Starvation Heights
by Gregg Olsen
419 pages, Paperback
Crown Publishing Group
Published 3 May 2005
Rating: 3 stars
In 1911, British heiresses Claire and Dora Williamson decide to undergo the “fasting treatment” under the supervision of Dr. Linda Hazzard – but everything is not quite as it seems, and the sisters soon find themselves trapped in nightmarish circumstances.
Between a new job, NaNoWriMo, and an impending move, I’ve done very little reading this past November. So I figured a nice way to get back on the wagon would be to break out this true crime tale of a very bizarre crime.
I was already acquainted with Linda Hazzard and Starvation Heights through the podcast Stuff You Missed In History Class, but the episode was short enough and the listening so long ago that much of what presented in this book was quite new to me.
The story is such a strange and sensational one that it makes for a fascinating read in itself. But Olsen’s writing, with its deft character sketches and its rampant tension, goes a long way toward making it eerie as well.
The first half of the book deals with how Claire and Dora fall under the spell of Hazzard and plunge straight into physical and mental deterioration, which of course ends in tragedy. The second half deals with the efforts to persecute Hazzard, including some truly strange backstory and a dramatic trial. Despite the fairly complex sequence of events and the number of deaths, I found the story fairly easy to keep track of.
However, I wished we got more backstory about Linda Hazzard and how she came to the place in which she ended up. Was everything about scamming people out of money, or did some of it have to do with a thirst for recognition? Did she really believe in her fasting cure, and to what extent? Until she pops up in relation to Samuel Hazzard in Chicago, information seems quite thin on the ground. I wish we had understood her better, considering she’s the main villain of this whole story.
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Description
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.
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Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.
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