Crime City

Police inspector Cecilie Mars is a different kind of cop. She has a heavy cocaine habit, fantasizes about vigilante violence, and constantly falls in love with men she shouldn’t. Late one night, while tailing a suspect, Mars makes an ill-fated choice that has far-reaching consequences. Unluckily for her, her misstep has been observed and filmed. Now, an anonymous foe is threatening to reveal the truth unless she submits to his terrifying agenda.

After a decade of exile precipitated by the tragic death of his mother, Will Seems returns home from Richmond to rural Southside Virginia, taking a job as deputy sheriff in a landscape given way to crime and defeat. Impoverished and abandoned, this remote land of tobacco plantations, razed forests, and boarded up homes seems stuck in the past in a state that is trying to forget its complex history and move on.

Sergeant Wade McKinnon knows who killed Samantha the moment he arrives at her crime scene. Problem is, he watched her killer die a year ago.

Leah Carroll's mother, a gifted amateur photographer, was murdered by two drug dealers with Mafia connections when Leah was four years old. Her father, a charming alcoholic who hurtled between depression and mania, was dead by the time she was 18. Why did her mother have to die? Why did the man who killed her receive such a light sentence? What darkness did Leah inherit from her parents? Leah was left to put together her own future, and now in her memoir she explores the mystery of her parents' lives through interviews and police records.

From the beginnings of big-city police work to the rise of the Mafia, Rogues' Gallery is a colorful and captivating history of crime and punishment in the bustling streets of Old New York.

Carcassonne today is the capital of the Aude department in the Occitanie region of southwestern France, about 58 miles from Toulouse. It lies by the eastward bend of the glittering cobalt waters of the River Aude, which serves as a barrier between the two towns of the city: the Cité and the Ville Basse. It is the old Cité that attracts most of Carcassonne's visitors (three million of them each year), for it houses the historic fortress that looks like it came straight out of a fairy tale. This audiobook examines the origins of the site and its sweeping history.

In fall 1967, friends Linda Tomaszewski and Christine Rothschild are freshmen at the University of Wisconsin. The students in the hippie college town of Madison are letting down their hair - and their guards. But amid the peace rallies lurks a killer. When Christine's body is found, her murder sends shockwaves across college campuses, and the Age of Aquarius gives way to a decade of terror. Linda knows the killer, but when police ignore her pleas, he slips away. For the next forty years, Linda embarks on a cross-country quest to find him.

Eric Ward is still uneasy on the board of merchant bankers Martin & Channing. Their defense against a hostile takeover is pushing the limits of the law. But Eric soon has problems nearer home: his wife’s colleague is charged with the murder of his fiancée in his London flat. He asks Eric to represent him. Eric discovers some very interesting facts about the dead woman. Then Eric is called back to London to deal with the takeover gone wrong.

In Long Island, a farmer found a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discovered a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumbled upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime were turning up all over New York, but the police were baffled: There were no witnesses, no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era's most perplexing murder.

When Malorie witnesses her best friend and roommate leave a campus bar with a mystery date driving a silver Mercedes, she suspects foul play, especially when Lani fails to return home the next day. Both women, med students in their final year at Elliott Bay University, have a lot riding on the line, but no one in her family is worried. When Malorie’s fears for her roommate deepen, she turns to her Uncle Wade, a sergeant at Seattle Homicide. Within 48 hours after Lani goes missing, the partial remains of a brutally murdered young woman wash up on Alki Beach....

A madman is holding Vitoria hostage, killing its citizens in brutal ways and staging the bodies. The city's only hope is a brilliant detective struggling to battle his own demons. Inspector Unai López de Ayala, known as "Kraken", is charged with investigating a series of ritualistic murders. The killings are eerily similar to ones that terrorized the citizens of Vitoria 20 years earlier. But back then, police were sure they had discovered the killer, a prestigious archaeologist who is currently in jail.

Married life for Tap and Pepper isn't turning out quite the way they planned. The ranch is gone and they've moved to Cheyenne where Tap finds himself a job as acting marshal in a town that has little regard for the law. And it's not a pretty sight!

Charles Bowden writes, “this book is not about how the world ends but how a new world is being born.” Murder City explores this new world, focusing on the idea that Mexico is collapsing into a permanent culture of violence. Bowden focuses on Ciudad Juarez, which lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso. Infamously known as the place where women disappear, last year alone 1,607 people were murdered, a number that is set to accelerate in 2009.

It was one of Kieran’s most chilling cases: her assessment of a murderer known as the Fireman. There was no doubt that the man needed to be locked away. Now, Craig is called to a gruesome crime scene that matches the killer’s methods, and news breaks that the Fireman has escaped prison. Amid a citywide manhunt, Kieran and Craig need to untangle a web of deceit, privilege, and greed. They suspect that those closest to the killer have been drawn into his evil, or else someone is using another man’s madness and cruelty to disguise their crimes.

On March 11, 2003, in Brownsville, Texas - one of America's poorest cities - John Allen Rubio and Angela Camacho murdered their three young children. The apartment building in which the brutal crimes took place was already run down, and in their aftermath a consensus developed in the community that it should be destroyed. It was a place, neighbors felt, that was plagued by spiritual cancer.

Former head of the Bonnano crime family, Bill Bonnano, and former undercover FBI agent Joe Pistone (aka Donnie Brasco) have collaborated with David Fisher on a riveting thriller about organized crime.

When Chris Bryson was discovered nude and severely beaten stumbling down Charlotte Street in Kansas City in 1988, police had no idea they were about to discover the den of one of the most sadistic American serial killers in recent history. This is the true story of Robert Berdella, nicknamed by the media the Kansas City Butcher, who from between 1984 and 1988 brutally raped, tortured, and ultimately dismembered six young male prostitutes in his unassuming home on a quiet street in Kansas City.

In the mid-1920s, young children began to vanish from neighborhoods around New York City. It took the police a decade to find their abductor, an unassuming 64-year-old handyman named Albert Fish. Fish had committed crimes of unspeakable horror: He had not only abducted and murdered the children, but also tortured and, in some cases, eaten them. During Fish's trial, some of the country's most prominent psychiatrists debated the exact nature of Fish's crimes. Was he evil or insane? Who had the power to determine where one ended and the other began?

It was a time of unregulated madness. And nowhere was it madder than in Chicago at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties. Speakeasies thrived, gang war shootings announced Al Capone's rise to underworld domination, Chicago's corrupt political leaders fraternized with gangsters, and the frenzy of stock market gambling was rampant. Enter a slick, smooth-talking, charismatic lawyer named Leo Koretz, who enticed hundreds of people (who should have known better) to invest as much as $30 million.

Two thousand arrests. One hundred off-duty arrests. Six thousand assists. Fifteen shootings. Eight shot. Four kills. These are not the performance statistics of an entire NYPD unit. They are the record that makes Detective 2nd Grade Ralph Friedman a legend.