“All True Stories—from Police and Court Records Inside: Killer wanted to marry the corpse! – Pot smoker was a knife freak—Killed his own mother with a pickaxe—Preyed on young black women—Rosemary’s rosaries—Mad murderess slept in victim’s blood—And much more!” A ringing endorsement from one of America’s Top True Crime Editors: Krist Boardman is “one of the very best detective writers. He does a lot of detective-like work himself for an article… He’s got the formula down and he really knows the knack of adding a measure of suspense to the story.” Art Crockett, late editor-in-chief of The Official Detective Group of magazines, Harford County Sun.

Detective Charlie Hochmeyer from a Pennsylvania anthracite coal town hears of a missing woman named Amanda Fielding, last seen walking a few blocks home after drinks and a movie. Amanda is a former high school girlfriend of Charlie's, but he takes the case against regulations. Charlie tries to locate an Indian friend of Amanda's whom she has disappeared with before, and he thinks the death of Amanda's sister in a train accident years earlier may somehow be connected. This traditional police inquiry gets turned on its head as it takes an unusual turn in a search for a lost spirit.

The subject of murder has always held a particular fascination for us. But, since at least the nineteenth century, we have seen the murderer as different from the ordinary citizen—a special individual, like an artist or a genius, who exists apart from the moral majority, a sovereign self who obeys only the destructive urge, sometimes even commanding cult followings. In contemporary culture, we continue to believe that there is something different and exceptional about killers, but is the murderer such a distinctive type? Are they degenerate beasts or supermen as they have been depicted on the page and the screen? Or are murderers something else entirely? In The Subject of Murder, Lisa Downing explores the ways in which the figure of the murderer has been made to signify a specific kind of social subject in Western modernity. Drawing on the work of Foucault in her studies of the lives and crimes of killers in Europe and the United States, Downing interrogates the meanings of media and texts produced about and by murderers. Upending the usual treatment of murderers as isolated figures or exceptional individuals, Downing argues that they are ordinary people, reflections of our society at the intersections of gender, agency, desire, and violence.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A must-read, cannot-put-down history.” — Thomas Friedman, New York Times Arguably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in a case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and cost him his life. In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor with the help of Sheriff Willis V. McCall, who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old girl cried rape, McCall pursued four young black men who dared envision a future for themselves beyond the groves. The Ku Klux Klan joined the hunt, hell-bent on lynching the men who came to be known as "the Groveland Boys." Associates thought it was suicidal for Marshall to wade into the "Florida Terror," but the young lawyer would not shrink from the fight despite continuous death threats against him. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI's unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund files, Gilbert King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader.

Detective Inspector Tom Thorne now knows that three murdered young women were a killer's mistakes -- and that Alison was his triumph. And unless Thorne can enter the mind of a brilliant madman -- a frighteningly elusive fiend who enjoys toying with the police as much as he savors his sick obsession -- Alison Willetts will not be the last victim consigned forever to a hideous waking hell. Already an international bestseller, Mark Billingham's Sleepyhead is a chilling masterwork of crime fiction -- a boldly original experiment in terror that will beget dark dreams and sleepless nights.

This debut thriller by the award-winning author of A Small Death in Lisbon is “a witty, fast-moving and picaresque tale” set in West Africa (Nelson DeMille). A British expat, Bruce Medway gets by as a fixer and troubleshooter in the West African country of Benin. He’s been in tough spots before, but never faced anything life-threatening until he did business with the mighty Madame Severnou. While she’s dangerously unhappy with him, it’s just as well that his next job will involve a good amount of travel. A Syrian millionaire wants Medway to track down a fellow expat, Steve Kershaw, whose gone missing. Against a backdrop of political disruption and official corruption, Medway pursues the elusive phantom of Kershaw—and soon finds himself in the middle of an international conspiracy even deadlier than Madame Severnou. Drawing on his time living and working in West Africa, Gold Dagger Award-winning author Robert Wilson evokes the landscape, politics, and people of the region in this tense and atmospheric thriller.

The classic thriller about a hostile foreign power infiltrating American politics: “Brilliant . . . wild and exhilarating.” —The New Yorker A war hero and the recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Sgt. Raymond Shaw is keeping a deadly secret—even from himself. During his time as a prisoner of war in North Korea, he was brainwashed by his Communist captors and transformed into a deadly weapon—a sleeper assassin, programmed to kill without question or mercy at his captors’ signal. Now he’s been returned to the United States with a covert mission: to kill a candidate running for US president . . . This “shocking, tense” and sharply satirical novel has become a modern classic, and was the basis for two film adaptations (San Francisco Chronicle). “Crammed with suspense.” —Chicago Tribune “Condon is wickedly skillful.” —Time

This book surveys the entire range of crime films, including important subgenres such as the gangster film, the private eye film, film noir, as well as the victim film, the erotic thriller, and the crime comedy. Focusing on ten films that span the range of the twentieth century, Thomas Leitch traces the transformation of the three leading figures that are common to all crime films: the criminal, the victim and the avenger. Analyzing how each of the subgenres establishes oppositions among its ritual antagonists, he shows how the distinctions among them become blurred throughout the course of the century. This blurring, Leitch maintains, reflects and fosters a deep social ambivalence towards crime and criminals, while the criminal, victim and avenger characters effectively map the shifting relations between subgenres, such as the erotic thriller and the police film, within the larger genre of crime film that informs them all.

On 9 November 1966, popular GP Dr Helen Davidson was battered to death in dense woodland while birdwatching and exercising her dog a few miles from her Buckinghamshire home. Her body was found the next day, her eyes having been pushed into her skull. 'She had binoculars round her neck, spied illicit lovers, was spotted, and one or both of them killed her,' surmised Detective Chief Superintendent Jack 'Razor' Williams of New Scotland Yard. He had received fifty police commendations in his career, yet not one for a murder enquiry. Unsurprisingly, within weeks the police operation was wound down, Williams retired, and another cold case hit the statistics. Fifty years later, amateur sleuth and author Monica Weller set about solving the murder – without the help of the prohibited files. As she sifted the evidence, a number of suspects and sinister motives began to emerge; it was clear it was not a random killing after all. Weller uncovered secret passions, deep jealousies, unusual relationships and a victim with a dark past. Her persistence and dedication were dramatically rewarded when she uncovered the identity of the murderer – revealed here for the first time.

Over 800 entries examine the facts, evidence, and leading theories of a variety of unsolved murders, robberies, kidnappings, serial killings, disappearances, and other crimes.