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Eastern Fringe: True Crime from Essex, Hertfordshire, and the Edge of London
Paperback
Series: Quiet Estates
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 3 2026
Pages: 228
Weight: 0.68
Height: 0.48 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Across Essex, Hertfordshire and the eastern edge of London, planned New Towns, commuter estates and prosperous villages were built around the promise of order. Yet the same region has witnessed murders behind ordinary front doors, disappearances along familiar routes, organised crime on rural lanes and institutional failures that crossed county lines.
Eastern Fringe examines fifteen documented cases spanning more than a century-from the Moat Farm murder and the Tottenham Outrage to the Rettendon killings, the Hatfield rail disaster, the disappearance of Danielle Jones, and the murders of Helen Bailey, Joy Morgan and Zara Aleena.
Inside this book:
- historic and modern British murder cases;
- unsolved disappearances and no-body prosecutions;
- domestic homicide, coercive control and financial deception;
- organised crime and the mythology of the Essex Boys;
- corporate negligence, policing and probation failures;
- the changing landscape of Basildon, Harlow, Stevenage and outer London.
Drawing on court judgments, sentencing remarks, inquest findings, official inquiries, police material, archival records and contemporary reporting, Julian Maddox separates evidence from allegation, judicial findings from public suspicion and documented history from criminal mythology.
This is not a catalogue of monsters or a claim that Essex and Hertfordshire are uniquely dangerous. It is a victim-centred account of ordinary lives unfolding within a region designed around home, work and the expectation of returning safely between them.
For readers of British true crime, regional history, unsolved cases and rigorously researched crime writing.
Book Two in the Quiet Estates series. Each volume can be read independently.
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