Art Crime

In the first major history of crime fiction in 50 years, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators traces the evolution of the genre from the 18th century to the present, offering brand-new perspective on the world’s most popular form of fiction.

Umiko Wada never set out to be a private detective, let alone become the one-woman operation behind the Kodaka Detective Agency. But so it has turned out, thanks to the death of her former boss, Kazuto Kodaka, in mysterious circumstances. Keen to avoid a similar fate, Wada chooses the cases she takes very carefully. A businessman who wants her to track down his estranged son offers what appears to be a straightforward assignment. But she should have known that the simplest cases are never really simple at all. Soon she finds herself pulled into a labyrinthine conspiracy.

To his neighbors, Anthony Sowell was a friendly and helpful former Marine. But they didn't know about his dark side - or the gruesome secret inside his house. Sowell's secret life was revealed to the nation on October 29, 2009, when a Cleveland Police SWAT team entered his house to arrest him for an alleged rape. They didn't find Sowell, but they encountered a nightmarish scene: two decomposed bodies in his third-floor living room. Eight more bodies were hidden throughout the house and buried in the back yard.

Master Forger David Henty has a problem: a forgery he painted is rejected and suddenly he owes a murderous, blind, female Japanese gangster £5 million.

Following his recovery from a personal and professional trauma, DCI Cyril Bennett returns to discover a complex case involving the art world. Soon, he unearths a dark side of the industry where greed and dubious practices thrive and, where there is money to be made, violence and murder abound. Working their way through a maze of galleries, museums and the Internet, can Bennett’s team differentiate between real and fake?

There are four cousins in the Morse family: perfect Kenny, the preppy West Coast lawyer; James, the shy but brilliant medical student; his seductive, hard-drinking sister Audrey; and Teresa, youngest and most fragile, haunted by the fear that she has inherited the madness that possessed her father. Their grandfather summons them to his mansion at Owl's Point. None of them have visited the family estate since they were children, when a prized painting disappeared: a self-portrait by Goya, rumored to cause madness or death upon viewing.

Six years ago, the "Fabulous Gustave" slipped the grasp of Agent Fleur van Beekhof, making off with a priceless artwork . . . and Fleur's beautifully ordered life. Suddenly the cool, pragmatic Europol detective lost her detective partner and wife, her rising career, and her control, thanks to the addictive lure of cards. When a new Italian art theft bears all the markings of Gustave's taunting style, Fleur is put back in the field, because no one knows him better. She jumps at the chance to correct the mistake that ruined her life. The hitch? She has to work with her fiery ex-wife.

Quella tra Oriana e Pier Paolo è una delle più affascinanti e intense storie di amore-odio della letteratura e del costume italiani del Novecento. Scrittori di primissimo livello, polemisti spietati, personaggi venerati e infangati dall'opinione pubblica del tempo, le loro personalità contrapposte non potevano far altro che incrociarsi. Forse anche perché, a differenza dei loro colleghi italiani, Oriana e Pier Paolo si muovono con agio sullo scenario internazionale.

What if a villain believes they are a hero? Our addiction to social media has created a new version of fame. And lurking beneath the surface of beautiful, polished social media accounts is a community being targeted by a killer. Ela's life is falling apart after she experiences a miscarriage. Her marriage dissolves while the rest of her life feels on hold. In order to deal with the grief and guilt from losing the pregnancy, Ela spends a lot of time on her phone. And the more time she spends online, the more her new identity begins to take shape.

The memoir covers La Plante's entire life, from her youth growing up in Merseyside to studying at RADA alongside Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt. It explores "the exasperation [La Plante] felt at the limited roles available for female actors" - something that led to her writing "Widows" and "Prime Suspect" for television.

Umiko Wada has had enough excitement in life. With an overbearing mother and her husband recently murdered, she just wants to keep her head down. As a secretary to a private detective, her life is pleasantly filled with coffee runs and paperwork. That is, until her boss takes on a new case. A case that is surrounded by shadows. A case that means Wada will have to leave Tokyo and travel to London.

The 1935 murder of architect Francis Mawson Rattenbury, world famous for his design of the iconic Parliament Buildings and Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia, and the arrest and lurid trial of his thirty years younger second wife, Alma, and the family chauffeur, George Percy Stoner, her lover, who was half her age, riveted people. Debate continues even today as to which one of them really was responsible.

Bobby Gunn has been fighting for his existence since a childhood spent living under the hand of his volatile father, and would do anything to give his seven-year-old daughter a better life—including betting on himself in the underground world of bare-knuckle boxing. In 1984, Gunn was an eleven-year-old boxer in Ontario when his father woke him in the middle of the night to fight grown men in motel parking lots for money, his old man pocketing the cash.

On a cool, overcast afternoon in April 2016, a salacious tip arrived at the L.A. Times that reporter Paul Pringle thought should have taken, at most, a few weeks to check out: a drug overdose at a fancy hotel involving one of the University of Southern California’s shiniest stars—Dr. Carmen Puliafito, the head of the prestigious medical school. Pringle, who’d long done battle with USC and its almost impenetrable culture of silence, knew reporting the story wouldn’t be a walk in the park. USC is the largest private employer in the city of L.A., and it casts a long shadow.

Max Allan Collins became Spillane's friend and collaborator, continuing the Mike Hammer series for years after the author's death, building upon unfinished manuscripts the writer left behind. Now, with coauthor James Traylor, Collins has produced the first comprehensive and authoritative profile of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master. It is a must-listen for any fan of the author—or of the generations of crime writers that were influenced by his work.

In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself.

Everything is not as it seems during those balmy summer days at one of Oxford’s most prestigious colleges. Lorcan Greene, wealthy gallery owner and expert forgery-spotter, is hired by Detective Braine of the Art Fraud Squad to investigate a tip-off in Oxford. But Lorcan gets more than he bargains for, falling in love with talented art student Frederica Delacroix. But what’s she hiding and could she even be involved in forgery herself?

Edinburgh, 1849. Hordes of patients are dying all across the city, with doctors finding their remedies powerless. And a whispering campaign seeks to paint Dr. James Simpson, pioneer of medical chloroform, as a murderer. Determined to clear Simpson’s name, his protégé Will Raven and former housemaid Sarah Fisher must plunge into Edinburgh’s deadliest streets and find out who or what is behind the deaths. Soon they discover that the cause of the deaths has evaded detection purely because it is so unthinkable.

Before turning to her life of crime - running a one-woman forgery business out of a phone booth in a Greenwich Village bar and even dodging the FBI - Lee Israel had a legitimate career as an author of biographies. But by 1990, almost broke and desperate to hang onto her Upper West Side studio, Lee made a bold and irreversible career change: inspired by a letter she’d received once from Katharine Hepburn, and armed with her considerable skills as a researcher and celebrity biographer, she began to forge letters in the voices of literary greats.

When businessman Thomas Peterson is killed outside a football ground in the Highlands, there are several witnesses. Yet the hunt for the killer is proving as futile as the search for a motive. Possible connections to Russian money and an eerie retirement home are soon thrown into the mix. To further complicate things, DI Westphall's MI6 past is coming back to haunt him. Guilt stalks his dreams, but could there be a message in these nightmares? Westphall is in danger of losing his head just when he needs it the most. He must find answers, and fast, before the murderer strikes again.