English True Crime

Genovese, Gambino, Bonnano, Colombo, and Lucchese. For decades these Five Families ruled New York and built the American Mafia (or Cosa Nostra) into an underworld empire. Today, the Mafia is an endangered species, battered and beleaguered by aggressive investigators, incompetent leadership, betrayals, and generational changes that produced violent, unreliable leaders and recruits.

Acclaimed journalist Randall Sullivan follows Russell Poole, a highly decorated LAPD detective who in 1997 was called to investigate a controversial cop-on-cop shooting, eventually to discover that the officer killed was tied to Marion “Suge” Knight’s notorious gangsta rap label, Death Row Records. During his investigation, Poole came to realize that a growing cadre of black officers were allied not only with Death Row, but with the murderous Bloods street gang. And incredibly, Poole began to uncover evidence that at least some of these “gangsta cops” may have been involved in the murders of rap superstars Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur.

United States of True Crime is an anthology series with books devoted to the most disturbing cases in each of the 50 states. This book focuses on twenty of the most chilling crimes in Florida history.

A deeply engaging and completely original book about nineteenth-century Britain’s fascination with good quality murder. Murder in nineteenth-century Britain was ubiquitous – not necessarily in quantity but in quality. This was the era of penny-bloods, early crime fiction and melodramas for the masses.

November 22, 2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the tragedy that has haunted America ever since. For the first time, this concise and compelling book pierces the veil of secrecy to fully document the small, tightly-held conspiracy that killed President John F. Kennedy. It explains why he was murdered, and how it was done in a way that forced many records to remain secret for almost 50 years. The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination draws on exclusive interviews with more than two dozen associates of John and Robert Kennedy.

Engrossed by the short lives of innocent victims, Stowers uses The Girl in the Grave...and Other True Crime Stories to tell the tales of devastated parents dealing with evil forces and unanswered questions that invaded their once normal lives, and the effect on the law enforcement officers duty-bound to involve themselves in such evil and troubling situations, investigating and seeking resolve and justice.

To their coworkers, neighbors, and others who knew them, they led unremarkable lives. They had careers as military pilots, police officers, landscapers, small business owners, farmers, realtors, reporters, authors, veterinary technicians, nurses, doctors, handymen, painters, and chefs, while they simultaneously stalked city suburbs, college campuses, trailer parks, and red-light districts. This chilling book looks at the horrifying stories of nearly thirty malevolent killers who were mistakenly trusted.

Dock Boss: Eddie McGrath and the West Side Waterfront is the fascinating account of one gangster's ascension from altar boy to the leader of New York City's violent Irish Mob. Eddie McGrath's life and crimes are traced through the tail-end of Prohibition, the gang warfare of the 1930s that propelled him into the position of an organized crime boss, the sordid years of underworld control over the bustling waterfront, McGrath's involvement in dozens of gangland murders, and finally the decline of the dock mobsters following a period of longshoremen rebellion in the 1950s.

I order another bourbon, neat. This is the drink that will flip the switch. I don’t even know how I got here, to this place, to this point. Something is happening to me lately. I’m drinking too much. My sheets are soaking wet when I wake up from nightmares of decaying corpses. I order another drink and swig it, trying to forget about the latest case I can’t shake. Crime solving for me is more complex than the challenge of the hunt, or the process of piecing together a scientific puzzle. The thought of good people suffering drives me to the point of obsession.

It started with a college course assignment, then escalated into a dangerous obsession. Eighteen-year-old honor student Jason Moss wrote to men whose body counts had made criminal history: men named Dahmer, Manson, Ramirez, and Gacy. Posing as their ideal victim, Jason seduced them with his words. One by one they wrote him back, showering him with their madness and violent fantasies. Then the game spun out of control. John Wayne Gacy revealed all to Jason - and invited his pen pal to visit him in prison.... It was an offer Jason couldn't turn down. Even if it made him....

Forty years before the names Snowden and Manning entered the world's cultural lexicon, Christopher Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee became America's youngest convicted spies - condemned to federal prison in 1977 for their roles in one of the most highly publicized espionage cases in Cold War history. Yet the story of their crime, as told in the book and movie The Falcon and the Snowman, was only the beginning.

In 2019, veteran journalist Mark Seal began investigating the suspicious death of music mogul Peter Ikin. Just 32 days before he was found dead in his Paris hotel room, Ikin had married a handsome, debonair Frenchman named Alexandre, who would claim to be entitled to his late husband’s fortune. As Seal dug into the case, he had no idea that tracing the incredible life of Alexandre Despallieres would take him from Paris to London to Beverly Hills, and unspool a web of intricate plots and deceptions.

From the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist, a gripping exploration of class, race, friendship, sexuality, what an author owes her subject and what it means to be a good person—all wrapped up in a riveting Canadian true crime story.

Widowed in Memphis during 1932, Cecile Dowd is struggling to provide for her three-year-old daughter. Unwittingly trusting a neighbor puts little Millie Mae into the clutches of Georgia Tann, corrupt Memphis Tennessee Children's Home Society director suspected of the disappearance of hundreds of children. With the help of a sympathetic lawyer, the search for Millie uncovers a deep level of corruption that threatens their very lives.

On May 5, 1981, three rebellious members of New York's Bonanno crime family were gunned down in a Brooklyn social club. One of the gunmen was Vito Rizzuto, a man who would rise to the top of the underworld in Canada and then expand his reign across continents to become a global superboss. The Sixth Family, now revised and updated, reveals the hidden history of the rise of the Rizzuto clan, the alliances it forged around the world, and the bloody events that led to charges against Vito Rizzuto in the United States and Italy for racketeering and corruption.

For more than 20 years, Joseph "Big Joey" Massino ran what was called the largest criminal network in the US, employing over 250 made men and untold numbers of associates. The Bonanno family was responsible for over 30 murders, even killing a dozen of its own members. He would be brought down by Salvatore "Good Looking Sal" Vitale, the underboss who was not only Massino's closest and most trusted friend but also his brother-in-law. King of the Godfathers is the story of the brutal mob war that made Massino head of the Bonanno family and the most powerful gangster in America.

A real-life thriller in the vein of The Devil in the White City, Kate Winkler Dawson's debut, Death in the Air, is a gripping, historical narrative of a serial killer, an environmental disaster, and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing. In winter 1952, London automobiles and thousands of coal-burning hearths belched particulate matter into the air. But the smog that descended on December fifth of 1952 was different; it was a type that held the city hostage for five long days.

In the early morning of October 18, 1986, Cherie Wier’s life collapses when her teenage son takes the life of her beloved husband. For years, Cherie grapples with events preceding and following the crime, struggling to overcome the consuming grief she suffers from her loss and the difficulty she faces as she attempts to forgive her son. The courtroom accounts of gruesome details and the shocking testimonies from experts only add to Cherie’s yearning to make sense of the crime. She is tormented, wanting to know why the tragedy happened, and if there was anything she could have done.

What would you do if your son suddenly disappeared in Syria, and you had no idea what had happened to him? Would you contact the FBI? The State Department? Pray? Would you Google “What to do if your son disappears in Syria”? When the unthinkable happened, the answer, in the case of Ann Goodwin and her husband Tag, was: all of the above. Their 30-year-old son Sam, who was attempting to become one of the few people in history to travel to every single country on the planet, vanished in a supposed safe-zone run by the Kurds on the Turkish border.

When Max Marshall arrived on the campus of the College of Charleston in 2018, he hoped to investigate a small-time fraternity Xanax trafficking ring. Instead, he found a homicide, several student deaths, and millions of dollars circulating around the Deep South. He also opened up an elite world hidden to outsiders. Behind the pop culture cliches of “Greek life” lies one of the major breeding grounds of American power: 80 percent of Fortune 500 executives, 85 percent of Supreme Court justices, and all but four presidents since 1825 have been fraternity members.