American Crime

When a teenage girl witnesses a carjacking gone bad, she is marked for death by a crime boss. A lawyer and an enforcer forge an uneasy alliance to protect the girl from a hit man with an agenda of his own. Soon after, Paul Elliott - lawyer and close friend of the witness's family - begins counseling them and becomes entangled in the murder plot. As the long-simmering feud between Rico - the white enforcer - and the hitman John D'Angelo reaches boiling point, bodies start to pile up in rapid succession...and old scores will be settled.

Augustus 'Gus' Martin is an embattled LAPD negotiator. Evelyn 'Lynn' Kennedy is the new Police Commissioner hired under curious circumstances. Thrust into an explosive terrorist crisis, they must trust one another to save the lives of over thirty hostages. But as the bodies drop, what they are faced with is a chess match against the most formidable criminal mind either has ever faced. What is really happening and why? Will any hostages survive?

While back on tribal land, Mud Sawpole uncovers an illegal fracking operation underway that threatens the Kiowas’ ancestral homeland. But there’s an even greater threat: a local businessman involved in artifact thefts is murdered and a respected tribe elder faces accusation of the crime. After being roped in by her cousin, Denny, they begin to investigate the death while also pursuing evidence to permanently stop frackers from destroying Kiowa land, water, and livelihoods. When answers evade her, Mud embraces Kiowa tribal customs to find the answers that she seeks.

An American King unfolds during a violent rash of crime in Whicher's hometown. Working for the Abilene US Marshals Office, Whicher investigates a baffling murder, part of an outbreak of lawlessness that threatens to escalate out of control. Assigned a new partner to help work a case unlike any he's known, what starts in shadow soon burns a path across the city, ever closer to home.

In the shadow of a massive boulder on Oklahoma’s Big Rock Prairie, a squirrel hunter discovers a charred skeleton in a homemade charcoal kiln. Johnston County deputy Hannah Bond and Chickasaw Lighthorse police sergeant Bill Maytubby are called to the scene and soon identify the victim as a young Chickasaw man from a nearby town. What begins as the search for a killer soon throws Maytubby and Bond into the deep end of a conspiracy that puts both the victim’s family and the officers themselves at risk.

In this confrontation with corruption, Ann Higgins stumbles into the underworld life of a high-ranking South Dakota statesman, and she catapults her psychiatrist, Troy Stoker, MD, into the conflict. When her chilling discovery threatens to devastate a politician's secret dominion, Ann ends up dangling from a makeshift noose and fighting for her survival while plunging Dr. Stoker even deeper into the battle of minds, muscles, and new tech.

TV investigative reporter Topher Davis, the only Black journalist on that beat, has exactly three weeks to do one final story before his position is eliminated due to corporate budget cuts. Enlisting the aid of his sister, SFPD Homicide Detective Lynn Sloan, he decides to investigate what the families of Blacks killed by police—and the families of the cops themselves—go through when tragic events like this occur. Instead, they find themselves involved in an ever-expanding mystery as more officers who’ve committed the same offense turn up dead.

Best friends Sophie, Diamond, and Angel find themselves with their backs against the wall and owing an extremely dangerous man. Short on funds, limited options, and a severe debt hanging over their heads forces the trio to take "getting to the bag" to a new level. While dripping mad sex appeal laced with money schemes, these ruthless vixens hatch a bulletproof plan, and before long—Jack Girlz is born.

Crime in America features selections from a series of six books Paul Brakke wrote on what's wrong with the criminal justice system and how to fix it. These books deal with the police, courts, and prisons, and consider of some of the crises now facing America due to illegal immigration, the opioid crisis, and the growing divide between racial, ethnic, rural-urban, and income groups. This book summarizes the critical insights of these other books in order to reach the widest possible audience, because one of Brakke's reasons for writing this book is to inspire real change.

Follow Europe’s most cunning art thief, forger, and amateur sleuth as she tracks down priceless antiquities and foils nefarious plots.

Society has created many great men; yet before they were great, they were persecuted. During their plights, they stood up for what they believed in; even when others were afraid to stand. They were galvanized by truths, which created followers. It was then that trends emerged. The trends contradicted the norm and uprooted communities, which created fear. Society rejects what it does not understand. The unknown makes them tremble. The thought makes them cower.

Raphael Waters grew up accustomed to being in a constant state of survival. When he becomes the muscle for known street figure, Rah, he believes his life has taken a turn for the better. That is until a string of unfortunate circumstances leave Rah missing and Raphael grasping for answers in the streets of the concrete jungle—once again. A chance encounter with the intriguing Alex Gatts promises to be the life-changing turnaround he needs.

Victor Li is a man without a past. To his new employer, Mark, he’s just an anonymous hired hand to help with the dirty work. Together, they break into storage units that contain the possessions of the recently deported, pocketing whatever is worth selling. Only Victor and his sister, Jules, know that he’s a wanted man. Amid the backpacks and suitcases, Victor makes the find of a lifetime: a gem rare and valuable enough to change his fortunes in an instant.

Norogachi, Chihuahua. Unas furiosas garras de fuego iluminan el cielo nocturno y abrasan la iglesia de Nuestra Señora del Pilar. Mientras el pueblo trajina inútilmente cubetas de agua para intentar apagar el incendio y todos se preguntan qué sucedió, en la montaña sólo se escuchan los aullidos del Lobo Montejo, un exsacerdote que colgó los hábitos para formar una familia y vivir en comunidad. El incendio ha socavado el último reducto de paz y es la señal definitiva de que el mal pretende asentarse en todas partes.

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, the connection between sports celebrity son and mobster father was studiously ignored by the press and ultimately overlooked for eight decades.

On a cold night in December 1956, two young girls mysteriously vanished after a night at the movies on the Southwest Side of Chicago, beginning one of the greatest searches to ever take place in the history of the city. Three weeks later, the bodies of the two lost girls, Barbara and Patricia Grimes, were found on the side of a secluded, snow-covered road, miles from where they disappeared. The discovery of their battered corpses created one of the greatest unsolved mysteries to ever baffle post-war America. Where had the girls been for the past three weeks?

He pulled off what some deem the crime of the century: skyjacking a commercial jetliner, collecting a ransom of $200,000, parachuting off the aft stairs of the Boeing 727 into the night, and simply disappearing. Since November 1971, “D. B. Cooper”—no one knows his real name or identity—has become a figure of enduring fascination and obsession. The FBI pursued him for over forty years, before closing the case and leaving it unsolved. Unsolved, perhaps, but much admired. D. B. Cooper’s exploit over the skies of the American Northwest has inspired books, films, and endless speculation.

In September of 2019, Luis Alberto Quiñonez—known as Sito— was shot to death as he sat in his car in the Mission District of San Francisco. He was nineteen. His killer, Julius Williams, was seventeen. It was the second time the teens had encountered one another. The first, five years before, also ended in tragedy, when Julius watched as his brother was stabbed to death by an acquaintance of Sito’s. The two murders merited a few local news stories, and then the rest of the world moved on. But for Laurence Ralph, Sito’s murder forced him to revisit the subject in a profoundly different way.

Immune to the consequences of immorality, five privileged young men in Bogotá bond over a shared code: worship drugs and drink, exploit women, and scorn the underclass. As males, they declare the right to freedom of pleasure. As friends, only disloyalty to each other is forbidden. When a little girl from the slums disappears, the limits of a perverse and sacred bond will be tested in ways none of them could have imagined.

When terrorists with the technological capabilities to hack The White House security system take the President of the United States hostage, it's up to an elite group of counterterrorism operatives to take back The White House and secure the president. The Pentagon has brought former counterterrorism agent Vince Ludlum in to lead this operation. The catch: Ludlum is a wounded warrior trying to escape his tragic past, until now....