Starvation Heights
Books | True Crime / Murder / Serial Killers
3.5
(62)
Gregg Olsen
In this true story—a haunting saga of medical murder set in an era of steamships and gaslights—Gregg Olsen reveals one of the most unusual and disturbing criminal cases in American history.In 1911 two wealthy British heiresses, Claire and Dora Williamson, arrived at a sanitorium in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to undergo the revolutionary “fasting treatment” of Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard. It was supposed to be a holiday for the two sisters, but within a month of arriving at what the locals called Starvation Heights, the women underwent brutal treatments and were emaciated shadows of their former selves. Claire and Dora were not the first victims of Linda Hazzard, a quack doctor of extraordinary evil and greed. But as their jewelry disappeared and forged bank drafts began transferring their wealth to Hazzard’s accounts, the sisters came to learn that Hazzard would stop at nothing short of murder to achieve her ambitions.
AD
Buy now:
More Details:
Author
Gregg Olsen
Pages
448
Publisher
Crown
Published Date
2005-05-03
ISBN
0307238393 9780307238399
Ratings
Google: 5
Community ReviewsSee all
"If you have ever lived in the Seattle area this book will delight you. Gregg Olsen is one of my favorite "Olson" writers, up there with Jack. Has some historical appeal to Puget sound residents. "
C M
Ck Meadows
"Linda Burfield Hazzard is a really fascinating and egregious example of not only early 20th century quackery (in some respects not too different from some of today's "alternative medicine" practitioners) but also a narcisstic fraudster with a rampant disregard for human life. I usually find myself even more flabbergasted by the adherents of these "cures" than those hawking them - greed is easy to understand, while the kind of guileless ignorance required to believe in that kind of thing is hard to relate to in a time more characterized by cynicism. However, I thought the author did a good job of portraying the Williamsons and many of Hazzard's other victims sympathetically in a way that elicited more sighs than scoffs at their fates."
Aileen Donahue