On August 2, 1876, a young policeman named Nicholas Cock was shot dead while confronting a burglar in Manchester. A few months later, engineer Arthur Dyson was murdered in his own backyard in Sheffield. One of these killings became the most scandalous case of the Victorian age, with a tale of illicit romance and a nationwide hunt for a wanted man; the other was to become an infamous landmark in legal history. At the center of it all was Charles Peace, a devious, ruthless con man, and here David Hanrahan tells his story, which is as compelling as any found in the pages of a detective novel.