Powerful, wry essays offering modern takes on a primitive practice, from one of our most widely read death penalty abolitionists As Ruth Bader Ginsburg has noted, people who are well represented at trial rarely get the death penalty. But as Marc Bookman shows in a dozen brilliant essays, the problems with capital punishment run far deeper than just bad representation. Exploring prosecutorial misconduct, racist judges and jurors, drunken lawyering, and executing the innocent and the mentally ill, these essays demonstrate that precious few people on trial for their lives get the fair trial the Constitution demands. Today, death penalty cases continue to capture the hearts, minds, and eblasts of progressives of all stripes—including the rich and famous (see Kim Kardashian’s advocacy)—but few people with firsthand knowledge of America’s “injustice system” have the literary chops to bring death penalty stories to life. Enter Marc Bookman. With a voice that is both literary and journalistic, the veteran capital defense lawyer and seven-time Best American Essays “notable” author exposes the dark absurdities and fatal inanities that undermine the logic of the death penalty wherever it still exists. In essays that cover seemingly “ordinary” capital cases over the last thirty years, Bookman shows how violent crime brings out our worst human instincts—revenge, fear, retribution, and prejudice. Combining these emotions with the criminal legal system’s weaknesses—purposely ineffective, arbitrary, or widely infected with racism and misogyny—is a recipe for injustice. Bookman has been charming and educating readers in the pages of The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and Slate for years. His wit and wisdom are now collected and preserved in A Descending Spiral.

In the tradition of the old "Ace Doubles" two-in-one books (flip one over to read the second title)--here is the fifth Wildside Mystery Double. MURDER OF A BOOKMAN: A Bentley Hollow Collectibles Mystery Novel, by Gary Lovisi. When the police are asked to investigate the brutal murder of bookseller Brian MacDonald, who's been stabbed in the back with his letter opener, they have no trouble locating suspects, because MacDonald has been less than honest in his dealings. But Detective Bentley Hollow has problems of his own: his wife has left him, and he detests his new partner. Still, he has to find a solution to the crime, and when he does, his life will be irrevocably changed. The first in a new series. THE PAPERBACK SHOW MURDERS, by Robert Reginald. When bookdealer "Freddie the Cur" is murdered at a paperback show, Police Lt. Pfisch is forced to close the con. After all, this is the third untimely death of a show attendee in as many days. First there was Lissa Boaz, called the "Boa Constrictor" for her questionable business practices. Then came Brody Richard "The O-Man" Dameen, the drunken horror writer. What links these victims, other than collectible paperbacks? And why does the identification of the REAL author of an early Ace gothic even matter? A comic mystery novel of the modern con scene.

Denver cop-turned-bookdealer Cliff Janeway is lured by an enterprising fellow ex-policeman into going to Seattle to bring back a fugitive wanted for assault, burglary, and the possible theft of a priceless edition of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven." The bail jumper turns out to be a vulnerable young woman calling herself Eleanor Rigby, who is also a gifted book finder. Janeway is intrigued by the woman -- and by the deadly history surrounding the rare volume. Hunted by people willing to kill for the antique tome, a terrified Eleanor escapes and disappears. To find her -- and save her -- Janeway must unravel the secrets of the book's past and its mysterious maker, for only then can he stop the hand of death from turning another page....

A mysterious portrait ignites an antiquarian bookseller’s search through time and the works of Shakespeare for his lost love. Charlie Lovett’s new book, The Lost Book of the Grail, is now available. Guaranteed to capture the hearts of everyone who truly loves books, The Bookman’s Tale is a former bookseller’s sparkling novel and a delightful exploration of one of literature’s most tantalizing mysteries with echoes of Shadow of the Wind and A.S. Byatt's Possession. Nine months after the death of his beloved wife Amanda left him shattered, Peter Byerly, a young antiquarian bookseller, relocates from North Carolina to the English countryside, hoping to outrun his grief and rediscover the joy he once took in collecting and restoring rare books. But upon opening an eighteenth-century study of Shakespeare forgeries, he discovers a Victorian watercolor of a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Amanda. Peter becomes obsessed with learning the picture’s origins and braves a host of dangers to follow a trail of clues back across the centuries—all the way to Shakespeare’s time and a priceless literary artifact that could prove, once and for all, the truth about the Bard’s real identity.

A movie star is typecast as a killer in the second Dangerous Type Mystery from the New York Times bestselling author of To Helvetica and Back. It’s January, and the Star City Film Festival has taken the Utah ski resort town by storm. Movie stars are everywhere, carving fresh powder on the slopes and crossing the thresholds of Bygone Alley’s charming boutique shops—including The Rescued Word, where Clare Henry and her grandfather restore old typewriters and beloved books. When cinema’s hottest superhero, Matt Bane, enters their store to buy some personalized notecards, it’s hard not to be starstruck. But when Clare sees the police leading Matt out of The Fountain hotel in handcuffs only a few hours later, she can’t believe her eyes. The affable actor is accused of killing his sister, but Clare’s convinced he’s wrong for that role. Now it’s open call for suspects as Clare tries to reel in the killer before another victim fades to black...

In a 19th century unlike our own, the shadowy assassin known as the Bookman moves unseen. His weapons are books; his enemies are many. And when Orphan, a young man with a mysterious past, loses his love to the sinister machinations of the Bookman, Orphan would stop at nothing to bring her back from the dead. In The Bookman, World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar writes a love letter to books, and to the serial literature of the Victorian era: full of hair-breadth escapes and derring-dos, pirates and automatons, assassins and poets, a world in which real life authors mingle freely with their fictional creations – and where nothing is quite as it seems. New 2016 edition includes the novelette “Murder in the Cathedral”. Discover, truthfully, what actually happened when Orphan visited Paris. File Under: Steampunk [Alternate Victorian London | Reptilian royalty | Diabolical anarchists | Extraordinary adventure!]

An omnibus edition of the most exciting steampunk series of recent years. Lizard Kings and swashbuckling pirates, secret government agencies and scuttling automata, tripods and airships. There’s never been a series with quite so much adventure crammed between two covers! File Under: Steampunk [ Alternate History! | Diabolical Anarchists! | Murder Most Foul | The End of Days ] From the Trade Paperback edition.

Sixty years after Dorothy L. Sayers began her unfinished Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Thrones Dominations, Booker Prize finalist Jill Paton Walsh took on the challenge of completing the manuscript---with extraordinary success. "The transition is seamless," said the San Francisco Chronicle; "you cannot tell where Sayers leaves off and Walsh begins." "Will Paton Walsh do it again?" wondered Ruth Rendell in London's Sunday Times. "We must hope so." Jill Paton Walsh fulfills those hopes in A Presumption of Death. Although Sayers never began another Wimsey novel, she did leave clues. Drawing on "The Wimsey Papers," in which Sayers showed various members of the family coping with wartime conditions, Walsh has devised an irresistible story set in 1940, at the start of the Blitz in London. Lord Peter is abroad on secret business for the Foreign Office, while Harriet Vane, now Lady Peter Wimsey, has taken their children to safety in the country. But war has followed them there---glamorous RAF pilots and even more glamorous land-girls scandalize the villagers, and the blackout makes the nighttime lanes as sinister as the back alleys of London. Daily life reminds them of the war so constantly that, when the village's first air-raid practice ends with a real body on the ground, it's almost a shock to hear the doctor declare that it was not enemy action, but plain, old-fashioned murder. Or was it? At the request of the overstretched local police, Harriet reluctantly agrees to investigate. The mystery that unfolds is every bit as literate, ingenious, and compelling as the best of original Lord Peter Wimsey novels.

In the bitter cold of 1985, two buddies embark on a hunting trip from suburban Detroit to rural Michigan, unaware they would soon become the hunted. Darker than Night tells the chilling true story of the mystery that haunted a community and baffled the police for two decades. The eerie silence surrounding their sudden disappearance is broken after nearly two decades when a relentless investigator inspires a terrified witness to break her silence. The witness narrates a haunting scene that had unfolded years back, pointing fingers at the prime suspects–the Duvall brothers. With no bodies unearthed, the justice system is riveted by the startling revelations during an electrifying trial in 2003. The brothers, Raymond and Donald Duvall, had bragged about the murders, evocatively explaining how they dismembered their victims and fed them to pigs. Despite the shocking confession, the case holds its ground purely on a single witness's account, taking the courtroom through a labyrinth of dark secrets and sinister acts. This gripping thriller presents a vivid tale of crime that reveals the devastating power of evil.

Christmas is murder-- when you're stranded in East Sussex with a killer. When guests at a secluded Victorian hotel start dying, all hopes for a jolly holiday are dashed.