The Architect Of Desire: Beauty And Danger In The Stanford White - Susannah Lessard

In this extraordinary book the author digs and digs until she can find out the whole story. Along the way she discovers that not only was her great-grandfather murdered by the husband of Evelyn Nesbitt, a showgirl at the time, who was enraged with jealousy, only to be acquitted on the grounds of insanity, but that the repercussions of this event and of her great-grandfather's behaviour on the rest of the family and its subsequent generations was devastating. Throughout the gripping narrative snippets of information about Stanford are woven into the incredible tale of the author's own upbringing and the whole family. This is a beautifully written and extraorinary powerful book.