Of all the feedback I& #39;ve had about The Five, both good & bad, the one accusation that never ceases to puzzle me is that I& #39;ve attempted to & #39;save& #39; these women from their true identity as & #39;prostitutes& #39; and in doing this have upheld the notion that & #39;bad women deserve to be punished& #39;.

Anyone who has read this book and still believes this, hasn& #39;t actually read it, or read anything that I& #39;ve subsequently written or said about researching or writing this book. My objective in writing The Five was to show that these women were human beings and worthy of respect.

I put that argument forward clearly in the final chapter. It doesn& #39;t matter who they were or how they lived their lives, no one deserves to be murdered. & #39;Saving them& #39; from their previous identity as & #39;prostitutes& #39; wasn& #39;t a goal of mine, discovering the truth of their lives was.

This is how it happened: I studied the historical documentation, I read through a vast amount of secondary material and I let the documentation lead me to my conclusions. Responsible history-writing isn& #39;t about forumlating a theory and then looking for documents to support it.