American Crime

Trick Baby tells the story of White Folks, a blue-eyed, light-haired con artist whose pale skin allows him to pass in the streets as a white man. Folks is tormented early in life, rejected by other children and branded a "trick baby," a child conceived between a hooker and her trick. Refusing to abandon his life in the ghetto and a chance at revenge, Folks is taken under the wing of an older mentor, Blue. What happens next is unbelievable.

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. It was an execution spree unlike any seen in Tennessee since the 1940s, 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.

The leafy Avenue de Foch, one of the most exclusive residential streets in Nazi-occupied France, was Paris' hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson, who lived with his wife and young son, Phillip, at Number 11, found himself drawn into the Liberation network of the French resistance, he knew the stakes were impossibly high.

They insist they are just a group of friends, yet they funnel millions of dollars through tax-free corporations. They claim to disdain politics, but congressmen of both parties describe them as the most influential religious organization in Washington. They say they are not Christians, but simply believers. Behind the scenes at every National Prayer Breakfast since 1953 has been the Family, an elite network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful.

Historians have previously glazed over the Mafia's formative years. In this first volume, Ferrante explores its Sicilian roots, before following a cast of larger-than-life characters who arrived as fugitives on American shores. Through these and other lives - including legendary mobsters Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Seigel - Ferrante tells the extraordinary story of the Mafia's rise in America, as they provided alcohol during Prohibition, created the gambling mecca Las Vegas and practically took over the island of Cuba.

Joe Leaphorn may be long retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, but his detective skills are still sharp, honed by his work as a private detective. His experience will be essential to solve a compelling new case: finding the birth parents of a woman who was raised by a bilagáana family but believes she is Diné based on one solid clue, an old photograph with a classic Navajo child’s blanket.

In the past thirty years alone, more than 2,800 innocent American prisoners—their combined sentences surpassing 25,000 years—have been exonerated and freed after being condemned for crimes they did not commit. Terrifyingly, this number represents only a fraction of the actual number of persons wrongfully accused and convicted over the same period.

We last saw Easy in 2007’s Blonde Faith, fighting for his life after his car plunges over a cliff. True to form, the tough WWII veteran survives, and soon his murderous sidekick Mouse has him back cruising the mean streets of L.A., in all their psychedelic 1967 glory, to look for a young black man, Evander "Little Green" Noon, who disappeared during an acid trip. Fueled by an elixir called Gator’s Blood, brewed by the conjure woman Mama Jo, Easy experiences a physical, spiritual, and emotional resurrection, but peace and love soon give way to murder and mayhem.

When an act of violence plunges the contenders into a final confrontation, David Rivers is sent in. He’s the first operative of a mercenary army. Parachuting into Russia to link up with a mysterious intelligence agent, he must find a way to strike the heart of a ruthless criminal alliance. The stakes couldn’t be higher. If David doesn’t succeed, he won’t just lose his life - he’ll lose everyone he cares about, too. Because when this war is over, either one organization will stand...or none of them will.

Grace Hale was home from college when she first heard the family legend. In 1947, while her beloved grandfather had been serving as a sheriff in the Piney Woods of south-central Mississippi, he prevented a lynch mob from killing a Black man who was in his jail on suspicion of raping a white woman—only for the suspect to die the next day during an escape attempt. It was a tale straight out of To Kill a Mockingbird, with her grandfather as the tragic hero. This story, however, hid a dark truth.

Persia Chandler has managed to get her life back on track. Things are calm at home, she's preparing to leave for college, and she is even feeling confident enough to start dating again. More importantly, she's drug free and plans to stay that way - until Chucky slithers back into her life. He's determined to make Persia his again, and he isn't willing to take no for an answer. When trying to woo her doesn't work, Chucky plays hardball and gives Persia an ultimatum: go along with his latest twisted plot, or have her junkie past exposed to the new man in her life, Philadelphia Eagles rookie quarterback, Vaughn Tate.

The notorious Gotti family is the stuff of mob legend. The "Dapper Don", John Gotti Sr., and his son John A. "Junior" Gotti ran New York's powerful Gambino crime family and were well known for their flamboyant style and brutal ways, an image perpetuated in popular Mafia mythology. John Alite, a mob hit man, associate, and close friend of the Gottis, has a very different story to tell.

On July 15, 1997, Gianni Versace was shot and killed on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion by serial killer Andrew Cunanan. But months before Versace’s murder, award-winning journalist Maureen Orth was already investigating a major story on Cunanan for Vanity Fair. Culled from interviews with more than four hundred people and insights gleaned from thousands of pages of police reports, Vulgar Favors tells the complete story of Andrew Cunanan, his unwitting victims, and the moneyed world in which they lived . . . and died.

Meet Anthony Stone, one of the best detectives that New York City has ever seen. He lives by the motto shoot first and ask questions never. Stone's life changes when his lieutenant assigns him to a bank robbery case. His job is to take down four ruthless and vicious bank robbers who will do anything to stay alive, and more importantly, stay out of jail. The leader of the bank robbers is a man that goes by the name Ghost. When it comes to money, Ghost and his team will do anything it takes to get it, even if that means taking innocent lives.

During the civil rights movement, the state of Mississippi created an elaborate spy network. Its mission was to preserve segregation by any means necessary—including voter interference, sponsorship of white supremacy groups, and even murder.

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.

I was the only daughter of the Italian American mafia boss on the East Coast. After my mother was murdered, he made sure the world forgot he had a daughter. I had to pretend to be the girl I’ve never been: meek. There is not one submissive bone in my body, but I had to look and act the part. Matteo De Salvo is the only person that has ever made me nervous. My skin itched around him and my throat closed up. I watched him from a distance, the defiant part of me hoping he’d catch me. He did.

As a low-level enforcer in Los Angeles, Ken Swift knows danger, but nowhere does he feel it more than in his tangled romances. Divorced from one woman, in love with another, and wrestling with a strong desire to get to know a third, his life is far from perfect, and it becomes all the more complicated when his troubled daughter resurfaces on the same day as a major job.

Mississippi, 1955: 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered by a white mob after making flirtatious remarks to a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. Till's attackers were never convicted, but his lynching became one of the most notorious hate crimes in American history. It launched protests across the country, helped the NAACP gain thousands of members, and inspired famous activists like Rosa Parks to stand up and fight for equal rights for the first time.

In the winter of 1873, a small band of prospectors lost their way in the frozen wilderness of the Colorado Rockies. Months later, when the snow finally melted, only one of them emerged. His name was Alfred G. Packer, though he would soon become infamous throughout the country under a different name: "the Man-Eater."