You'll find no pretty parades of princes or benevolent industrialists here. This is Deadly Derby, caught red handed--a city built by the Romans over the dead bodies of Britons; trashed, burned, and reinvented by the Vikings; bludgeoned into a Dark Age den of vice by the Saxons; razed once again by the Normans; and simmering with murder, slavery, wickedness, and profanity ever since. Heretics roasted throughout the sixteenth century; plague decimated the population at whim in the seventeenth century; and in the eighteenth a new form of malevolence arrived with slave-devouring factories and industrialists. Invading Scottish Jacobites in 1745 were the least of Derby's worries--murder and violent crime were riding high from the outset, and the city slums bred all imaginable forms of vice and desperation. All rounded off with heavy bombing in World War II. Welcome to the real Derby!

Paul Sullivan lived in Derbyshire for many years, and his previous books include several guidebooks on the area. A specialist in folklore with many books to his name, his previous credits include researching, writing, and presenting at weekly festivals and customs guide for BBC Radio 5, and columns in publications as diverse as the Fortean Times, Living History, and The Sunday Express.