American Detective

From the Roaring '20s to the 1970s, detectives reigned supreme in police departments across the country. In this tightly woven slice of true crime reportage, Thomas A. Reppetto offers a behind-the-scenes look into some of the most notable investigations to occur during the golden age of the detective in American criminal justice.

England, 1819. Two enigmatic Americans arrive in London and soon after, a bank collapses. A man is found dead on a building site; another goes missing in the teeming stews of Seven Dials. A deathbed vigil ends in an act of theft and a beautiful heiress flirts with her inferiors. A strange destiny links each of these events to the American boy Edgar Allen Poe, brought to England by his foster father and sent to the leafy village of Stoke Newington to be educated.

The sole survivor of his family’s gruesome murder years earlier, poor little Ned Lawton has struggled to put the dark events behind him. So, when a brash New York detective darkens his doorway demanding an interview, the wealthy young gentleman immediately shuts him out. But a rash of murders in America are mirroring of the London killings, and Patrick Kelly knows Ned might be the key to stopping the bloodshed.

The Gunmen of the American Wild West Collection brings to life the history of the frontier west of the Mississippi in the latter parts of the 19th century. The gunmen ranged from lawmen to cowboys, ranchers, and outlaws. Most of the outlaws in the Old West preyed on banks, trains, and stagecoaches. Although spread thin, the law was present, usually on the level of deputy US marshal, county sheriff, and the town marshal or constable.

From the acclaimed author of Death in the Air ("Not since Devil in the White City has a book told such a harrowing tale"--Douglas Preston) comes the riveting story of the birth of criminal investigation in the twentieth century. Berkeley, California, 1933. In a lab filled with...

Peter Straub has spent forty years at the forefront of modern literary horror. This pair of stories represent his astonishing range and his ability to terrify, transport, and hold a reader hostage. Both stories crack the foundation of our reality and opens our eyes, taking us further and...

Ben Prescott, Porter Rockwell, and Latch McRae couldn’t be more different. Ben is a home-schooled brainiac. Porter is the starting quarterback for the Ridgeport Raiders, and Latch is a grease-smudged prodigy who never saw an engine he couldn’t take apart and set to purring. Yet the three have been friends forever, drawn together by a shared passion: treasure hunting for the forgotten loot of American history.

When a Western star is gunned down at a rodeo, Ellery Queen saddles up to solve the mystery.

Buck Horne has roped thousands of cattle, slugged his way out of dozens of saloons, and shot plenty of men dead in the street - but always on the back lot. He's a celluloid cowboy, and his career is nearly kaput. The real box-office draw is his daughter, Kit, a brawling beauty who can out shoot any rascal the studio has to offer. Desperate for a comeback, Buck joins Wild Bill Grant's traveling rodeo for a show in New York, hoping to land one last movie contract.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Negroni is a talented aviation journalist who clearly understands the critically important part the human factor plays in aviation safety.” —Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, pilot of US Airways 1549, the Miracle on the Hudson A fascinating exploration of...

A collection of the year’s best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by Edgar-winning author and screenwriter Megan Abbott and series editor Steph Cha. The Best American series, launched in 1915, is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction, and...

Yunte Huang ingeniously traces Charlie Chan from his real beginnings as a bullwhip-wielding detective in territorial Hawaii to his reinvention as a literary sleuth and Hollywood film icon. Huang finally resurrects the "honorable detective" from the graveyard of detested postmodern symbols and reclaims him as the embodiment of America’s rich cultural diversity. The result is one of the most critically acclaimed books of the year and a "deeply personal...voyage into racial stereotyping and the humanizing force of storytelling" (Donna Seaman, Los Angeles Times).

New York Times bestselling author Dana Stabenow's latest, Bad Blood, finds Kate Shugak entangled in a bitter tribal rivalry and murder In Alaska, one hundred years of bad blood between the villages of Kushtaka and Kuskulana come to a boil when the body of a young Kushtaka ne'er-do-well is found...

A fascinating examination of the world of private investigators by a 21st-century private eye. Today's world is complicated: companies are becoming more powerful than nations, the lines between public and corporate institutions grow murkier, and the internet is shredding our privacy. To combat...

New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty...

How can political campaigns fight back against disinformation? A decade after The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, which Politico called "Moneyball for politics," journalist Sasha Issenberg returns to the cutting edge of political innovation to reveal how campaigns are...

Dr. John H. Watson could not anticipate that a favour for the noted American mystery writer and forensic dentist, Rodrigues Ottolengui, would result in the discovery of a heinous murder. But that is what happens when in helping the American, Watson finds himself at a shooting match in a London villa that ultimately leads him to a charred corpse lying face down in a fireplace. With the members of a shooters club as suspects, Watson and Scotland Yard are quick to welcome Sherlock Holmes to the investigation.

Like the first book, The Covid Murders is a fictional and captivating medical detective story, this time exploring a mysterious death in a hospital in suburban Nashville, Tennessee. But like the first, it also connects this entertaining tale simply and understandably to the very real problems of American health care policy. It explains what has gone wrong with our system historically and now, including the great impact of our recent national experience with the Covid pandemic.

Reminiscent of Goodfellas, American Trash is a gritty tale of organized crime. Only in this story, it is not the Italian mafia; it is the largest crime organization in the state of Missouri. Running their operation out of Funland - a stationary carnival outside Branson - these violent criminals are carnies by day, killers by night.

“Wonderfully moving...Fredericks has a sharp eye for the complexities of human nature and how even good people are capable of committing terrible deeds to protect the ones they love. This is a touching portrait of early-20th-century New York in all its glory and ugliness.” — Publishers...

After years of cowboying, Charles A. Siringo settled down in Caldwell, Kansas to run a store—until an acquaintance told him that he was "cut out" for detective work. Thereupon, Siringo joined the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, where he worked for more than twenty years. A Cowboy Detective chronicles Siringo's adventures as an undercover operative in the wilder parts of the West, where he rode with the lawless and escaped violent death more than a few times.