Showing titles in Murder

A true-crime collection culled from the crime files of the New York Times best-selling series, Notorious USA.

The name “Hollywood” conjures up fantastical images of bright lights, glamorous dreams, and impossible riches. From its humble beginnings as a ranch sprawling northwest of Los Angeles in the late 1800s, Hollywood has spanned lifetimes as a factory of dreams, a dazzling place where all things are possible.

The 'Ndrangheta is the world's most powerful Mafia and it's behind a litany of violence, organised crime and corruption around the world. Bound together by blood ties, silent but deadly, and steeped in religious ritual, they are a Mafia unlike any other, and vastly more dangerous. In Mafiopoli, the first comprehensive book to be published in English about the 'Ndrangheta, Sanne De Boer takes us deep inside this extraordinary criminal organisation.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of All-American Murder by James Patterson, read by Peter Coleman. Aaron Hernandez was a college football All-American who became the youngest player in the NFL and later reached the Super Bowl. He was a star on the league-dominant New England Patriots, who extended his contract for a record $40 million. Hernandez’s every move as a professional athlete played out in the headlines, yet he led a secret life - one that ended in a maximum-security prison. What drove him to go so wrong so fast?

The World Encyclopedia of Serial Killers is the most comprehensive set of its kind in the history of true crime publishing. Written and compiled by Susan Hall, the four-volume set has more than 1600 entries of male and female serial killers from around the world.

One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert - after running through the oceanfront community of Oak Beach screaming for her life - went missing. No one who had heard of her disappearance thought much about what had happened to the 24-year-old: She was a Craigslist escort who had been fleeing a scene - of what, no one could be sure. The Suffolk County police, too, seemed to have paid little attention - until seven months later, when an unexpected discovery in a bramble alongside a nearby highway turned up four bodies, all evenly spaced, all wrapped in burlap.

Norco '80 tells the story of how five heavily armed young men - led by an apocalyptic born-again Christian - attempted a bank robbery that turned into one of the most violent criminal events in US history, forever changing the face of American law enforcement. Part action thriller and part courtroom drama, Norco '80 transports the listener back to the Southern California of the 1970s, an era of predatory evangelical gurus, doomsday predictions, megachurches, and soaring crime rates, with the threat of nuclear obliteration looming over it all.

In 1922, Major Herbert Armstrong, a Hay-on-Wye solicitor, was found guilty of, and executed for, poisoning his wife, Katharine, with arsenic. Armstrong's case has all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery, from a plot by Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers (indeed some aspects of his story appear in Sayers' Unnatural Death). It is a near-perfect whodunnit.

Bekhal Mahmod was one of six siblings from a Sunni Muslim family in Iraqi Kurdistan who sought a new life as asylum seekers and arrived in London in 1998. When Bekhal's father tried to force her into an arranged marriage at 15, she ran away. This caused her father to ‘lose respect’ within the Kurdish community and Bekhal became the target of an honour killing and her younger sisters Banaz and Payzee were quickly married off to restore the family's reputation. When Banaz left her husband, Mahmod decided this 'shame' to the family meant Banaz must die. Within weeks, she had vanished.

Ted Bundy is the most darkly fascinating and widely analyzed serial killer of the past century, possibly ever. No sex criminal, from Jack the Ripper to Zodiac to the Green River Killer, inhabits the popular mind as does Bundy. Now, the two men who know Bundy’s criminal nature best - Dr. Robert Keppel and author Stephen Michaud - have teamed to write the definitive narrative of Bundy’s bloody career, as well as the inside story of how Keppel tracked the elusive killer for 15 years.

For years, A.J. Bennett was the first person onto a crime scene. Before the detectives and the forensics teams, it was her and the body, the only sound her flashbulb as it lit up scenes of unimaginable horror. It was her job to record, in exhaustive detail, the images that would allow someone's last moments to be understood. Now she takes us into the shadowy world of the crime scene photographer, from murders to suicides, accidents to assassinations.

It's a case reminiscent of the explosive story of Susan Smith, convicted in the drownings of her two young sons in South Carolina. But in The Unforgiven, three young children are in the back seat of a car driven by Amanda Hamm's boyfriend as it slips into an Illinois lake. Amanda and her boyfriend survive. Her three children do not.

Mafia Prince is the first-person account of one of the most violent eras in Mafia history - "Little" Nicky Scarfo’s reign as boss of the Philly family in the 1980s - written by Scarfo’s underboss and nephew, "Crazy" Phil Leonetti. The youngest-ever underboss at the age of 31, Leonetti was at the crux of the violent downfall of the traditional American Mafia in the 1980s when he infiltrated Atlantic City after gambling was legalized, and later turned state’s evidence against his own.

Let This Be Our Secret is a remarkable true crime story set on Ireland's north coast where the bodies of a couple were found in a car filled with carbon monoxide fumes - the apparent victims of a suicide pact....

The public’s obsession with serial killers and weird murders is growing by the day, with more TV shows, movies and books now detailing the crimes of these human monsters. There’s no denying that we’re all fascinated by serial murder–it’s part of the human experience.

Innocent people do go to jail. Sometimes mistakes are made. But even more terrifying is when the authorities conspire to frame them. That's what happened to Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey, who were convicted of murder and are serving life sentences. Un-Making a Murderer is an explosive book which uncovers the illegal, devious, and covert tactics used by Wisconsin officials.

Jana Monroe was no ordinary cop: a cofounder of - and, at the time, the only female agent in - the world-renowned FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit at Quantico, over the course of her career she consulted on more than 850 homicide cases. But to the people who know her best, Monroe is the BSU analyst upon whom the film character of Clarice (Jodie Foster) in The Silence of the Lambs was modeled. Hearts of Darkness is Monroe's story and will have Monroe finally stepping out from the shadows to tell the range of remarkable tales from the top moments of a life chasing the monsters among us.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside government buildings in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the island of Utøya, where he killed 69 more, most of them teenage members of Norway's governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and what led up to it. What made Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become a terrorist?

Craig Glazer was an ordinary college student when he planned and successfully executed his first fake sting to get back at some drug dealers who had robbed him. The rush he got from the experience led him and a crew of 11 accomplices to mastermind a two-year, 33-sting spree that stretched coast to coast, posing as everything from local police to IRS agents and hotel managers.

Robert Peernock appeared to have the ideal life; working as a pyrotechnics engineer and computer expert and coming home to his wife and daughter, he projected the American dream. Even when he and his wife separated, it seemed amicable, just a small bump for the well-to-do family. But there was madness in his house: in private, Peernock was violent, subtly manipulative, and bordering on psychotic.