From the first victim, a longtime friend of hers, she knew she needed other victims. It is the first time she felt alive. It became a need, a desire that she couldn’t let go. It also excited her husband as well. Helping her with his power, each killing made her want more. She kept them, loved them, and killed them. They were unnoticed until Detective Geronimo Deacon Jones came into the picture. He needed to find them as much as they needed to kill.

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This book is a comprehensive study of the history of pew-renting in the church of England, from the first known rented sittings in the fifteenth century to the system’s collapse in the twentieth. The book’s significance is partly its originality; no book and very few articles or portions of books have appeared solely on pew-renting since the nineteenth century, and even those of that time were not histories – they were polemical works that generally attacked pew-renting on religious grounds. This work encompasses the distinction between formal letting of seats – which involved the methodical letting of sittings by church authorities with set rents – and informal pew-letting, in which congregants tipped pew-openers and sidesmen for favourable seats for one service. It also details the concomitant difficulties and hindrances encountered by churches and renters, the means of setting the rents and collecting the proceeds, the types of congregants who rented pews, thecontroversy the practice provoked, and the deception and bending – and sometimes outright breaking – of the applicable law.