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

For centuries, arsenic's image as a poison has been inextricably tied to images of foul play. In King of Poisons, John Parascandola examines the surprising history of this deadly element. From Gustave Flaubert to Dorothy Sayers, arsenic has long held a place in the literary realm as an instrument of murder and suicide. It was delightfully used as a source of comedy in the famous play Arsenic and Old Lace. But as Parascandola shows, arsenic has had a number of surprising real-world applications. It was frequently found in such common items as wallpaper, paint, cosmetics, and even candy, and its use in medical treatments was widespread. American ambassador Clare Boothe Luce suffered from exposure to arsenical paint in her study, and Napoleon's death has long been speculated to be the result of accidental or intentional poisoning. But arsenic poisoning is still a public menace. In the neighborhood surrounding American University in Washington, D.C., the army has undertaken a massive cleanup of artillery shells and bottles containing chemical warfare agents such as arsenical lewisite after a number of workmen and residents became ill. Arsenic contamination of the water supply in Bangladesh and in West Bengal, India, is a major public health problem today as well. From murder to crime fiction, from industrial toxin to chemical warfare, arsenic remains a powerful force in modern life.

Surrey Murders is an examination of some of the county's most notorious and shocking cases. They include the 'Wigwam Girl', Joan Wolfe, who lived in a tent built by a Cree Indian Soldier before being brutally slaughtered; the infamous stabbing of Frederick Gold by 'the Serpent', Percy Lefroy Mapleton; the poisoning of the entire Beck family with a bottle of oatmeal stout, laced with cyanide; and the sailor butchered at the Devil's Punch Bowl, later immortalised in Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby. John Van der Kiste's carefully researched, well-illustrated and enthralling text will appeal to all those interested in the darker side of Surrey's history.

Which of South London’s most gruesome murders happened in your street? Armed with this book and a good London map, you will be able to do some murder house detection work of your own. South London has a long and blood-spattered history of capital crime, and many of its murder houses still stand.

"How strange are the coincidences which have harmed my family. It has been said that we must have an enemy who has done all this". So said the beguiling Grace Duff as members of her family died one by one. Was she right, or was the truth closer to home? Read this intriguing true crime mystery and decide for yourself.

Six “perfect murders” by Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, and other Golden Age Mystery authors of the Detection Club—plus an essay by Agatha Christie. Founded in England in the 1930s, the Detection Club brought together an impressive array of Golden Age Mystery authors. Their projects included The Floating Admiral, a whodunit in which twelve different writers contributed individual chapters, as well as Ask a Policeman, another collaboration in which the mystery writers swapped detectives to solve a murder. In Six Against the Yard, a half dozen mystery masters—Margery Allingham, Father Ronald Knox, Anthony Berkeley, Russell Thorndike, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Freeman Wills Crofts—each create a perfect crime, a seemingly unsolvable mystery. The stories are then analyzed by Ex-Superintendent Cornish, C.I.D., a real-life retired police detective, to see if they would indeed stump Scotland Yard. This edition also features an afterword by inaugural Detection Club member Agatha Christie on a true unsolved case of arsenic poisoning in Britain in 1929.

Criminoloogist Robin Odell has compiled this gruesome gallery of cases from all over the world, revealing the growth in serial slayings, contract killings and middle-class murders and investigating what motivates people to commit the ultimate crime. As well as gangsters and ordinary felons, the book includes doctors, millionaries, housewives, children, lawyers, accountants, officers and gentlemen who have succumbed to the killing instinct. Behind the sensational names concocted by the tabloid press - 'Boston Strangler', 'Dracula Killer', 'Night Stalker', 'Granny Killer' - lurk real murderers committing acts of violence in circumstances often more bizarre than fiction. Arranged in an easy-to-use A-Z format, the book contains over 500 cases from serial killers such as Dennis Nilsen and Ted Bundy, to those such as Jeremy Bamber and Steven Benson who dispatched their parents for money; from murderous New Zealand teenagers whose story made a successful film, to the many doctors and nurses who took life instead of saving it; from unsolved murders such as the murder of Little Gregory in France to the paid assignments of John Waynes Hearn, a Vietnam veteran who killed to order. The result is a classic of true crime, a definitive work on murder as a worldwide phenomenon.