong.

I have to be honest my annoyance at the way the book tries to sell you the same stories again has coloured my review, had they been original stories and tales of murder then I would have given this 4 out of 5 but because of the fact it is simply a selection of pre-existing work I cannot give it more than 3 out of five stars which I know seems harsh given this was a freebie but it is just something that bothered me.