The Irish are celebrated at home and abroad as explorers, freedom fighters and great writers and artists, but for every Tom Crean, Bernardo O'Higgins or James Joyce, there is a Hugh Gough, Antoine Walsh or Luke Ryan. This book is about the Irish slavers, grave robbers, duellists, conmen, drug-lords and killers who wreaked havoc around the world. Includes;

• Burke & Hare grave-robbers turned murderers who supplied cadavers to the medical schools of nineteenth-century Edinburgh.
• Sir Hugh Gough, a Limerick man who commanded the British troops in the first Opium war against China.
• James 'Sligo' Jameson who was rumoured to have fallen into madness and cannibalism in the Congo in 1888 … and many more!