Book description
Night comes quickly to the Bahamas. That of 7 July 1943 was
unpleasantly close and humid, for though the rains were nearing their
end, the air was heavy with an approaching storm. It struck Nassau soon
after midnight. By the time it had blown itself out, one of the world's
richest men, Sir Harry Oakes, had been murdered in his own bedroom. He
had been burned alive, then had his skull broken by four blows to the
head. When the body was found at daybreak, bloody handprints marked the
walls of the room, while a fan stirred small white feathers that clung
to the charred corpse on the bed. Beyond it, the window stood wide open.
Even in the middle of wartime, Oakes's death commanded front-page
headlines in the world's newspapers, and began a series of events whose
protagonists included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Ernest Hemingway,
two French aristocrats, a suspected Nazi and a grey Maltese cat, and
which culminated in the sensational trial and acquittal of Oakes's own
son-in-law for the crime. Owen's brilliant telling of the story stands
alongside James Fox's WHITE MISCHIEF as a true-crime classic as well as
an extraordinary portrait of a glamorous and corrupt society. James
Owen trained as a barrister before turning to writing and he contributes
to a range of newspapers. He became fascinated by the Harry Oakes story
when he first heard about it from his grandmother, who still lives in
Nassau and knew many of the people in this book.
