True Crime England

Who was Kim Philby? Those closest to him—like his fellow MI6 officer and best friend since childhood, Nicholas Elliot, and the CIA’s head of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton—knew him as a loyal confidant and an unshakeable patriot. Philby was a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain’s counterintelligence against the Soviet Union. Together with Elliott and Angleton he stood on the front lines of the Cold War, holding Communism at bay. But he was secretly betraying them both: He was working for the Russians the entire time.

Kaltblütige Morde, tragische Entführungen, niederträchtige Folter, skrupelloser Missbrauch, verhängnisvolle Familiendramen und ein Jahrtausendraub - echte Kriminalfälle aus dem wahren Leben. Beststellerautor und True Crime-Experte Adrian Langenscheid berichtet im dritten Band seiner Buchreihe True Crime International aufs Neue wahrheitsgemäß, sachlich und frei von jeglicher Sensationsgier über schockierende Straftaten aus der unmittelbaren Nachbarschaft. Verbrechen, die sich tatsächlich ereignet haben - und das vor gar nicht allzu langer Zeit.

The New England Mafia was a hugely powerful organization that survived by using violence to ruthlessly crush anyone that threatened it, or its lucrative gambling, loansharking, bootlegging, and other enterprises. From information based on newly declassified documents and the use of underworld sources, Boston Mob spans the gutters and alleyways of East Boston, Providence, and Charlestown to the halls of Congress in Washington, D.C., and Boston's Beacon Hill. Its players include governors and mayors, and the Mafia Commission of New York City.

Britain's Special Air Service - or SAS - was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, gadabout aristocrat whose aimlessness in early life belied a remarkable strategic mind. Where most of his colleagues looked at a battlefield map of World War II's African theater and saw a protracted struggle with Rommel's desert forces, Stirling saw an opportunity: Given a small number of elite, well-trained men, he could parachute behind enemy lines and sabotage their airplanes and war matériel.

In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication. Their lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women. For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that "the Ripper" preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, but it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told.

Part history, part true-crime, and entirely entertaining, listen to the story of how the behemoth Oxford English Dictionary was made. You'll hang on every word as you discover that the dictionary's greatest contributor was also an insane murderer working from the confines of an asylum.

The British Secret Service has been cloaked in secrecy and shrouded in myth since it was created 100 years ago. Our understanding of what it is to be a spy has been largely defined by the fictional worlds of James Bond and John le Carre. MI6 provides a unique and unprecedented insight into this secret world and the reality that lies behind the fiction.

They have names like Barmy Bernie, Daft Donald, and Steamin' Sammy. They like lager (in huge quantities), the queen, football clubs (especially Manchester United), and themselves. Their dislike encompasses the rest of the known universe, and England's soccer thugs express it in ways that range from mere vandalism to riots that terrorize entire cities. Now, Bill Buford, editor of the prestigious journal Granta, enters this alternate society and records both its savageries and its sinister allure.

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.

Gerard Lee Bevan was the black sheep of one of London's most respectable banking families. A high-living womanizer and upper-class shyster of almost pantomime proportions, he exploited a glittering range of social connections. After a long run of success in City dealings he perpetrated a massive fraud which ruined both the City Equitable Fire Insurance Company and his stockbroking firm, Ellis & Co. He fled the country and was eventually arrested, tried, and jailed.

In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection. At the time, the detective was a relatively new invention; there were only eight detectives in all of England and rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher.

Who lived to regret her "deathbed" confession? Was Amelia Dyer mad or wicked? Why did the judiciary look compassionately on women who committed infanticide? Among over 80 women whose stories appear in this book, some were tragic; some were evil; some were mad; and several were undoubtedly innocent of the murders for which they were hanged.

Few outside the security services have heard of 14 Company. As deadly as the SAS yet more secret, the operators of 14 Company are Britain's most effective weapon against international terrorism. For every bomb that goes off, 14 Company prevent 12. The selection process is the most physically, intellectually, and emotionally demanding anywhere in the world. This is the true story of one operator and of some of the most hair-raising military operations ever conducted on the streets of Britain.

Sir Maurice Oldfield was one of the most important British spies of the Cold War era. A farmer's son from a provincial grammar school, Sir Maurice was the first Chief of MI6 who didn't come to the role via the traditional route. Oldfield was the voice of British Intelligence in Washington at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and was largely responsible for keeping the UK out of the Vietnam War. Working his way to the top, he took on the job of rebuilding confidence in the British Secret Service in the wake of the Cambridge spies scandal.

Between them, the three men in the fearsome Pierrepoint dynasty executed over 800 people during a career spanning more than half a century. Henry, his brother Thomas, and his son Albert, dispatched some of the most infamous criminals of the 20th century, and in the process earned a public notoriety that followed them throughout their eventful lives.

In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker, investigated a woman's claim that, aged four, she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. At first incredulous, Margaret discovered that this was just the tip of an enormous iceberg. Up to 150,000 children, some as young as three years old, had been deported from children's homes in Britain and shipped off to a 'new life' in distant parts of the Empire, right up until as recently as 1970. Many were told that their parents were dead, and parents were told that their children had been adopted.

The fascinating, improbable true story of Maxwell Knight - the great MI5 spymaster and inspiration for the James Bond character M. Maxwell Knight was perhaps the greatest spymaster in history. He did more than anyone in his era to combat the rising threat of fascism in Britain during World War II, in spite of his own history inside this movement. He was also truly eccentric - a thrice-married jazz aficionado who kept a menagerie of exotic pets - and almost totally unqualified for espionage. Yet he had a gift for turning practically anyone into a fearless secret agent.

Early in the morning of Monday, July 8, 1895, 13-year-old Robert Coombes and his 12-year-old brother, Nattie, set out from their small, yellow-brick terraced house in East London to watch a cricket match at Lord's. Their father had gone to sea the previous Friday, the boys told their neighbors, and their mother was visiting her family in Liverpool. Over the next 10 days, Robert and Nattie spent extravagantly, pawning their parents' valuables to fund trips to the theatre and the seaside. But as the sun beat down on the Coombes house, a strange smell began to emanate.

Peaky Blinders is a popular BBC television series about an organized crime family in post-World War I Birmingham, England, but does this series depict the factual history of Birmingham? As it turns out, there were Peaky Blinders in Birmingham, and they terrorized those streets long before World War I. The Peaky Blinders rose to prominence in the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions of late Victorian Birmingham in the 1870s. Their ranks were composed of the working poor.