2010

John Baxter was 91, when his book about his experiences in Japanese POW camps was published.  Royal Engineer Baxter was captured and imprisoned in Indonesia in 1942.  He was starved and beaten, and contracted malaria, dysentery and diphtheria, for which he received no treatment.  For the last two years of the War, he worked in the hard labour mines in Japan, where, in August 1945, he felt the direct blast of the atomic bomb falling on Nagasaki 40 miles away.

Quite simply, this is the Jack the Ripper “bible”, the indispensable book of reference written in an easily accessed alphabetical format by three renowned authorities on the case, and utterly dependable on every detail and aspect of it.

There was a hidden, but terrible side to popular Radio Dublin DJ, Eamonn Cooke. His sexual abuse of Siobhan from the age of 7 and many other trusting young girls at his home and studios in Dublin was cunningly executed and vile.  She tried to bury her memories until, almost twenty years later, she saw the man, who had haunted her life, in the street holding the hands of two wide-eyed children.  Siobhan knew she had no choice, but to save them and other potential victims from Cooke’s clutches and, no matter what it took, get him sentenced to a long term of imprisonment.

The manuscript, rediscovered ten years after Reg Kray’s death from cancer in 2000, is his memoir of his East End childhood in Bethnal Green, his days as a semi-pro boxer, and the forming of friendships, which would endure through to the Kray Twins’ reign of terror in the 1960s and beyond.

Small-time villain Sean O’Donnell walked out on his family almost twenty years ago and hasn’t been heard of since.  Now his daughter, Iris, has returned to the East End to find out just what happened.  But it isn’t going to be easy.  Everyone close to her seems to be keeping secrets.