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Blood Royal
Jager, Eric
(Hardcover)
List Price: $29.00 Sale: $7.47
A riveting true story of murder and detection in 15th-century Paris, by one of the most brilliant medievalists of his generation. On a chilly November night in 1407, Louis of Orleans was murdered by a band of masked men. The crime stunned and paralyzed France since Louis had often ruled in place of his brother King Charles, who had gone mad. As panic seized Paris, an investigation began. In charge was the Provost of Paris, Guillaume de Tignonville, the city's chief law enforcement officer--and one of history's first detectives. As de Tignonville began to investigate, he realized that his hunt for the truth was much more dangerous than he ever could have imagined. A rich portrait of a distant world, BLOOD ROYAL is a gripping story of conspiracy, crime and an increasingly desperate hunt for the truth. And in Guillaume de Tignonville, we have an unforgettable detective for the ages, a classic gumshoe for a cobblestoned era.
Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders
Lehr, Dick
(Softcover)
List Price: $14.99 Sale: $5.60
On a cold night in January 2001, the idyllic community of Dartmouth College was shattered by the discovery that two professors had been hacked to death in their own home. Investigators searched helplessly for clues linking the victims, Half and Susanne Zantop, to their killers. Nearby, residents of Chelsea, Vermont, were shocked to see police car lights flashing outside the house of high school senior Robert Tulloch. The town soon discovered the incomprehensible reality that Tulloch and best friend Jim Parker - two of Chelsea's brightest and most popular sons - were now fugitives, wanted for the murders of Half and Susanne Zantop. Authors Dick Lehr and Mitchell Zuckoff offer a vivid explanation of the murders that captivated the nation as well as provide a clear portrait of the killers, their families, and their community - and, perhaps, a warning to all parents about what evil may lurk in the hearts of boys.
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
Simon, David
(Paperback)
List Price: $19.00 Sale: $6.96
The scene is Baltimore. Twice every three days another citizen is shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned to death. At the center of this hurricane of crime is the city's homicide unit, a small brotherhood of hard men who fight for whatever justice is possible in a deadly world. David Simon was the first reporter ever to gain unlimited access to a homicide unit, and this electrifying book tells the true story of a year on the violent streets of an American city. The narrative follows Donald Worden, a veteran investigator; Harry Edgerton, a black detective in a mostly white unit; and Tom Pellegrini, an earnest rookie who takes on the year's most difficult case, the brutal rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl. Originally published fifteen years ago, Homicide became the basis for the acclaimed television show of the same name. This new edition - which includes a new introduction, an afterword, and photographs - revives this classic, riveting tale about the men who work on the dark side of the American experience.
Out of Thin Air: A True Story of Impossible Murder in Iceland
Adeane, Anthony
(Paperback)
List Price: $19.99 Sale: $4.75
In 1974, two men vanished without a trace under suspicious circumstances, shocking the people of Iceland, where serious crime is almost non-existent. More than a year later there seemed to be a breakthrough when a small-time crook named Erla Bolladottir described a dream to police that they interpreted as a sign of trauma related to the men’s disappearance. After lengthy interrogations, investigations and courtroom dramas, Erla and five acquaintances confessed to killing both men and were given prison sentences ranging from three years to life. But over the years the case against the convicted six began to disintegrate, and one major question remained unanswered: Why had they all confessed to murder if they hadn’t done it?Out of Thin Air joins Erla in the present day as she pursues her exoneration, exploring the many facets of this bizarre and bewildering case and the social and cultural history of Iceland, a country of vast landscapes, extreme weather and strange folklore, where more than eighty per cent of the population believes that elves might exist.
Assassination Generation: Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing
Grossman, Dave
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.00 Sale: $8.40
The author of the landmark work On Killing reveals how violent video games have ushered in a new era of mass homicide - and what we must do about it.Paducah, Kentucky, 1997: a 14-year-old boy shoots eight students in a prayer circle at his school. Littleton, Colorado, 1999: two high school seniors kill a teacher, twelve other students, and then themselves. Utoya, Norway, 2011: a political extremist shoots and kills sixty-nine participants in a youth summer camp. Newtown, Connecticut, 2012: a troubled 20-year-old man kills 20 children and six adults at the elementary school he once attended.What links these and other horrific acts of mass murder? A young person's obsession with video games that teach to kill.Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, who in his perennial bestseller On Killing revealed that most of us are not "natural born killers" - and who has spent decades training soldiers, police, and others who keep us secure to overcome the intrinsic human resistance to harming others and to use firearms responsibly when necessary - turns a laser focus on the threat posed to our society by violent video games.Drawing on crime statistics, cutting-edge social research, and scientific studies of the teenage brain, Col. Grossman shows how video games that depict antisocial, misanthropic, casually savage behavior can warp the mind - with potentially deadly results. His book will become the focus of a new national conversation about video games and the epidemic of mass murders that they have unleashed.
The Most Dangerous Animal of All
Stewart, Gary L.
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.99 Sale: $5.85
When Gary L. Stewart decided to search for his biological father at the age of thirty-nine, he never imagined his quest would lead him to a horrifying truth and force him to reconsider everything he thought he knew about himself. Written with award-winning author and journalist Susan Mustafa, The Most Dangerous Animal of All tells the story of Stewart's decade-long hunt. While combing through government records and news reports and tracking down relatives and friends, Stewart turns up a host of clues - including forensic evidence - that conclusively identifies his father as the Zodiac Killer, one of the most notorious and elusive serial murderers in history. At last, all the questions that have surrounded the case for almost fifty years are answered in this riveting narrative - a singular work of true crime at its finest as well as a sensational and powerful memoir.
Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History
Telfer, Tori
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.99 Sale: $5.39
Inspired by author Tori Telfer's Jezebel column “Lady Killers,” this thrilling and entertaining compendium investigates female serial killers and their crimes through the ages.When you think of serial killers throughout history, the names that come to mind are ones like Jack the Ripper, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy. But what about Tillie Klimek, Moulay Hassan, Kate Bender? The narrative we’re comfortable with is the one where women are the victims of violent crime, not the perpetrators. In fact, serial killers are thought to be so universally, overwhelmingly male that in 1998, FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood infamously declared in a homicide conference, “There are no female serial killers.”Lady Killers, based on the popular online series that appeared on Jezebel and The Hairpin, disputes that claim and offers fourteen gruesome examples as evidence. Though largely forgotten by history, female serial killers such as Erzsébet Báthory, Nannie Doss, Mary Ann Cotton, and Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova rival their male counterparts in cunning, cruelty, and appetite for destruction.Each chapter explores the crimes and history of a different subject, and then proceeds to unpack her legacy and her portrayal in the media, as well as the stereotypes and sexist clichés that inevitably surround her. The first book to examine female serial killers through a feminist lens with a witty and dryly humorous tone, Lady Killers dismisses easy explanations (she was hormonal, she did it for love, a man made her do it) and tired tropes (she was a femme fatale, a black widow, a witch), delving into the complex reality of female aggression and predation. Featuring 14 illustrations from Dame Darcy, Lady Killers is a bloodcurdling, insightful, and irresistible journey into the heart of darkness.
Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference, and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls
McDiarmid, Jessica
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Sale: $7.81
In the vein of the bestsellers I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and The Line Becomes a River, a penetrating, deeply moving account of the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls of Highway 16, and a searing indictment of the society that failed them.For decades, Indigenous women and girls have gone missing or been found murdered along an isolated stretch of highway in northwestern British Columbia. The corridor is known as the Highway of Tears, and it has come to symbolize a national crisis.Journalist Jessica McDiarmid meticulously investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities, and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate in which Indigenous women and girls are overpoliced yet underprotected. McDiarmid interviews those closest to the victims - mothers and fathers, siblings and friends - and provides an intimate firsthand account of their loss and unflagging fight for justice. Examining the historically fraught social and cultural tensions between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the region, McDiarmid links these cases to others across Canada - now estimated to number up to four thousand - contextualizing them within a broader examination of the undervaluing of Indigenous lives in the country.Highway of Tears is a piercing exploration of our ongoing failure to provide justice for the victims and a testament to their families’ and communities’ unwavering determination to find it.
No Matter How Loud I Shout (Updated)
Humes, Edward
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $5.17
In an age when violence and crime by young people is again on the rise, "No Matter How Loud I Shout" offers a rare look inside the juvenile court system that deals with these children and the impact decisions made in the courts had on the rest of their lives. Granted unprecedented access to the Los Angeles Juvenile Court, including the judges, the probation officers, and the children themselves, Edward Humes creates an unforgettable portrait of a chaotic system that is neither saving our children in danger nor protecting us from adolescent violence. Yet he shows us there is also hope in the handful of courageous individuals working tirelessly to triumph over seemingly insurmountable odds. Weaving together a poignant, compelling narrative with razor-sharp investigative reporting, "No Matter How Loud I Shout" is a convincingly reported, profoundly disturbing discussion of the Los Angeles juvenile court's failings, providing terrifying evidence of the system's inability to slow juvenile crime or to make even a reasonable stab at rehabilitating troubled young offenders. Humes draws an alarming portrait of a judicial system in disarray.
Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence
James, Bill
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $4.24
Celebrated writer and contrarian Bill James has voraciously read true crime throughout his life and has been interested in writing a book on the topic for decades. With Popular Crime, James takes readers on an epic journey from Lizzie Borden to the Lindbergh baby, from the Black Dahlia to O. J. Simpson, explaining how crimes have been committed, investigated, prosecuted and written about, and how that has profoundly influenced our culture over the last few centuries - even if we haven’t always taken notice. Exploring such phenomena as serial murder, the fluctuation of crime rates, the value of evidence, radicalism and crime, prison reform and the hidden ways in which crimes have shaped, or reflected, our society, James chronicles murder and misdeeds from the 1600s to the present day. James pays particular attention to crimes that were sensations during their time but have faded into obscurity, as well as still-famous cases, some that have never been solved, including the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Boston Strangler and JonBenet Ramsey. Satisfyingly sprawling and tremendously entertaining, Popular Crime is a professed amateur’s powerful examination of the incredible impact crime stories have on our society, culture and history.
The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer
Summerscale, Kate
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Sale: $5.39
From the internationally bestselling author, a deeply researched and atmospheric murder mystery of late Victorian-era London In the summer of 1895, Robert Coombes (age 13) and his brother Nattie (age 12) were seen spending lavishly around the docklands of East London -- for ten days in July, they ate out at coffee houses and took trips to the seaside and the theater. The boys told neighbors they had been left home alone while their mother visited family in Liverpool, but their aunt was suspicious. When she eventually forced the brothers to open the house to her, she found the badly decomposed body of their mother in a bedroom upstairs. Robert and Nattie were arrested for matricide and sent for trial at the Old Bailey. Robert confessed to having stabbed his mother, but his lawyers argued that he was insane. Nattie struck a plea and gave evidence against his brother. The court heard testimony about Robert's severe headaches, his fascination with violent criminals and his passion for 'penny dreadfuls', the pulp fiction of the day. He seemed to feel no remorse for what he had done, and neither the prosecution nor the defense could find a motive for the murder. The judge sentenced the thirteen-year-old to detention in Broadmoor, the most infamous criminal lunatic asylum in the land. Yet Broadmoor turned out to be the beginning of a new life for Robert--one that would have profoundly shocked anyone who thought they understood the Wicked Boy. At a time of great tumult and uncertainty, Robert Coombes's case crystallized contemporary anxieties about the education of the working classes, the dangers of pulp fiction, and evolving theories of criminality, childhood, and insanity. With riveting detail and rich atmosphere, Kate Summerscale recreates this terrible crime and its aftermath, uncovering an extraordinary story of man's capacity to overcome the past.
The Secret Life of Bikers
Langton, Jerry
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.99 Sale: $4.97
From the bestselling co-author of The Hard Way Out and for fans of Sons of Anarchy comes a new book that reveals the cold, dark, dirty secrets of the biker underworldHells Angels, Bandidos, Outlaws, Vagos. What would you do if a biker sat beside you in a bar? How about if a group of leather-and-denim–clad tough guys established a clubhouse in your neighbourhood? Television and movies glamorize bikers as freedom fighters, men who do things their own way, brothers-in-arms who party all the time and ride Harleys to escape everyday life, while news reports paint them as criminals responsible for drug trafficking, brutal assaults and murder. That paradox, each side true in its own way, is what makes outlaw motorcycle gangs so very fascinating. What really goes on behind those heavily secured steel clubhouse doors?In The Secret Life of Bikers, bestselling true-crime author Jerry Langton tells the stories of the men who live the biker life as they have never been told before. Langton has interviewed many bikers over the past decade, and he shares their tales, often in their own words, in these pages. He has also interviewed members of law enforcement to hear the biker story from the other side of the ledger. This book offers rare insights into the everyday workings of motorcycle clubs: the hierarchies, the initiation rituals, the brawls, the bodies and the brotherhood of blood.
The Trial of Lizzie Borden
Robertson, Cara
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $5.17
When Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally hacked to death in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August 1892, the arrest of the couple’s younger daughter Lizzie turned the case into international news and her murder trial into a spectacle unparalleled in American history. Reporters flocked to the scene. Well-known columnists took up conspicuous seats in the courtroom. The defendant was relentlessly scrutinized for signs of guilt or innocence. Everyone - rich and poor, suffragists and social conservatives, legal scholars and laypeople - had an opinion about Lizzie Borden’s guilt or innocence. Was she a cold-blooded murderess or an unjustly persecuted lady? Did she or didn’t she?Based on transcripts of the Borden legal proceedings, contemporary newspaper articles, previously withheld lawyer's journals, unpublished local reports, and recently unearthed letters from Lizzie herself, The Trial of Lizzie Borden is definitive account of the Borden murder case and offers a window into America in the Gilded Age, showcasing its most deeply held convictions and its most troubling social anxieties.
Never the Hope Itself
Hadden, Gerry
(Paperback)
List Price: $14.99 Sale: $5.60
A former NPR correspondent takes you into his own ghost-filled life as he reports on a region in turmoil. Gerry Hadden was training to become a Buddhist monk when opportunity came knocking: the offer of a dream job as NPR's correspondent for Latin America. Arriving in Mexico in 2000 during the nation's first democratic transition of power, he witnesses both hope and uncertainty. But after 9/11, he finds himself documenting overlooked yet extraordinary events in a forgotten political landscape. As he reports on Colombia's drug wars, Guatemala's deleterious emigration, and Haiti's bloody rebellion, Hadden must also make a home for himself in Mexico City, coming to terms with its ghosts and chasing down the love of his life, in a riveting narrative that reveals the human heart at the center of international affairs.
Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession
Monroe, Rachel
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.00 Sale: $6.53
A provocative and original investigation of our cultural fascination with crime, linking four archetypes—Detective, Victim, Defender, Killer—to four true stories about women driven by obsession.In this illuminating exploration of women, violence, and obsession, Rachel Monroe interrogates the appeal of true crime through four narratives of fixation. In the 1940s, a frustrated heiress began creating dollhouse crime scenes depicting murders, suicides, and accidental deaths. Known as the “Mother of Forensic Science,” she revolutionized the field of what was then called legal medicine. In the aftermath of the Manson Family murders, a young woman moved into Sharon Tate’s guesthouse and, over the next two decades, entwined herself with the Tate family. In the mid-nineties, a landscape architect in Brooklyn fell in love with a convicted murderer, the supposed ringleader of the West Memphis Three, through an intense series of letters. After they married, she devoted her life to getting him freed from death row. And in 2015, a teenager deeply involved in the online fandom for the Columbine killers planned a mass shooting of her own.Each woman, Monroe argues, represents and identifies with a particular archetype that provides an entryway into true crime. Through these four cases, she traces the history of American crime through the growth of forensic science, the evolving role of victims, the Satanic Panic, the rise of online detectives, and the long shadow of the Columbine shooting. In a combination of personal narrative, reportage, and a sociological examination of violence and media in the twentieth and twenty-first century, Savage Appetites scrupulously explores empathy, justice, and the persistent appeal of violence.
Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America
Bllum, Howard
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.99 Sale: $6.70
In the summer of 1914, New York City Police captain Tom Tunney is preoccupied by Manhattan's raging gang rivalries and has little idea that, halfway around the world, a much more ominous threat to the city is brewing. As Germany teeters on the brink of war, its ambassador to the United States is given instructions to find and finance a team of undercover saboteurs who can bring America to its knees before it has a chance to enter the conflict on the side of the Allies. Overwhelmed and undermatched, Tunney's small squad of cops was the David to Germany's Goliath, the operatives of which included military officers, a germ warfare expert, a gifted Harvard professor, a bomb technician, and a document forger. As explosions leveled munitions plants and destroyed cargo ships, particularly in and around New York City, panicked officials talked about rogue activists and anarchists - but it was Tunney who suspected that these incidents were part of something bigger and became determined to bring down the culprits. Through meticulous research - and enhanced by more than fifty images sourced from global archives - Blum deftly reconstructs an enthralling, vividly detailed saga of subterfuge, bravery, and the birth of Homeland Security.
Tyrannical Minds
Haycock, Dean A
(Hardcover)
List Price: $27.95 Sale: $9.25
An incisive examination into the pairing of psychology and situation that creates despotic leaders from the author of Murderous Minds.  
Not everyone can become a tyrant. It requires a particular confluence of events to gain absolute control over entire nations.
First, you must be born with the potential to develop brutal personality traits. Often, these are combined in “The Dark Triad” of malignant narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, as well as elements of paranoia, and an extraordinary ambition to achieve control over others.
Second, your predisposition to antisocial behavior must be developed and strengthened during childhood. You might suffer physical and/or psychological abuse, or grow up in trying times.
Finally, you must come of age when the political system of your country is unstable. Together, these events establish a basis for a rise to power, one that Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi all used to gain life-and-death control over their countrymen and women. It is how Osama bin Laden and the leaders of the Islamic State hoped to gain such power.
Though these men lived in different times and places, and came from vastly different backgrounds, many of them felt respect for each other. They often seemed to recognize their shared, “dark” personality traits and viewed them as strengths. Only in rare cases did they show signs of mental disorders.
“Getting inside the heads” of foreign leaders and terrorists is one way governments try to understand, predict, and influence their actions. Psychological profiles can help us understand the urges of tyrants to dominate, subjugate, torture and slaughter. 
Tyrannical Minds reveals how recognizing their psychological traits can provide insight into the motivations and actions of dangerous leaders, potentially allow to us predict their behavior?and even how to stop them. As strongmen and authoritarian leaders around the world increase in number, understanding the most extreme examples of tyrannical behavior should serve as a warning to anyone indifferent to the threats posed by political extremism.

Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels -- from the Jungles to the Streets
Muse, Toby
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.99 Sale: $8.40
Cocaine is glamour, sex and murder. From the badlands of Colombia, it stretches across the globe, seducing, corrupting and destroying. A product that must be produced, distributed, and protected, it is both a harbinger of violence and a source of immense wealth. Beginning in the jungles and mountains of Colombia, it filters down to countryside villages and the nightclubs of the cities, attracting money, sex, and death. Each step in the life of a kilo reveals a different criminal underworld with its own players, rules, and dangers, ranging from the bizarre to the diabolical. The killers, the drug-lords, all find themselves seduced by cocaine and trapped in her world.Seasoned war correspondent Toby Muse has witnessed each level of this underworld, fueled by the appetite for cocaine in America and Europe. In this riveting chronicle, he takes the reader inside Colombia’s notorious drug cartels to offer a never before look at the drug trade. Following a kilo of cocaine from its production in a clandestine laboratory to the smugglers who ship it abroad, he reveals the human lives behind the drug’s complicated legacy. Reporting on Colombia for the world’s most prestigious networks and publications, Muse gained unprecedented access to the extraordinary people who survive on the drug trade - farmers, smugglers, assassins - and the drug lords and their lovers controlling these multi-billion dollar enterprises. Uncovering stories of violence, sex, and money, he shows the allure and the madness of cocaine. And how the War on Drugs has been no match for cocaine.Piercing this veiled world, Kilo is a gripping portrait of a country struggling to end this deadly trade even as the riches flow. A human portrait of criminals and the shocking details of their lives, Kilo is a chilling, unforgettable story that takes you deep into the belly of the beast.Kilo includes 16 pages of photographs.
Twisted History: 32 True Stories of Torture, Traitors, Sadists, and Psychos... Plus the Most Celebrated Saints in History
Watson, Howard
(Softcover)
List Price: $19.95 Sale: $6.33
Twisted History brings to life the incredible stories of 32 historical figures -- murderers, assassins and traitors who embraced the dark side, and martyrs and innocents who paid with their lives in the pursuit of good. All changed world history.The book is lavishly illustrated with stunning illustrations and period photographs. Accessible text and fact boxes describe evil and angelic acts across the centuries, like Judas, whose name would come to define betrayal, Joan of Arc, victorious virgin soldier and patron saint of France, and René Goupil, tortured and martyred by Native Americans, who became the first American saint. Twisted History puts readers face to face with vile villains and true heroes.
Dangerous Instincts: Using an FBI Profiler's Tactics to Avoid Unsafe Situations
O'Toole, Mary Ellen
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Sale: $5.17
Chances are you'll never be kidnapped at gunpoint, your child won't be the victim of a predator, and your financial advisor won't be Bernie Madoff. But every day, you make choices that could turn dangerous in an instant, from trusting a date with a drink to letting your son ride home with his soccer coach. Retired FBI profiler Mary Ellen O'Toole knows from experience that what we rely on to assess danger - fear and emotion - simply doesn't keep us safe. She knows better than anyone that instincts alone do not protect us - but that smart, proven analysis can. Using anecdotes from her thirty-year career, O'Toole illustrates the SMART method she developed based on her training and experience at the FBI. From recognizing the risk of a situation to observing people for clues on their intent, Dangerous Instincts shows how to make the safest decision possible for yourself and your family.
Human Game: The True Story of the "Great Escape" Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen
Read, Simon
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Sale: $4.24
In March and April of 1944, Gestapo gunmen killed fifty POWs - a brutal act in defiance of international law and the Geneva Conventions. This is the true story of the men who hunted them down.The mass breakout of seventy-six Allied airmen from the infamous Stalag Luft III became one of the greatest tales of World War II, immortalized in the film The Great Escape. But where Hollywood’s depiction fades to black, another incredible story begins . . .Not long after the escape, fifty of the recaptured airmen were taken to killing fields throughout Germany and shot on the direct orders of Hitler. When the nature of these killings came to light, Churchill’s government swore to pursue justice at any cost. A revolving team of military police, led by squadron leader Francis P. McKenna, was dispatched to pick up a trail long gone cold.Amid the chaos of postwar Germany, divided between American, British, French, and Russian occupiers, McKenna led a three-year manhunt that brought twenty-one Gestapo killers to justice. In Human Game, Simon Read delivers a clear-eyed and meticulously researched account of this often overlooked saga of hard-won justice.
The Map Thief
Blanding, Michael
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $5.17
Once considered a respectable rare-map dealer, E. Forbes Smiley made millions and was highly esteemed for his knowledge; until he was arrested for slipping maps out of books in the Yale University library. Though pieces of the story have been told before, Blanding is the first reporter to gain access to Smiley himself after he'd gone silent. Although Smiley swears he has admitted to all of the maps he stole, libraries claim he stole hundreds more, and offer evidence to prove it. Using interviews, Blanding teases out the tale of deception.
Under and Alone: The True Story of the Undercover Agent Who Infiltrated America's Most Violent Outlaw Motorcycle Gang
Queen, William
(Softcover)
List Price: $15.00 Sale: $5.17
In 1998, William Queen was a veteran law enforcement agent with a lifelong love of motorcycles and a lack of patience with paperwork. When a "confidential informant" made contact with his boss at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, offering to take an agent inside the San Fernando chapter of the Mongols (the scourge of Southern California, and one of the most dangerous gangs in America), Queen jumped at the chance, not realizing that he was kicking-starting the most extensive undercover operation inside an outlaw motorcycle gang in the history of American law enforcement. Nor did Queen suspect that he would penetrate the gang so successfully that he would become a fully "patched-in" member, eventually rising through their ranks to the office of treasurer, where he had unprecedented access to evidence of their criminal activity. After Queen spent twenty-eight months as "Billy St. John," the bearded, beer-swilling, Harley-riding gang-banger, the truth of his identity became blurry, even to himself.Despite the constant criminality of the gang, for whom planning cop killings and gang rapes were business as usual, Queen also came to see the genuine camaraderie they shared. When his lengthy undercover work totally isolated Queen from family, his friends, and ATF colleagues, the Mongols felt like the only family he had left. "I had no doubt these guys genuinely loved Billy St. John and would have laid down their lives for him. But they wouldn't hesitate to murder Billy Queen."From Queen's first sleight of hand with a line of methamphetamine in front of him and a knife at his throat, to the fearsome face-off with their decades-old enemy, the Hell's Angels (a brawl that left three bikers dead), to the heartbreaking scene of a father ostracized at Parents' Night because his deranged-outlaw appearance precluded any interaction with regular citizens, Under and Alone is a breathless, adrenaline-charged read that puts you on the street with some of the most dangerous men in America and with the law enforcement agents who risk everything to bring them in.
Manhunt
Bergen, Peter L.
(Softcover)
List Price: $16.00 Sale: $5.17
In "Manhunt," Peter Bergen delivers a taut yet panoramic account of the pursuit and killing of Osama bin Laden. Here are riveting new details of bin Laden's flight after the crushing defeat of the Taliban to Tora Bora, where American forces came startlingly close to capturing him, and of the fugitive leader's attempts to find a secure hiding place. As the only journalist to gain access to bin Laden's Abbottabad compound before the Pakistani government demolished it, Bergen paints a vivid picture of bin Laden's grim, Spartan life in hiding and his struggle to maintain control of al-Qaeda. Half a world away, Bergen takes us inside the Situation Room, where President Obama considers the courses of action presented by his war council and receives conflicting advice from his top advisors before deciding to risk the raid that would change history--and then inside the Joint Special Ops Command, whose "secret warriors," the SEALs, would execute Operation Neptune Spear. From the moment two Black Hawks take off from Afghanistan until bin Laden utters his last words, "Manhunt" reads like a thriller.
Dead Men Do Tell Tales
Maples, William R.
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.95 Sale: $6.70
From a skeleton, a skull, a mere fragment of burnt thighbone, Dr. William Maples can deduce the age, gender, and ethnicity of a murder victim, the manner in which the person was dispatched, and ultimately, the identity of the killer. In Dead Men Do Tell Tales, Dr. Maples revisits his strangest, most interesting, and most horrific investigations, from the baffling cases of conquistador Francisco Pizarro and Vietnam MIAs to the mysterious deaths of President Zachary Taylor and the family of Czar Nicholas II.
Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
Quinones, Sam
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Sale: $7.47
Over the past fifteen years, enterprising sugar cane farmers in the small county of Xalisco on the west coast of Mexico have created a unique distribution system that has brought black tar heroin--the cheapest, most addictive form of the opiate, two to three times purer than its white powder cousin--to the veins of people across the United States. Communities where heroin had never been seen before have become overrun with it. Local police and residents are stunned: How could heroin, long considered a drug found only in the dense, urban environments along the East Coast, and trafficked into the United States by enormous Colombian drug cartels, be so incredibly ubiquitous in the American heartland? Who was bringing it here and why were so many townspeople suddenly eager for the comparatively cheap high it offered? Acclaimed journalist Sam Quinones weaves together two classic tales of American capitalism in Doped Up: Young men in Mexico, independent of the drug cartels, in search of their own American Dream via the fast and enormous profits of trafficking cheap black tar heroin to America's rural and suburban addicts; and Purdue Pharma, determined to corner the market on pain with its new and expensive miracle drug, Oxycontin, extremely addictive in its own right. Quinones illuminates just how these two stories fit together as cause and effect. Doped Up is a dramatic and revelatory account of addiction spreading to every part of the American landscape.
The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey into the World of Firearms
Overton, Iain
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.99 Sale: $3.81
In this compelling and revelatory book, an investigative journalist explores the lifecycle of the gun—following those who make firearms, sell them, use them, and die by them—with a special emphasis on the United States, to make sense of our complex relationship with these weapons.We live in the Age of the Gun. Around the globe, firearms are ubiquitous and define countless lives; in some places, it’s even easier to get a gun than a glass of clean water. In others, it’s legal to carry concealed firearms into bars and schools. In The Way of the Gun, Iain Overton embarks on a remarkable journey to understand how these weapons have become an integral part of twenty-first century life, beyond the economics of supply and demand.Overton travels through more than twenty-five countries around the world and meets with ER doctors dealing with gun trauma, SWAT team leaders, gang members, and weapons smugglers. From visiting the most dangerous city in the world outside a war zone to the largest gun show on earth, his journey crosses paths with safari hunters and gun-makers, paralyzed victims and smooth-talking lobbyists. Weaving together their stories, Overton offers a portrait of distinct yet deeply connected cultures affected by the gun and from them draws out powerful insights into our weaponized world. Ultimately, he unearths some hard truths about the terrible realities of war and gun crime, and what can be done to stop it.Eloquent and accessible, infused with compassion and humor, The Way of the Gun is a riveting expose about guns and human beings that offers an eye-opening portrait of our time.
Adnan's Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial
Chaudry, Rabia
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.99 Sale: $3.39
In early 2000, Adnan Syed was convicted and sentenced to life plus thirty years for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, a high school senior in Baltimore, Maryland. Syed has maintained his innocence, and Rabia Chaudry, a family friend, has always believed him. By 2013, after almost all appeals had been exhausted, Rabia contacted Sarah Koenig, a producer at This American Life, in hopes of finding a journalist who could shed light on Adnan’s story. In 2014, Koenig's investigation turned into Serial, a Peabody Award-winning podcast with more than 500 million international listenersBut Serial did not tell the whole story. In this compelling narrative, Rabia Chaudry presents new key evidence that she maintains dismantles the State's case: a potential new suspect, forensics indicating Hae was killed and kept somewhere for almost half a day, and documentation withheld by the State that destroys the cell phone evidence -- among many other points -- and she shows how fans of Serial joined a crowd-sourced investigation into a case riddled with errors and strange twists. Adnan's Story also shares Adnan’s life in prison, and weaves in his personal reflections, including never-before-seen letters. Chaudry, who is committed to exonerating Adnan, makes it clear that justice is yet to be achieved in this much examined case.
The Trial of Lizzie Borden
Robertson, Cara
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Sale: $7.47
The Trial of Lizzie Borden tells the true story of one of the most sensational murder trials in American history. When Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally hacked to death in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August 1892, the arrest of the couple’s younger daughter Lizzie turned the case into international news and her trial into a spectacle unparalleled in American history. Reporters flocked to the scene. Well-known columnists took up conspicuous seats in the courtroom. The defendant was relentlessly scrutinized for signs of guilt or innocence. Everyone - rich and poor, suffragists and social conservatives, legal scholars and laypeople - had an opinion about Lizzie Borden’s guilt or innocence. Was she a cold-blooded murderess or an unjustly persecuted lady? Did she or didn’t she?The popular fascination with the Borden murders and its central enigmatic character has endured for more than one hundred years. Immortalized in rhyme, told and retold in every conceivable genre, the murders have secured a place in the American pantheon of mythic horror, but one typically wrenched from its historical moment. In contrast, Cara Robertson explores the stories Lizzie Borden’s culture wanted and expected to hear and how those stories influenced the debate inside and outside of the courtroom. Based on transcripts of the Borden legal proceedings, contemporary newspaper accounts, unpublished local accounts, and recently unearthed letters from Lizzie herself, The Trial of Lizzie Borden offers a window onto America in the Gilded Age, showcasing its most deeply held convictions and its most troubling social anxieties.
A Burglar's Guide to the City
Manaugh, Geoff
(Paperback)
List Price: $24.00 Sale: $7.81
Encompassing nearly 2,000 years of heists and tunnel jobs, break-ins and escapes, A Burglar's Guide to the City offers an unexpected blueprint to the criminal possibilities in the world all around us. You'll never see the city the same way again.
Courtroom 302
Bogira, Steve
(Softcover)
List Price: $16.00 Sale: $5.17
Courtroom 302 is the fascinating story of one year in Chicago's Cook County Criminal Courthouse, the busiest felony courthouse in the country. Here we see the system through the eyes of the men and women who experience it, not only in the courtroom but in the lockup, the jury room, the judge's chambers, the spectators' gallery. From the daily grind of the court to the highest-profile case of the year, Steve Bogira’s masterful investigation raises fundamental issues of race, civil rights, and justice in America.
The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South
Balko, Radley
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Sale: $5.17
A shocking and deeply reported account of the persistent plague of institutional racism and junk forensic science in our criminal justice system, and its devastating effect on innocent lives.After two three-year-old girls were raped and murdered in rural Mississippi, law enforcement pursued and convicted two innocent men: Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks. Together they spent a combined thirty years in prison before finally being exonerated in 2008. Meanwhile, the real killer remained free.The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist recounts the story of how the criminal justice system allowed this to happen, and of how two men, Dr. Steven Hayne and Dr. Michael West, built successful careers on the back of that structure. For nearly two decades, Hayne, a medical examiner, performed the vast majority of Mississippi's autopsies, while his friend Dr. West, a local dentist, pitched himself as a forensic jack-of-all-trades. Together they became the go-to experts for prosecutors and helped put countless Mississippians in prison. But then some of those convictions began to fall apart.Here, Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington tell the haunting story of how the courts and Mississippi's death investigation system--a relic of the Jim Crow era--failed to deliver justice for its citizens. The authors argue that bad forensics, structural racism, and institutional failures are at fault, raising sobering questions about our ability and willingness to address these crucial issues.
A Good Month for Murder - The Inside Story of a Homicide Squad
Wilber, Del Quentin
(Hardcover)
List Price: $30.00 Sale: $7.47
Bestselling author Del Quentin Wilber tells the inside story of how a homicide squad - a dedicated, colorful team of detectives - does its almost impossible job.Twelve homicides, three police-involved shootings and the furious hunt for an especially brutal killer - February 2013 was a good month for murder in suburban Washington, D.C.After gaining unparalleled access to the homicide unit in Prince George's County, which borders the nation's capital, Del Quentin Wilber begins shadowing the talented, often quirky detectives who get the call when a body falls. After a quiet couple of months, all hell breaks loose: suddenly every detective in the squad is scrambling to solve one shooting and stabbing after another. Meanwhile, the entire unit is obsessed with a stone-cold "red ball," a high-profile case involving a seventeen-year-old honor student attacked by a gunman who kicked down the door to her house and shot her in her bed.Murder is the police investigator's ultimate crucible: to solve a killing, a detective must speak for the dead. More than any recent book, A Good Month for Murder shows what it takes to succeed when the stakes couldn't possibly be higher.
The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row
Hinton, Anthony Ray
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.99 Sale: $5.39
A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn't commit.In 1985, Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested and charged with two counts of capital murder in Alabama. Stunned, confused, and only twenty-nine years old, Hinton knew that it was a case of mistaken identity and believed that the truth would prove his innocence and ultimately set him free.But with no money and a different system of justice for a poor black man in the South, Hinton was sentenced to death by electrocution. He spent his first three years on Death Row at Holman State Prison in agonizing silence - full of despair and anger toward all those who had sent an innocent man to his death. But as Hinton realized and accepted his fate, he resolved not only to survive, but find a way to live on Death Row. For the next twenty-seven years he was a beacon - transforming not only his own spirit, but those of his fellow inmates, fifty-four of whom were executed mere feet from his cell. With the help of civil rights attorney and bestselling author of Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson, Hinton won his release in 2015.With a foreword by Stevenson, The Sun Does Shine is an extraordinary testament to the power of hope sustained through the darkest times. Destined to be a classic memoir of wrongful imprisonment and freedom won, Hinton’s memoir tells his dramatic thirty-year journey and shows how you can take away a man’s freedom, but you can’t take away his imagination, humor, or joy.
Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?
Dawisha, Karen
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Sale: $7.47
The raging question in the world today is who is the real Vladimir Putin and what are his intentions. Karen Dawisha’s brilliant Putin’s Kleptocracy provides an answer, describing how Putin got to power, the cabal he brought with him, the billions they have looted, and his plan to restore the Greater Russia.
Little Princes
Grennan, Conor
(Paperback)
List Price: $14.99 Sale: $3.81
In search of adventure, twenty-nine-year-old Conor Grennan traded his day job for a year-long trip around the globe, a journey that began with a three-month stint volunteering at the Little Princes Children's Home, an orphanage in war-torn Nepal. Conor was initially reluctant to volunteer, unsure whether he had the proper skill, or enough passion, to get involved in a developing country in the middle of a civil war. But he was soon overcome by the herd of rambunctious, resilient children who would challenge and reward him in a way that he had never imagined. When Conor learned the unthinkable truth about their situation, he was stunned: The children were not orphans at all. Child traffickers were promising families in remote villages to protect their children from the civil war - for a huge fee - by taking them to safety. They would then abandon the children far from home, in the chaos of Nepal's capital, Kathmandu. For Conor, what began as a footloose adventure becomes a commitment to reunite the children he had grown to love with their families, but this would be no small task. He would risk his life on a journey through the legendary mountains of Nepal, facing the dangers of a bloody civil war and a debilitating injury. Waiting for Conor back in Kathmandu, and hopeful he would make it out before being trapped in by snow, was the woman who would eventually become his wife and share his life's work. Little Princes is a true story of families and children, and what one person is capable of when faced with seemingly insurmountable odds. At turns tragic, joyful, and hilarious, Little Princes is a testament to the power of faith and the ability of love to carry us beyond our wildest expectations.
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