Crime City

Almost a hundred years ago, a major terrestrial event reshaped the Earth’s coastlines. Goodbye entire cities. Goodbye entire states. Goodbye entire countries. And when the authorities outlawed salvaging from these sunken sites, why, say hello to a new breed of criminal: underwater reclamation specialists. Even a hundred years later, there’s still a whole lot of loot for the reclaiming.

In this second collection of connected essays, Chicago cop Martin Preib takes on seemingly unrelated murder cases, all dating from one year (1982), including some in which offenders were released as part of the wrongful conviction movement. This audiobook shatters listener assumptions - about the workings of justice, the objectivity of the media, and the role of the police in the city of Chicago, even calling into question allegations of police torture in the notorious cases against Jon Burge.

Kane Kulpa learned which laws could be bent and which broken after a short stint in prison courtesy of Detective Vincent Bayonne. Bound by time, integrity, and the reality of life in Central City, Bayonne and Kane made peace with the past. Now, gang tension spirals from corrupt to deadly, and a series of murders stresses Kane and Bayonne’s uneasy alliance. Kane balances on a razor’s edge to protect his bar, power, life, and family, and Bayonne hustles to keep another lonely man from being strangled.

Rabato Sabato aka Soni Dike is a Lagos big boy: a criminal turned grandee, with a beautiful wife, a sea-side mansion, and a questionable fortune. Then one day he disappears and his car is found in a ditch, music blaring from the speakers. Soni’s older brother, Abel Dike, a teacher, arrives in Lagos to look for his missing brother. Abel is rapidly sucked into the unforgiving Lagos maelstrom where he has to navigate encounters with a motley cast of common criminals and policemen intent on getting a piece of the pie, and contend with his growing attraction for his brother’s wife.

Twenty-two-year-old Charlotte Ford reconnects with Danielle, her best friend from high school, a few days before Danielle is found bludgeoned to death in a motel room. In the wake of the murder, Charlotte's life unravels and she descends into the city's underbelly, where she meets the strippers, pornographers and drug dealers who surrounded Danielle in the years they were estranged. Ginsburg's Houston is part of a lesser known south, where the urban and rural collide gracelessly.

Sharon Simpson spent 15 of her younger years in Morgan City, Louisiana, a small, blue-collar town along the Atchafalaya River Delta. Morgan City was living large during the big oil days in the 1970s, yet no one expected what was about to happen to the town. The booming oil industry was desperate for workers to fill positions and used a “trawling net approach” to hire any warm body - as long as the work was getting done on schedule. The heart of the issue - money and greed - led to the hiring of a damaged man who went on a spree, raping and murdering several local teens...

Grace Scott returns from her honeymoon with her new husband, Mac, to find a man lying dead in their Edinburgh flat. They don't know who he is or where he's come from. Then, three months later, Grace finds a note tucked inside one of the wedding gifts, sending her on a journey to discover what really happened - a journey that becomes more dangerous the closer she comes to the truth. What she discovers will change her life forever.

One after another, they appear by the sides of suburban roads and freeways - the naked, strangled bodies of women who have been raped, tortured, and left for dead. Police begin to suspect that their target is a rogue operator who has emerged from their own ranks. And then, all hell breaks loose in Los Angeles. An arrest in the strangling murders of two co-eds across state lines finally leads to a break in the case, but the suspect is someone, or something, the investigators could have ever expected.

In the wake of a tragedy, 13-year-old Graham moves with his family to Beirut, Lebanon, a city on the edge of the sea and cataclysmic violence. Inquisitive and restless by nature, Graham suspects his State Department father is a CIA operative, and that their family’s fragile domesticity is merely a front for American efforts along the nearby Israeli border. Over the course of one year, 1974, Graham’s life will utterly change. Two men are murdered, his parent’s marriage disintegrates, and Graham, along with his two ex-pat friends, run afoul of forces they cannot understand.

Brandon Blake, the tough and resourceful kid from the Portland waterfront, has made it. He's been hired by the Portland Police Department, partly as payback for stopping a vicious cop killer in Port City Shakedown. But the newest rookie on the night shift isn't pulling any punches. And when a drug-addled mom can't find her baby, Blake - whose mother left him and was killed when he was a toddler - comes down on her hard. Except the baby really is gone.

Even before he was shot dead on the stairway of the tony Grand Central Hotel in 1872, financier James “Jubilee Jim” Fisk, Jr., was a notorious New York City figure. From his audacious attempt to corner the gold market in 1869 to his battle for control of the geographically crucial Erie Railroad, Fisk was a flamboyant exemplar of a new financial era marked by volatile fortunes and unprecedented greed and corruption. But it was his scandalously open affair with a showgirl named Josie Mansfield that ultimately led to his demise.

Year 2150: Eight years after the murder of Akira Kimura, Water City’s renowned scientist and anointed “God,” the nameless antihero who tracked down Akira’s killer, is no longer a detective, but a stay-at-home dad. While his wife climbs the corporate ladder of the city’s police department, he raises his daughter and occasionally takes the odd job as a bounty hunter. His domestic bliss is threatened when Ascalon’s Scar—the mark left by Akira’s destruction of Sessho-seki—vanishes from the sky and a familiar face thought dead returns from the ocean depths to exact revenge on humanity.

Would you turn criminal to save a child? Desperate to save his dying nephew, Mitch Walker agrees to commit a dangerous crime, in exchange for life-saving medicine. But things go horribly wrong and he sets off a chain reaction of kidnapping, carnage, and chaos. Hunted by ruthless criminals, Mitch's only hope is a cop named Betts, who wants him behind bars. But the game is about to change.

A Narc’s Tale is a four-book series that is a first-hand account of stories, written like a memoir or personal diary, which gives you an inside glimpse of what it is like working six years deep undercover in the dangerous drug world as a city cop (Vol. 1), county vice and narcotics investigator (Vol. 2 and 3), and special agent with the US Drug Enforcement Administration (Vol. 4). Most undercover books only show this from one perspective, but you will get three here - city, county and federal - and realize the differences among them.

Thirteen-year-old Boli and his friends are deep in the middle of a game of marbles. An older boy named Mosca has won the prized Devil's Fire marble. His pals are jealous and want to win it away from him. This is Izayoc, the place of tears, a small pueblo in a tiny valley west of Mexico City where nothing much happens. It's a typical hot Sunday morning except that on the way to church, someone discovers the severed head of Enrique Quintanilla propped on the ledge of one of the cement planters in the plaza, and everything changes.

Mitch Walker is so desperate to save his dying nephew, he commits an insanely dangerous crime in exchange for life-saving medicine. But things go horribly wrong and he unknowingly triggers a chain reaction of carnage, chaos, and murder. Hunted by a ruthless crime syndicate, Mitch's only hope is a cop named Betts who wants him behind bars. When the crime syndicate employs dark tech, the investigation takes an unexpected turn that nobody sees coming. Driven by the faint hope of saving the sick child, both Betts and Walker find themselves working together in a fight for survival.

Absolute Madness tells the disturbing true story of Joseph Christopher, a white serial killer who targeted black males and struck fear into the residents of Buffalo and New York City in the 1980s. Dubbed both the .22-Caliber Killer and the Midtown Slasher, Christopher allegedly claimed eighteen victims during a savage four-month spree across the state.

Peter Rena is a "fixer". He and his partner, Randi Brooks, earn their living making the problems of the powerful disappear. They get their biggest job yet when the White House hires them to vet the president's nominee for the Supreme Court. Judge Roland Madison is a legal giant, but he's a political maverick, with views that might make the already tricky confirmation process even more difficult.

It was my father’s arrest that brought me here, although you could certainly say that I took the scenic route. Here is rehab, where Ben - the only son of a rich South Dublin banker - is piecing together the shattered remains of his life. Abruptly cut off, at the age of 27, from a life of heedless privilege, Ben flounders through a world of drugs and dead-end jobs, his self-esteem at rock bottom. Even his once-adoring girlfriend, Clio, is at the end of her tether. Then Ben runs into an old school friend who wants to cut him in on a scam.

Vienna. A city of history and culture, where Mozart, Freud, and Beethoven once walked the streets. For American university student Jake Meyer, it is a chance to recover from a family tragedy he left behind. Surrounded by the baroque palaces and charming squares of the city, he hopes to pull his life back together.