Art Crime

Dashiell Hammett changed the face of crime fiction. In five novels published over five years as well as a string of stories, he transformed the mystery genre into literature and left us with the figure of the hard-boiled detective, from the Continental Op to Sam Spade - immortalized on film by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon - and the more glamorous Thin Man, also made iconic with the aid of Hollywood.

Zoe has an unconventional pen pal - Mr. Stuart Harris, a Texas Death Row inmate and convicted murderer. But then again, Zoe has an unconventional story to tell. A story about how she fell for two brothers, betrayed one of them, and killed the other. Hidden away in her backyard shed in the middle of the night with a jam sandwich in one hand and a pen in the other, Zoe gives a voice to her heart and her fears after months of silence. Mr. Harris may never respond to Zoe's letters, but at least somebody will know her story...

Kim Wall was a thirty-year-old Swedish freelance journalist with a rising career. Then, in the summer of 2017, she followed a story that led to an eccentric inventor in Copenhagen. Instead of writing the next days headline, she'd become one. As the bizarre events of Kim's murder unfolded, the world watched in shocked disbelief. For Kim's distraught parents, Ingrid and Joachim, it was a devastating personal struggle. In the ensuing months, day by grueling day, they had to come to terms with their loss, process the global media attention, and endure the investigation and trial.

Jake saw something unspeakable when he was nine. An act of violence. Brutal. He doesn't know it, but this trauma will play a key role in shaping him later in life. Now, he's 15. A wimp. He flinches. Always. He seeks the guidance of the biggest bad-ass he knows, his cousin Nick. Nick is a professional burglar and makes Jake his apprentice. Nick teaches Jake his dark philosophy - that there is no right or wrong in the world, just a series of events that happen without meaning. At first this helps Jake, but it also unleashes an aggression in himself he never thought possible....

On a cold November day in Amsterdam in 2004, the celebrated and controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was shot and killed by an Islamic extremist for making a movie that "insulted the prophet Mohammed." The murder sent shock waves across Europe and around the world. Shortly thereafter, Ian Buruma returned to his native land to investigate the event and its larger meaning as part of the great dilemma of our time.

In Girls of Tender Age, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith fully articulates with great humor and tenderness the wild jubilance of an extended French-Italian family struggling to survive in a post-World War II housing project in Hartford, Connecticut.

A child is stolen - gone but not forgotten. As Stella watches the police investigation unfold, she starts to ask a terrifying question. Where was her own mother that night?

In Bearing Witness, John Carpenter explores how across the world, those who experienced the war tried to make sense of it both during and in its immediate aftermath. The digestion of a cataclysmic event can take generations. But in this fascinating audiobook, Carpenter brings together all those who did their best to communicate what they saw in the moment so that it could never be lost.

Max the Forger is an artist and gentleman whose colorful lifestyle has spanned over 70 years. He has lived under the strict regime of Barnardo’s children’s homes, been an elephant handler in the circus, lived rough, busked his way from Brighton to Bombay, sold his fakes up and down the country, dined with dukes, socialized with celebrities, associated with gangsters, served time in prison, and donated tens of thousands to charity. And through it all, he never stopped smiling, and loving life - and missing his mum.

From Benjamin Franklin's newspaper hoax that faked the death of his rival to Abbie Hoffman's attempt to levitate the Pentagon - pranksters, hoaxers, and con artists have caused confusion, disorder, and laughter in Western society for centuries. Profiling the most notorious mischief-makers from the 1600s to the present day, Pranksters explores how "pranks" are part of a long tradition of speaking truth to power and social critique.

When 28-year-old San Francisco Daily Morning Call reporter Mark Twain met Tom Sawyer at a local bathhouse in 1863, he was seeking a subject for his first novel. As Twain steamed, played cards, and drank beer with Sawyer (a volunteer firefighter, customs inspector, and local hero responsible for having saved 90 lives at sea), he had second thoughts about Shirley Tempest, his proposed book about a local girl firefighter, and began to envision a novel of wider scope.

El carismático mercenario que narra esta historia es un personaje real bajo el seudónimo de Adrián Falcón, aunque a lo largo de sus años en activo usó otros como El Parse, Garfio, Strelkinov...Tierno y diabólico, Falcón tiene ahora sesenta y tantos años y ha sobrevivido con peculiar sentido del humor a su compleja historia de vida.

Henry Lindon's flight across the north Atlantic was turbulent and sleepless. His plane has just touched down in Amsterdam, where he’s come to work as a visiting professor. Lindon is torn about leaving his troubled wife, Marylou, behind in Dallas, but relieved and excited to start a new chapter in a lively city. But troubles from the past soon cross the Atlantic. Lindon discovers that notorious Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren, born in 1899, is about to play a part in Lindon’s own personal drama.

A troubled Mary Ann Walker takes a nosedive off a bridge. Seattle's police department macho man John LaMoia takes the call, along with the beauteous cop psychologist Daphne Matthews. They suspect her boyfriend, known to beat Mary Ann. Her seething brother, Ferrell, is convinced the boyfriend did the deed. But the case somehow becomes too slippery to close.

Funny, what people seem to want. In Art, Mystery, a controversial former footballer, now export agent specializing in chrome, accepts an unusual commission—to find and export a pornographic work of Renaissance art.

Freed after a five-year prison stint for a crime he did not commit, Eddie Grassle is looking to make a fresh start. His main goal: to unite with the young child he has never met. But a fateful decision lands Eddie back in jail, this time as an unwitting accomplice to a murder. Convinced he is headed to prison for life, Eddie executes a brazen jailbreak in the desperate hope of finding and meeting his son.

Arthur Fellig’s ability to arrive at a crime scene just as the cops did was so uncanny that he renamed himself “Weegee”, claiming that he functioned as a human Ouija board. Weegee documented better than any other photographer the crime, grit, and complex humanity of midcentury New York City. In Flash, we get a portrait not only of the man (both flawed and deeply talented, with generous appetites for publicity, women, and hot pastrami) but also of the fascinating time and place that he occupied....

Thanks to one reporter's skill, we can fix the exact moment on November 22, 1963 when the world stopped and held its breath: At 12:34 p.m. Central Time, UPI White House reporter Merriman Smith broke the news that shots had been fired at President Kennedy's motorcade. Most people think Walter Cronkite was the first to tell America about the assassination. But when Cronkite broke the news on TV, he read from one of Smith's dispatches.

August 21, 2013: A chemical weapons attack on the suburbs of Damascus reminds the world of the existence of the Syrian war. Hundreds of journalists from every corner of the world rush to the frontier only to leave disappointed when Obama decides not to bomb. They leave behind 200,000 estimated victims, and more than half of a population of 22 million people dispersed or refugeed in nearby countries: the worst humanitarian crisis since WWII according to the UN.

Steadfast in fighting crime, but operating outside the police force - and sometimes even the law - is the private detective. Driven by his own moral code, he is a shadowy figure in a trench coat standing on a street corner, his face most likely obscured by a tilted fedora, a lit cigarette dangling from his hand. The hard-boiled detective is known by his dark past, private pain, and powers of deduction. He only asks questions - never answers them. In his stories he is both the main character and the narrator.