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Showing 141 - 160 of 6097 items
By Justyn Barnes. 2014
Inspired by the Emmy Award-winning television series--and now feature film--Downton Abbey: Rules for Household Staff is a grand gift book…
for fans that reveals the proper etiquette and techniques required for those working in the manor or on the grounds of the Grantham estate.The household staff of Downton Abbey carries out their duties with effortless dignity, finesse and pride. Yet how do they know how exactly to lay the table, when to leave the room to give Lord and Lady Grantham their privacy, how to care for Lady Mary's furs and which uniform to wear when? This recently recovered and fascinating staff handbook answers all of these questions and more. Covering all the main positions of the Downton household—footman, lady's maid, housekeeper, groundsman and more—and with a general introduction for new members of staff from Carson the Butler, this book tells you everything you need to know about working below stairs in the grand estate of Downton Abbey.By Mikita Brottman. 2018
An Unexplained Death is an obsessive investigation into a mysterious death at the Belvedere—a once-grand hotel—and a poignant, gripping meditation…
on suicide and voyeurism“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, the Belvedere. As Brottman delves into the murky circumstances surrounding Rey Rivera’s death—which begins to look more and more like a murder—she contemplates the nature of and motives behind suicide, and uncovers a haunting pattern of guests at the Belvedere, when it was still a historic hotel, taking their own lives on the premises. Finally, she fearlessly takes us to the edge of her own morbid curiosity and asks us to consider our own darker impulses and obsessions.By Del Quentin Wilber. 2016
Bestselling author Del Quentin Wilber tells the inside story of how a homicide squad---a dedicated, colorful team of detectives—does its…
almost impossible jobTwelve homicides, three police-involved shootings and the furious hunt for an especially brutal killer--February 2013 was a good month for murder in suburban Washington, D.C.After gaining unparalleled access to the homicide unit in Prince George's County, which borders the nation's capital, Del Quentin Wilber begins shadowing the talented, often quirky detectives who get the call when a body falls. After a quiet couple of months, all hell breaks loose: suddenly every detective in the squad is scrambling to solve one shooting and stabbing after another. Meanwhile, the entire unit is obsessed with a stone-cold "red ball," a high-profile case involving a seventeen-year-old honor student attacked by a gunman who kicked down the door to her house and shot her in her bed.Murder is the police investigator's ultimate crucible: to solve a killing, a detective must speak for the dead. More than any recent book, A Good Month for Murder shows what it takes to succeed when the stakes couldn't possibly be higher.By John Follain. 2011
London Times journalist John Follain presents the most comprehensive account of the most publicized and controversial trial in a decadeShortly…
after 12:30pm on November 2, 2007, Italian police were called to the Perugia home of twenty-one-year-old British student Meredith Kercher. They found her body on the floor under a beige quilt. Her throat had been cut.Four days later, the prosecutor jailed Meredith's roommate, American student Amanda Knox, and Raffaele Sollecito, her Italian boyfriend. He also jailed Rudy Guede, an Ivory Coast drifter. Four years later Knox and Sollecito were acquitted amid chaotic scenes in front of the world's media.Uniquely based on four years of reporting and access to the complete case files, and hundreds of first hand interviews, Death in Italy takes readers on a riveting journey behind the scenes of the investigation, as John Follain shares the drama of the trials and appeal hearings he lived through. Including exclusive interviews with Meredith's friends and other key sources, Death in Italy reveals how the Italian dream turned into a nightmare.By Nathan Ward. 2010
What if the world of the old New York waterfront was as violent and mob-controlled as it appears in Hollywood…
movies? Well, it really was, and the story of its downfall, told here in high style by Nathan Ward, is the original New York mob story.New York Sun reporter Malcolm "Mike" Johnson was sent to cover the murder of a West Side boss stevedore and discovered a "waterfront jungle, set against a background of New York's magnificent skyscrapers" and providing "rich pickings for criminal gangs." Racketeers ran their territories while doubling as union officers, from the West Side's "Cockeye" Dunn, who'd kill for any amount of dock space, to Jersey City's Charlie Yanowsky, who controlled rackets and hiring until he was ice-picked to death. Johnson's hard-hitting investigative series won a Pulitzer Prize, inspired a screenplay by Arthur Miller, and prompted Elia Kazan's Oscar-winning film On the Waterfront. And yet J. Edgar Hoover denied the existence of organized crime - even as the government's dramatic hearings into waterfront misdeeds became must-see television.In Dark Harbor, Nathan Ward tells this archetypal crime story as if for the first time, taking the reader back to a city, and an era, at once more corrupt and more innocent than our own.By Åsne Seierstad. 2082
One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015 and a New York Times bestseller, and…
now the basis for the Netflix film 22 July, from acclaimed filmmaker Paul Greengrass Widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, Åsne Seierstad’s One of Us is essential reading for a time when mass killings are so grimly frequent. On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside the Norwegian prime minister's office in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the wooded island of Utøya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenage members of the country's governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and its reverberations. How did Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become Europe's most reviled terrorist? How did he accomplish an astonishing one-man murder spree? And how did a famously peaceful and prosperous country cope with the slaughter of so many of its young? As in her international bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul, Seierstad excels at the vivid portraiture of lives under stress. She delves deep into Breivik's childhood, showing how a hip-hop and graffiti aficionado became a right-wing activist, a successful entrepreneur, and then an Internet game addict and self-styled master warrior who believed he could save Europe from the threat of Islam and multiculturalism. She writes with equal intimacy about Breivik's victims, tracing their political awakenings, teenage flirtations and hopes, and ill-fated journeys to the island. By the time Seierstad reaches Utøya and relates what happened there, we know both the killer and those he will kill. In the book's final act, Seierstad describes Breivik's tumultuous public trial. As Breivik took the stand and articulated his ideas, an entire country debated whether he should be deemed insane, and asked why a devastating sequence of police errors allowed one man to do so much harm.One of Us is at once a psychological study of violent extremism, a dramatic true crime procedural, and a compassionate inquiry into how a privileged society copes with homegrown evil. Lauded in Scandinavia for its literary merit and moral poise, One of Us is the true story of one of our age's most tragic events.Was Albert DeSalvo Really the Boston Strangler? Handyman Albert DeSalvo confessed to eleven brutal rape/murders that terrorized Boston from 1962…
to 1964. The repeat sex offender boasted he had raped an additional 2,000 women. His story became the subject of a bestselling book, a major Hollywood movie, and a Hulu docuseries. But DeSalvo was not The Boston Strangler. Author Susan Kelly&’s detailed investigation shows us the true DeSalvo—a pathological liar whose hunger for celebrity drove him to false confessions—and indicates that the stranglings were committed by more than one killer. Exploring stunning DNA findings, a shocking re-autopsy, expert profiling evidence, and other recent developments, she shows why this savage, unsolved case continues to fascinate and haunt us.By Wendy Joan Biddlecombe Agsar. 2024
Discover the truth of what happens when true believers go too far with the shocking stories of the world&’s most…
known and horrific cults like The Order of the Solar Temple and the NXIVM Cult.Cults have been around for centuries, and many have been dubbed as satanic and murderous due to their heinous crimes. In Cults: A True Crime Collection, you will get to study the most notorious ones and what they did to achieve that notoriety. Get to know the story behind the scariest cults in history, including: Charles Manson and the Manson Family Heaven&’s Gate and their mass suicide attempts Blood-consuming cults like the Vampire Clan Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre The People&’s Temple and their cyanide-laced drinks And more! From gruesome suicides to clan murders, Cults: A True Crime Collection will tell you the real story behind the crimes and the leaders who orchestrated them. This book also studies the rise and fall of said clans and what led them to commit such terrible crimes like mass murders and human sacrifices.By Kristine S. Ervin. 2024
A Washington Post &“Most Anticipated&” Book of the Year • A New York Times &“Must Read&”For readers of My Dark…
Places and The Fact of a Body, a beautiful, brutal memoir documenting one woman&’s search for identity alongside her family's decades-long quest to identify the two men who abducted—and murdered—her mother"Melding true crime with memoir, Ervin reminds us of what happens when we conflate people with the transgressions committed against them—the collateral damage we inflict when we turn human beings into moral allegory . . . A powerful treatise on love and loss, on mothers and daughters, but it is also a warning to all of us who consume true crime." —The New York Times Book ReviewKristine S. Ervin was just eight years old when her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was abducted from an Oklahoma mall parking lot and violently murdered in an oil field. First, there was grief. Then the desire to know: what happened to her, what she felt in her last terrible moments, and all she was before these acts of violence defined her life.In her mother&’s absence, Ervin tries to reconstruct a woman she can never fully grasp—from her own memory, from letters she uncovers, and from the stories of other family members. As more information about her mother's death comes to light, Ervin&’s drive to know her mother only intensifies, winding into her own fraught adolescence. She reckons with contradictions of what a woman is allowed to be—a self beyond the roles of wife, mother, daughter, victim—what a &“true&” victim is supposed to look like, and, finally, how complicated and elusive justice can be.Told fearlessly and poetically, Rabbit Heart weaves together themes of power, gender, and justice into a manifesto of grief and reclamation: our stories do not need to be simple to be true, and there is power in the telling.By Rebecca Godfrey. 2019
It has been a long road to justice for Reena Virk, beaten and murdered at the hands of her teenage…
peers. The murder of this girl is one of the most notorious and heartbreaking cases in Canadian history. Here, for the first time, acclaimed author Rebecca Godfrey reveals the stunning truth about a Canadian tragedy that captured international headlines.Who were the seemingly ordinary suburban teenagers who found themselves under the bridge in Victoria, BC, on the night of November 14, 1997? Why would a girl who longed to be their friend be beaten and killed? And how did so many teenagers keep terrible secrets from parents, teachers and police for eight days? These are the questions all of us have been asking, and in Under the Bridge the answers are revealed in a stunning narrative. Godfrey spent six years researching the case, conducting exclusive interviews with parents, classmates, police, prosecutors and, perhaps most importantly, several of the youths, including Warren Glowatski, one of the two teenagers convicted of murdering Virk. Godfrey also witnessed firsthand the many trials of Kelly Ellard, also found guilty of killing a girl who just wanted to fit in.By Steven Hale. 2023
In the vein of Waiting for an Echo and Dead Man Walking, a deeply immersive look at justice in America,…
told through the interwoven lives of condemned prisoners and the men and women who come to visit them . . .In 2018, after nearly a decade&’s hiatus, the state of Tennessee began executing death row inmates, bucking national trends that showed the death penalty in decline. In less than two years, the state put seven men to death, more than any other state but Texas in that time period. It was an execution spree unlike any seen in Tennessee since the 1940s, one only brought to a halt by a global pandemic. Award-winning journalist Steven Hale was the leading reporter on these executions, covering them both locally for the Nashville Scene alt-weekly and nationally for The Appeal.In Death Row Welcomes You, Hale traces the lives of condemned prisoners at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution—and the people who come to visit them. What brought them—the visitors and convicted murderers alike—to death row?The visitors are, for the most part, not activists—or at least they did not start out that way. Nor are they the sort of killer-obsessed death row groupies such settings sometimes attract. In fact, in most cases they are average people whose lives, not to mention their views on the death penalty, were turned upside down by a face-to-face meeting with a death row prisoner.Hale&’s access to the people that make up that community afforded him a perspective that no other journalist has been granted, largely because Tennessee&’s Department of Correction has all but shut off official media access.Combining topics that have long fascinated readers—crime, death, and life inside prison—Hale writes with humanity, empathy, and insight earned by befriending death row prisoners . . . and standing witness to their final moments.By Clint Richmond. 2007
Roger and Penny Scaggs seemed a poster couple for family values. Evangelical Christians living in booming Austin, Texas, in the…
mid-1990s, they were respected leaders in their church and community. As Roger diligently worked his way up the high-tech corporate ladder, Penny kept a pristine home and coached similarly devout young women on how to be perfect wives. But on a windy March evening, this godly woman met the devil head-on. And when the police discovered her lifeless body—repeatedly bludgeoned with a lead pipe, then mutilated with a knife from her own spotless kitchen—they were shocked by the rage and savagery behind her slaying.The Good Wife is a startling true story of greed, hatred, betrayal, and an unimaginable murder—a tale of the dark decay that can be hidden behind a facade of saintliness when a marriage seemingly made in heaven descends into hell.By Mark Beaver. 2023
On a June night in 1983, twenty-three-year-old Karla Faye Tucker and her boyfriend, fueled by a sinister cocktail of illicit…
drugs, broke into a Houston apartment. “We were very wired,” Tucker later testified, “and we was looking for something to do.” Though they later claimed they entered the premises with no murderous intent, they ended up slaughtering two people—one a sworn enemy, the other an utter stranger. The weapon: a pickax they found in the apartment. Fourteen years later, in early 1998, Tucker was facing lethal injection. But after her religious conversion in prison, Texas would be executing a different woman than the one who’d committed the murders. Her change was so dramatic that the most powerful and influential voices in American televangelism—Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell among them—were urging viewers to contact Texas's governor, George W. Bush, and plead for clemency. One follower was author Mark Beaver’s father, a devout Southern Baptist deacon who asked Beaver to put his fledgling literary ambitions to work by composing a letter on his behalf to Governor Bush.Through a merger of true crime, social history, and memoir, The Ballad of Karla Faye Tucker illustrates how a seemingly distant news story triggers a national reckoning and exposes a growing divide in America’s evangelical community. It’s a tale of how one woman defies all conventions of death row inmates, and her saga serves as an unlikely but fascinating prism for exploring American culture and the limits of forgiveness and transformation. It’s also a deeply personal reflection on how a father’s request leads his son to struggle with who he was raised to be and who he imagines becoming.By Lovejoy Boteler. 2019
In 1968, during Albert Lepard’s fifth escape from a life sentence at Parchman Penitentiary, he kidnapped Lovejoy Boteler, then eighteen…
years old, from his family’s farm in Grenada, Mississippi. Three decades later, still beset by half-buried memories of that time, Boteler began researching his kidnapper’s nefarious, sordid life to discover how and why this terrifying abduction occurred.Crooked Snake: The Life and Crimes of Albert Lepard is the true story of Lepard, sentenced to life in Parchman for the murder of seventy-four-year-old Mary Young in 1959. During the course of his sentence, Lepard escaped from prison six times in fourteen years. In Crooked Snake, Boteler pieces together the story of this cold-blooded murderer's life using both historical records and personal interviews—over seventy in all—with ex-convicts who gravitated to and ran with Lepard, the family members who fed and sheltered the fugitive during his escapes, the law officers who hunted him, and the regular folks who were victimized in his terrible wake.Throughout Crooked Snake, Boteler reveals his kidnapper’s hardscrabble childhood and tracks his whereabouts before his incarceration and during his jailbreaks. Lepard’s escapes take him to Florida, Michigan, Kansas, California, and Mexico. Crooked Snake captures a slice of history and a landscape that is fast disappearing. These vignettes describe Mississippi’s countryside and spirit, ranging from sharecropper family gatherings in Attala County’s Seneasha Valley to the twenty-thousand-acre Parchman farm and its borderlands teeming with alligator, panther, bear, and wild boar.By William Bradford Huie. 2018
Author William Bradford Huie was one of the most celebrated figures of twentieth-century journalism. A pioneer of "checkbook journalism," he…
sought the truth in controversial stories when the truth was hard to come by. In the case of James Earl Ray, Huie paid Ray and his original attorneys $40,000 for cooperation in explaining his movements in the months before Martin Luther King’s assassination and up to Ray’s arrest weeks later in London. Huie became a major figure in the investigation of King’s assassination and was one of the few persons able to communicate with Ray during that time.Huie, a friend of King, writes that he went into his investigation of Ray believing that a conspiracy was behind King’s murder. But after retracing Ray’s movements through California, Louisiana, Mexico, Canada, Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, and London, Huie came to believe that James Earl Ray was a pathetic petty criminal who hated African Americans and sought to make a name for himself by murdering King. He Slew the Dreamer was originally published in 1970 soon after Ray went to prison and was republished in 1977, but was out of print until the 1997 edition, published with the cooperation of Huie’s widow.This new edition features an essay by scholar Riché Richardson that provides fresh insight, and it includes the 1977 prologue, which Huie wrote countering charges by members of Congress, the King family, and others who claimed the FBI had aided and abetted Ray. In 1970, 1977, 1997, and now, He Slew the Dreamer offers a remarkably detailed examination of the available evidence at the time the murder occurred and an invaluable resource to current debates over the King assassination.By James L. Robertson. 2023
Dwelling along the Mississippi River, the Tennessee state line, the Tenn-Tom Waterway, and the Gulf of Mexico are a trove…
of characters with fascinating lives and histories. In Rowdy Boundaries: True Mississippi Tales from Natchez to Noxubee, author James L. Robertson weaves these stories to reveal a tapestry of Mississippi’s border counties and the towns and people that occupy them. From his unique vantage as a former Mississippi Supreme Court justice and seasoned lawyer, he documents the legal, geographical, and biographical tales revealed during his journeys along and within the state lines.The volume features the true stories of musicians, authors, portrait painters, and football players, as well as political activists, educators, politicians, and judges. Also featured are tributes to noteworthy newspaper editors and columnists for their many contributions over the years. Robertson covers pivotal moments in Mississippi history, including the Mississippi Married Women’s Property Act of 1839, the development of Chinese culture in the Mississippi Delta, and 1964 Freedom Summer. He does not shy away from the tragedies of the past, discussing lynchings and murders that still haunt the state today. From ghost towns in Jefferson County to the Slugburger Festival in Corinth, stopping en route for a mint julep in Columbus, Robertson puts a human face on Mississippi history and tells a good yarn along the way.This true story of an ex-Marine who fought crime as an undercover cop, a narcotics agent, and finally a federal…
prosecutor spans a decade of crime fighting and narrow escapes. Charlie Spillers dealt with a remarkable variety of career criminals, including heroin traffickers, safecrackers, burglars, auto thieves, and members of Mafia and Mexican drug smuggling operations. In this riveting tale, the author recounts fascinating experiences and the creative methods he used to succeed and survive in a difficult and sometimes extremely dangerous underworld life.As a young officer with the Baton Rouge Police Department, ex-Marine Charlie Spillers first went undercover to infiltrate criminal groups to gather intelligence. Working alone and often unarmed, he constantly attempted to walk the thin line between triumph and disaster. When on the hunt, his closest associates were safecrackers, prostitutes, and burglars. His abilities propelled him into years of undercover work inside drug trafficking rings. But the longer he worked, the greater the risks. His final and perhaps most significant action in Baton Rouge was leading a battle against corruption in the police department itself.After Baton Rouge, he joined the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics and for the next five years continued working undercover, from the Gulf Coast to Memphis; and from New Orleans to Houston, Texas. He capped off a unique career by becoming a federal prosecutor and the justice attaché for Iraq. In this book, he shares his most intriguing exploits and exciting undercover stings, putting readers in the middle of the action.By Jim Bradshaw, Danielle Miller. 2014
In 1902, on a prairie in southwest Louisiana, six members of a farming family are found murdered. Albert Edwin Batson,…
a white, itinerant farm worker, rapidly descends from likely suspect to likely lynching victim as people in the surrounding countryside lusted for vengeance. In a territory where the locals were coping with the opening of the prairies by the railroad and the disorienting, disruptive advances of the rice and oil industries into what was predominantly cattle country, Batson, an outsider, made an ideal scapegoat. Until You Are Dead, Dead, Dead tells the story of the legal trials of Batson for the murder of six members of the Earll family and of the emotional trial of his mother. She believed him innocent and worked tirelessly, but futilely, to save her son's life. More than two dozen photos of Batson, his mother, and the principals involved in his arrest and convictions help bring this struggle to life.Though the evidence against him was entirely circumstantial, most of the citizenry of southwest Louisiana considered him guilty. Sensational headlines in national and local newspapers stirred up so much emotion, authorities feared he would be lynched before they could hang him legally. Even-handed, objective, and thorough, the authors sift the evidence and lament the incompetence of Batson's court-appointed attorneys. The state tried the young man and convicted him twice of the murders and sentenced him each time to death. Louisiana's governor refused to accept the state pardon board's recommendation that Batson's final sentence be commuted to life in prison. A stranger in a rapidly changing land, Batson was hanged.By John Hailman. 2013
As a federal prosecutor in Mississippi for over thirty years, John Hailman worked with federal agents, lawyers, judges, and criminals…
of every stripe. In From Midnight to Guntown, he recounts amazing trials and bad guy antics from the darkly humorous to the needlessly tragic. In addition to bank robbers—generally the dumbest criminals—Hailman describes scam artists, hit men, protected witnesses, colorful informants, corrupt officials, bad guys with funny nicknames, over-the-top investigators, and those defendants who had a certain roguish charm. Several of his defendants and victims have since had whole books written about them: Dickie Scruggs, Emmett Till, Chicago gang leader Jeff Fort, and Paddy Mitchell, leader of the most successful bank robbery gang of the twentieth century. But Hailman delivers the inside story no one else can. He also recounts his scary experiences after 9/11 when he prosecuted terrorism cases.By John Hailman. 2015
A federal prosecutor in Mississippi for over thirty years, John Hailman routinely worked with federal agents, lawyers, judges, and criminals…
of every type imaginable. Encouraged by the acclaim for his earlier book, From Midnight to Guntown, he has opened even more of the astonishing cases within the over thirty-five boxes full of trial stories he carried into retirement. Hailman gathers colorful exploits of eccentric modern criminals from William Faulkner's Mississippi, where savvy victims often outwit their criminal perpetrators. Characters range from rich but incompetent drug lords and nationwide gun-runners to bumbling Dixie Mafia kidnappers. The book ends with “Fancy Frauds” in which ingenious con men (and women) offer hilarious but surprisingly sophisticated “special deals” on tax-free gold mines in Mexico and bargain (but bogus) Viagra. Chapters include “Guns, Bombs, and Moonshine Whiskey,” “Drug Kingpins Have Troubles Too,” “Crime Victims Fight Back,” “Mere Theft,” and “Fancy Frauds.” Written to entertain and enlighten, these stories will delight any fan of the true crime genre and anyone who enjoys good writing and the skill of a master storyteller.