American Crime

Mass violence committed by young people is now an epidemic. The reasons behind this escalating violence and the cultural forces that have impugned a generation is the subject of this important new book. The Spiral Notebook is full of interviews with Generation Z, a group dogged by big pharma and antidepressants and ADHD drugs, by a doomsday/apocalyptic mentality present since birth, and by an entertainment industry that has turned violence into parlor games.

The Girls is a profound exploration of trust, ambition, betrayal, and self-discovery. Award-winning journalist Abigail Pesta unveils this deeply reported narrative at a time when the nation is wrestling with the implications of the MeToo movement. How do the women who grew up with Nassar reconcile the monster in the news with the man they once trusted? In The Girls, we learn that their answers to that wrenching question are as rich, insightful, and varied as the human experience itself.

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.

Caught between the Mob and the feds in a plot to save the casinos in Havana from Castro's revolution, Wolfe Rabin pulls the biggest money-laundering scheme in history, but his hubris leads to the conspiracy unraveling in a sensational trial. At a time when there was a jukebox in every restaurant, diner, bar, barracks, arcade, and canteen, Rabin's trajectory from inventor to promoter to outlaw is set against the Mob's growing infiltration of the jukebox industry.

Under the cover of night on June 11, 1962, using only crude homemade tools, Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin tunneled their way out of Alcatraz, America's most secure maximum security prison. Enacting a complex escape plan, the trio broke free from the cellblock, made it undetected past patrolling guards, inflated homemade life vests and a raft, and set sail into a foggy history.

An icy chill foretells a harsh winter for the Navajo people—and for perpetually down on his luck Harley Ponyboy the situation grows increasingly desperate. What evil is this that dogs his every step? When a lucky lottery ticket comes his way, Harley uses the new resources to search for a lost love—only to find she has fallen to appalling depths. His stubborn resolve to help puts him on a collision course with her abusive companion . . . and with his own mortality.

When Eleanor Wooley's best friend Rette suddenly disappears, Eleanor abandons her job as a crime reporter for the Gold Strike Tribune in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and sets off in desperate pursuit. What begins as a search and rescue operation quickly becomes an obsession and a personal quest for truth. Spurred by gut instinct, Eleanor scours Northeastern Nevada during the worst heat wave in recorded history. Obscure signs appear-an intruder's dire warning, a casino's mysterious graffiti, a random sighting of a killer on the run.

Before he was an assassin, David Rivers was a patriot. One year after the 9/11 attacks, he serves as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan. His patrol enters the Shigal Valley, a desolate place with a fearsome reputation for enemy fighters - a reputation that David is about to experience firsthand. As the first shots ring out over the valley, David must decide between military orders and gut instinct...and in the process, discover a hidden truth about himself.

She'd heard the stories, seen the movies, read the books. But now police Chief Inspector Sigrid Ødegård has to leave her native Norway and actually go there - to that land across the Atlantic where her missing brother is implicated in the mysterious death of a prominent African-American academic. America. Sigrid is plunged into a United States where race and identity, politics and promise, reverberate in every aspect of daily life.

From the Pulitzer-winning author of the New York Times bestseller The Nazis Next Door, a deeply reported exploration of the violent resurgence of hatred and white supremacy through the lens of Orange County, California—“ground zero” for racial extremism—and the story of one brutal murder there that revealed the deep roots of violent bigotry as a bellwether for the country.

12/14/2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School Newtown, Connecticut We remember the numbers: 20 children and 6 adults, murdered in a place of nurture and trust. We remember the names: Teachers like Victoria Soto, who lost her life protecting her students. A shooter named Adam Lanza. And we remember the questions: Outraged conjecture instantly monopolized the worldwide response to the tragedy, while the truth went missing. Here is the definitive journalistic account of Newtown.

After an attempted horse theft goes tragically wrong, 16-year-old Caleb Bentley is on the run with his mean-spirited older brother across the American Southwest at the turn of the 20th century. Caleb’s moral compass and inner courage will be tested as they travel the harsh terrain and encounter those who have carved out a life there, for good or ill.

Thomas Horn Jr. was an infamous figure in the 19th-century American Old West. Cowboy, soldier, government scout, translator, and gunman, Horn’s storied life has become an important part of western folklore. In 1902, he was convicted for murdering a 14-year-old boy after a run-in during a feud with a cattle rancher. The Life of Tom Horn is his life story in his own words, written from prison before he met his fate at the gallows the following year.

In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America's imagination. A "spirit photographer", William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation.

In Massachusetts in 1824, Josephine Clayton awakes on the table of the doctor she's assisted all these months. She was presumed dead by all and has become the doctor's next corpse for his medical research. Frightened, the doctor tries to kill her, but Josephine begs to be spared. A deal is struck - Josie will leave her village and work at a distant cotton mill.

When Harriet Peters came to Boston in 1882, the Robinson family took her in as one of their own, and Harriet became closer to Lizzie Robinson than her own siblings. Now, four years later, Lizzie is deathly sick, failing quickly just like several others in her family have done over the past few years. How can so many in one family die from the same mysterious illness? Harriet doesn’t have answers, but she is determined to help the family, bringing in a new-to-the-neighborhood doctor, Michael Wheaton.

"Villains by choice." Betrayed. Melody is nowhere to be found, Liam is in jail, and the Callahan family is cracking, just as Avian Doers, the FBI Director and puppet master behind their downfall, planned. But just because they're down doesn't mean they're out. To fight back, Liam and Melody will have to put everything on the line. The kid gloves are coming off, and no one is getting out alive.

The year was 1922: World War I had just come to a close, the Ottoman Empire was in decline, and Asa Jennings, a YMCA worker from upstate New York, had just arrived in the quiet coastal city of Smyrna to teach sports to boys. Several hundred miles to the east in Turkey's interior, tensions between Greeks and Turks had boiled over into deadly violence. Mustapha Kemal, now known as Ataturk, and his Muslim army soon advanced into Smyrna, a Christian city, where a half a million terrified Greek and Armenian refugees had fled in a desperate attempt to escape his troops.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson insisted that "the policeman is the frontline soldier in our war against crime", and police forces, arms makers, policy makers, and crime experts heeded this call to arms, bringing weapons and practices from the arena of war back home. The Punitive Turn in American Life offers a political and cultural history of the ways in which punishment and surveillance have moved to the center of American life and become imbued with militarized language and policies.

In 1974, Pan American Flight 806 was hoping to land safely in Pago Pago, Samoa, but instead plummeted at 140 miles per hour into the jungle floor. The 101 passengers and crew members all survived this devastating crash. Unfortunately, only four of them escaped the wreckage before the ensuing fire that followed and lived to tell their story. After the disaster, Pan American was found guilty of "willful misconduct" after the longest and most expensive trial in aviation history.