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Title details for The Wilderness of Ruin by Roseanne Montillo - Available

The Wilderness of Ruin

A Tale of Madness, Fire, and the Hunt for America's Youngest Serial Killer

by Roseanne Montillo
Emily Woo Zeller
Audiobook
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In the early 1870s, local children begin disappearing from the working-class neighborhoods of Boston. Several return home bloody and bruised after being tortured, while others never come back.


With the city on edge, authorities believe the abductions are the handiwork of a psychopath, until they discover that their killer—fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy—is barely older than his victims. The criminal investigation that follows sparks a debate among the world's most revered medical minds and will have a decades-long impact on the judicial system and medical consciousness.


The Wilderness of Ruin is a riveting tale of gruesome murder and depravity. At its heart is a great American city divided by class—a chasm that widens in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1872. Roseanne Montillo brings Gilded Age Boston to glorious life—from the genteel cobblestone streets of Beacon Hill to the squalid, overcrowded tenements of Southie.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 17, 2015

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781494591021
      • File size: 258329 KB
      • Duration: 08:58:11

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      The working-class neighborhoods of Boston in the 1870s were disturbed and frightened by a series of child abductions and tortures. The culprit turns out to be a child himself: 14-year-old Jesse Pomeroy, who, after imprisonment, goes on to commit more murders later in life. Narrator Emily Woo Zeller employs a well-measured pace. Her tone is informative yet, when appropriate, full of the foreboding that spread through Boston during the period of the brutal and shocking murders. Although Pomeroy's story is interesting, the inclusion in the book of so much extraneous detail about prominent figures of the era suggests that the author lacked enough information to fill an entire book. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 19, 2015
      Delving deep into the history of Boston circa the 19th century, Montillo (The Lady and Her Monsters) unearths a riveting true-crime tale that rivals anything writers in the 21st century could concoct. Jesse Harding Pomeroy, an adolescent from a deeply troubled family, earns notoriety in working-class Boston and surrounding towns by kidnapping and torturing young boys. The sensational journalism of the period soon turns him into a subject of grotesque fascination in the city and beyond. After Jesse is apprehended by court order and sent off to reform school, his mother secures a commutation that returns the teenager to the city, with monstrous results. A masterly storyteller, Montillo skillfully evokes the poor and patrician neighborhoods that served as a backdrop for the crimes, particularly after the 1872 fire that ravaged the city center. The police investigations that tracked down Jesse are stunning in their similarity to modern-day sleuthing. Alongside the graphic, disturbing details of Pomeroy’s crimes, Montillo chronicles the contemporary fascination with mental illness by writers such as Herman Melville, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other paragons of 19th-century Boston. A host of doctors and lawyers also figure prominently in these pages, as they all try to understand what drove a young boy to commit horrific crimes that gripped a city for decades. B&w illus. Agent: Rob Weisbach, Rob Weisbach Creative Management.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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