A Most Deliberate Swindle by Mick Hamer

A Most Deliberate Swindle by Mick Hamer ISBN-13: 9781910453421 Paperback: 240 pages Publisher: RedDoor Publishing Released: Sept. 28, 2017

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from NetGalley:
On a warm April morning in 1906 a crowd of expectant correspondents from London s leading newspapers gathered at the Hotel Cecil in the Strand to view the new wonder of the age the electrobus.

This clean, green machine was gearing up to take on the noisy, polluting petrol vehicle, which was just starting to replace the horse-drawn omnibus and surely had the potential to be a game changer in terms of what it would mean to Londoners and other city-dwellers who were already choking on petrol fumes.

Disastrously though, the London Electrobus Company was in the grip of a gang of greedy and fraudulent financiers, who systematically conned shareholders, looted the company's coffers and drove the promise of the electrobus into the ground.

Rammed with fascinating characters and vividly capturing the Edwardian era, A Most Deliberate Swindle uncovers one of the biggest frauds in history and reveals why a century later this historic scam has left us all gasping for breath.


My Review:
A Most Deliberate Swindle is a well-researched historical true crime story. This interesting tale started in April 1906 with a company promising to run battery-powered buses in London. This was at a time when the new petrol-powered buses were not popular due to the smell and noise. There were also steam-powdered buses vying to be the technology to replace horse-drawn vehicles. Though the battery-powered buses were very popular, they were also more expensive to build. However, they may have become the norm if the company first promoting the buses hadn't been a fraud.

This is the story of the technology, the fraud going on at that time, and the main players who carried off this is astounding fraud. They managed to keep people interested and sending them money even after the company was exposed as a fraud. The company didn't shut down its buses until the early 1910s when new technologies offered better cons. Overall, I'd highly recommend this interesting and cautionary tale to those interested in stocks and new technologies.


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