Earth to Earth: Lives and Violent Deaths of a Devon Farming Family: A True Crime Classic Revisited

The Luxtons' idyllic farm on a stretch of lush countryside between Exmoor and Dartmoor had been lovingly tended with outdated methods. There were rumours of a thwarted betrothal, wrangles over money and property, generational feuds in the extended family, bouts of insanity and extreme miserliness.

John Cornwell's classic investigation into the violent deaths of these unhappy siblings told a story of a farming family struggling under unbearable practical and emotional pressures, their violent deaths, the police investigation and the proceedings of the inquest. The official verdict was that there had been a suicide pact, but Cornwell decided to revisit the evidence forty years after Earth to Earth was first published, and he finds that there were anomalies in the evidence suggesting alternative, criminal scenarios, and the misery that preceded these savage deaths suggested even darker elements.

Were the Luxtons scapegoats of local malice, or victims of a murderous family conflict, stricken by a dire ancestral curse?

This new edition of a true crime classic includes a postscript in which the author describes the extraordinary lengths that the great poet Ted Hughes, a neighbour of the Luxtons, went to try and suppress publication of the book.