"The poster is new. I notice it right away, taped to a utility pole. Beneath the word 'Missing,' printed in a bold, high-impact font, are two sepia-toned photographs of a man dressed in a bow tie and tux." Most people would keep walking. Maybe they'd pay a bit closer attention to the local news that evening. Mikita Brottman spent ten years sifting through the details of the missing man's life and disappearance, and his purported suicide by jumping from the roof of her own apartment building, th...
This book is about a large number of deliberate or untimely deaths in what was thought to be one of the quiet backwaters of Hampshire. In this true-life thriller, Chris Heal investigates twenty local murders beginning in Roman times, over half of them since 1900 and three within the last few years. They are all here: drug runners, people traffickers, robbers and smugglers; killers of animals, of babies, young children and the senile; those who planned revenge and sought the righting of wrongs;...
Even among the Mob, the Westies were feared. Out of a partnership between two sadistic thugs - James Coonan and Mickey Featherstone - the gang dominated the decaying slice of New York City's West Side known as Hell's Kitchen in the 1970s and '80s. Excelling in extortion, numbers running, loansharking and drug-peddling, they became the most notorious gang in the history of organized crime. The then prosecutor Rudolf Giuliani called them 'the most savage organisation in the long history of New Yor...
'A wonderful book' - Guardian Truth, murder and the birth of the lie detector Henry Wilkens burst through the doors of the emergency room covered in his wife's blood. But was he a grieving husband, or a ruthless killer who'd conspired with bandits to have her murdered? To find out, the San Francisco police turned to technology, and a new machine that had just been invented in Berkeley by a rookie detective, a visionary police chief, and a te...
True Murder Mysteries of Southwestern Pennsylvania
by A Parker Burroughs
For 164 years, The New York Times has been a rich source of information about crime. This fascinating compilation captures the full sweep of the newspaper's coverage of the subject and also examines issues like incarceration, organised crime and vice. Chapters are organised by topic and include explanatory material by Flynn to provide context. The book features approximately 40 photographs as well as reproductions of frontpage stories. Although the focus is on the US, important international sto...
Fans of Sherlock Holmes will delight to investigate Victorian England, a world where crimes large and small abound and where dark corners and well-lit drawing rooms alike hide villainy. Through the enduring eye of Sherlock Holmes, noted historian Jeremy Black traces how Holmes and his milieu evolved in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s books and how Holmes continues to resonate today. Black explores the context of Doyle’s ideas and stories and why they struck such a chord with readers in London, and ult...
'Brings home the full enormity of the Iraq war' - Simon Jenkins, The GuardianWhen troops invaded Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein's regime, most people expected an easy victory. Instead, the gamble we took was a grave mistake, and its ramifications continue to reverberate through the lives of millions, in Iraq and the West. As we gain more distance from those events, it can be argued that many of the issues facing us today - the rise of the Islamic State, increased Islamic terrorism, intens...
In the long annals of sports and crime, no story compares to the one that engulfed the Luckman family in 1935. As 18-year-old Sid Luckman made headlines across New York City for his high school football exploits at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, his father, Meyer Luckman, was making headlines in the same papers for a very different reason: the gangland murder of his own brother-in-law. Amazingly, when Sid became a star at Columbia and a Hall of Fame NFL quarterback in Chicago, all of it w...
