True Crime Authors

Based on exclusive new information, Submerged, a compelling true crime drama, exposes hidden angles of a case that captivated and divided an ordinary American community, tore apart two families, and tested the criminal justice system. Compelled by conscience and curiosity, former Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Janice (Morse) Hisle - who covered the saga of Ryan and Sarah Widmer from the start - returns 10 years later to dig deep to tell the untold story

Donna Freitas has lived two lives. In one life, she is a well-published author and respected scholar who has traveled around the country speaking about Title IX, consent, religion, and sex on college campuses. In the other, she is a victim, a woman who suffered and suffers still because she was stalked by her graduate professor for more than two years.

On September 26, 2014, 43 male students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College went missing in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. According to official reports, the students commandeered several buses to travel to Mexico City to commemorate the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre. During the journey, local police intercepted the students and a confrontation ensued. By the morning, they had disappeared without a trace. Hernández reconstructs almost minute-by-minute the events of those nights in late September 2014, giving us what is surely the most complete picture available.

Criminal exploits, secret agent intrigue, and clever disguises fill the pages of Francois Eugene Vidocq’s memoirs. A legendary figure in history, Vidocq is known as the first detective and an inspiration to great writers such as Honore de Balzac, Victor Hugo and Edgar Allen Poe. As a player in the criminal underworld, Vidocq is a master of disguises and an accomplished thief, eventually turning his unlawful talents toward catching criminals as the first French chief of secret police.

This gripping historical crime fiction novel, based on fact, is set in Bradford, England, 1888. It explores the horrific murder of Johnny Gill; a murder and mutilation so gruesome, it stuns a nation. Even hardened detectives are affected by its savagery, swiftly comparing it to the work of Jack the Ripper.

Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a black sheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder.

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.

Computer engineer, Selina Co, becomes a hacker and actress who scams the scammer and captures his real information. Join Selina's adventure and her interaction with lawyers, police, hackers, banks and organizations...But...why did this computer engineer fall victim in the first place, when she was not even in love with the fraudster? Will Selina be able to save the love of her life, Jason, who is believed to be in another romance scam?

In the 1970s, a mysterious man captivated and terrorized a small Alabama town. He was elegant and handsome, a charismatic pastor and leader in the African American community. But rumors swirled. "Preaching on Sunday," people would say, "killing on Monday." Far away in New York City, one of America’s most beloved writers was about to get caught up in the strange and violent tale of Reverend Willie J. Maxwell. Harper Lee, author of the modern-day classic To Kill a Mockingbird, was searching for her next book when the perfect story came her way.

My name is Patrick Harrington, and they called me The Breeze. I trafficked drugs throughout the American southwest for fifteen years. I had the merchandise to take away people’s troubles, and then I was gone like a breeze. But no matter how many people I dealt oblivion to, I could never escape my demons. This is how a lifetime of trauma, dysfunction, bad choices, and addiction was healed and redeemed. With his characteristic wit, humor, and brutal honesty, Patrick brings you along for the roller coaster ride that was his life.

The doorbell rings in the home of a prominent Palm Beach citizen, quickly followed by a shotgun blast that shatters a window, cracking the calm of a cool January night. Rodger Kriger falls to the floor, mortally wounded, leaving a wife and six children. Murder in Palm Beach: The Homicide That Never Died is closely based on a sensational, real murder that happened in the posh oceanside town in 1976. In the thin guise of fiction, the audiobook contains shocking new information never before made public.

Author Jason Ryan takes us back to the heady days before drug smuggling was synonymous with deadly gunplay. During this golden age of marijuana trafficking, the country's most prominent kingpins were a group of wayward and fun-loving Southern gentlemen who forsook college educations to sail drug-laden luxury sailboats across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean. Les Riley, Barry Foy, and their comrades eschewed violence as much as they loved pleasure, and it was greed, lust, and disaster at sea that ultimately caught up with them, along with the law.

London. 1910. A procession of well-attired gentlemen and ladies are clearly out of place among the stalls and pushcarts of the Whitechapel District. As the group makes its way through the crowded streets, the tour guide stops now and then to point out various places where the mutilated bodies of the women had been found. Although the murders occurred twenty-two years prior, the man leading the group seems to know every detail and aspect of each slaying. Of those things he does not know, he offers freely his own insightful conjecture.

Kelly Carlisle was three weeks old when her mother was strangled in downtown Los Angeles, leaving Kelly in the care of her grandfather, an eccentric Englishman who owned a porn store and lived on a boat in the harbor. It is here that Kelly finds a home among friendly alcoholics and the city's forgotten residents. But she can't help but wonder if she is destined to become a part of the dysfunction that surrounds her.

Back then, hot-headed gangsters, not-so-gentle dames and bullet-riddled corpses filled the newspaper headlines. And some of the stories below the headlines were even true. The 1920s was a period in American history when even the respectable were unwilling to stay sober. And not-so-fast cars carried assassins across Chicago, a city that for many captures the essence of the USA. In Tough Guys in the Room, the story of Al Capone and his rivals is told in separate and stand-alone topics that cover key figures and events.

Throughout John Mortimer's career, he established profound friendships with people accused of various crimes. He also indulged his passion for writing, penning Paradise Postponed and a series of stories about Rumpole, for whom he was often mistaken. With wit, wisdom and tenderness, he has written the story of his life.

Miriam Giles ran away to Colorado to bury her violent past - but this seductive, charismatic widow has a dark side that could never stay buried. After finding the "sugar daddy" she was looking for in Alan Helmick, her new marriage seemed happy. Then, two years later, Alan meets a gruesome fate. Returning home from errands, Miriam finds him lying in a pool of blood. Miriam shows police a cryptic note warning her to "run, run, run". But Miriam is no distraught housewife.

After a wealthy woman was brutally murdered in her Glasgow home in 1908, the police found a convenient suspect in Oscar Slater, an immigrant Jewish cardsharp. Though he was known to be innocent, Slater was tried, convicted, and consigned to life at hard labor. Outraged by this injustice, Arthur Conan Doyle, already world famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, used the methods of his most famous character to reinvestigate the case, ultimately winning Slater’s freedom.

In 1932, the city of Natchez, Mississippi, reckoned with an unexpected influx of journalists and tourists as the lurid story of a local murder was splashed across headlines nationwide. Two eccentrics, Richard Dana and Octavia Dockery, enlisted an African American man named George Pearls to rob their reclusive neighbor, Jennie Merrill, at her estate. During the attempted robbery, Merrill was shot and killed.

A notorious white supremacist named Richard Barrett was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 2010 by a young Black man named Vincent McGee. At first the murder seemed a twist on old Deep South race crimes. But then new revelations and complications came to light. Maybe it was a dispute over money rather than race - or, maybe and intriguingly, over sex.