True Crime Fiction

Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar was a devoted family man and a psychopathic killer; a terrible enemy, yet a wonderful friend. While donating millions to the poor, he bombed and tortured his enemies - some had their eyeballs removed with hot spoons. Through ruthless cunning and America's insatiable appetite for cocaine, he became a multi-billionaire, who lived in a $100-million house with its own zoo.

Murder is the most vile crime known to man. It can be triggered by love or money or sex. Those are the three big ticket items for homicide. But people are strange. They will kill for the most obscure and ridiculous of reasons. In 30 years covering murder, I have discovered each one has its own flavour. Cops and friends can be stunned by the evil lurking within a seemingly ordinary man or woman. In this collection of some of the most memorable cases I've reported on, there are serial killers, rich kid monsters, football stars and wives in pursuit of hormone-charged hijinks....

Frank Rodriguez, a much-loved counselor of troubled teens, lies dead on the bedroom floor. His wife and step-daughter are in shock, and so is the medical examiner when he performs the autopsy. Aside from being dead, Frank is in perfect health.

Liz Catalano is shocked when a DNA ancestry test reveals she’s adopted. But she could never have imagined trying to connect with her unknown family would plunge her into an FBI investigation of a notorious serial killer. The Tri-State Killer has been abducting pairs of women for 40 years, evading all police efforts and leaving barely a trace behind. Can Liz figure out who in her new family is the cold-blooded killer? And can she save his newest victims before it’s too late?

Before finding out about girls, Patrick MacKenna had aspired to join the priesthood...the whole good against evil thing intrigued him as a kid growing up in Central New York. Now after marrying young and going through a divorce he’s trying to make it as a cop in his home town of Camillus...but he’s treading water on whether he’ll keep his job on the force. Worse than that, Mac thought all cops were the good guys...he’s slowly finding out on his journey that this might not exactly be the case, and that some true blue brothers weren’t what they were supposed to be at all!

Former actress Becca Ransom lived her dream in Hollywood for seven years before returning to her hometown of Larch Haven, known as the Venice of North America. The Vermont town has canals instead of roads, gondolas instead of cars, and charming cottages plucked from the pages of a fairy tale. It’s also where Becca is pursuing her newest passion as a chocolatier at True Confections, the chocolate shop owned by her grandparents, Lolly and Pops.

After being summarily thrown out of the DEA Task Force, Office Patrick MacKenna finds himself once again pushing a marked police car around on street patrol in the city of Syracuse, New York. The middle-aged cop is reevaluating his law enforcement career while solely taking care of his three children when he receives a call from the captain of the new Abused Persons Unit asking him to come on board. Mac deliberately passed on a transfer request to APU—but now he has a feeling that if he doesn’t take the captain up on her offer, he may never get back to wearing a gold shield again.

In June 1994 the Oakland Tribune cracked the story of a string of bizarre deaths in the San Francisco area. The victims were elderly, well-to-do, and, in each case, had been befriended by members of an extended Gypsy family - the Tene Bimbos.

Twenty years ago, Mari vanished while backpacking through Thailand with her boyfriend, Luke. He was accused of murder, but has always insisted he's innocent. Besides, her body was never found. Now, he's finally ready to talk. And filmmaker Cassidy Chambers wants to be the one to uncover what really happened, back then, in the dark of the jungle. But as she delves deeper into the past, Cassidy begins to fear what lies ahead, and the secrets buried along the way.

Running away from a past she’d rather forget, Doctor Alison Wilson has moved to a new town to take up the role of Medical Officer at failing hospital St Margaret’s. Tasked with shaking things up, she quickly learns that things are worse than they initially seem: patient records are in disarray, staff morale is low, and there’s something afoot that she can’t quite put her finger on As Alison starts to dig into the hospital’s past, she gradually discovers a trail of lies that runs deeper and darker than she could have ever imagined.

Poppy Fields, Hollywood IT girl extraordinaire, accompanies her A-list mother to Paris, and why not? It's Paris! What her mother doesn't know is Poppy's on assignment. Her mission? To help bankrupt a drug cartel. To do that, she must access encrypted account numbers, evade a drug lord with a grudge, dodge a Russian oligarch, and align herself with a man who looks like a Norse god. Oh, and there's that plot - the one to launch a massive attack on the City of Lights.

On the heels of a divorce, a mid-list mystery writer returns to his hometown in Central Connecticut and is dragged back into a decades-old unsolved case involving former missing classmates to expose the horrific secrets of a quaint, idyllic New England town. Fusing the modern domestic psychological thriller with popular unsolved mysteries (Girl on the Train meets In Cold Blood), this meta blend of true crime and fiction plays with expectations and perspective before its mind-blowing conclusion.

With makeup and an affected Elvis pout, Tucson’s Charlie Schmid was a crude parody of a bad-boy heartthrob. In 1964, he still had a hold on girls who’d follow him anywhere. He murdered three of them. It was the dawn of the free-love movement - perfect for a magnetic madman who’d also foreshadow its end a few years later in the malignant charisma of Charles Manson. The inspiration for a classic story by Joyce Carol Oates, Schmid, the most bizarre serial killer of any era, was the epitome of a narcissist flattered into believing he could get away with murder.

A group of friends including Kendall Grey, Riley Panova, Tammy Bridge, and Celine and Corrine DeCaste are seemingly typical teenagers who live in the small town of Rockledge. Their different personalities lead them to adventures around the town; their historical meet-up place, the orange grove; and later to Miami, a place that Kendall has been trying to avoid for unknown reasons.

Sommer 1924. Die beiden Freunde Ludwig und Theo sind gerade auf einer Fahrradtour unterwegs, als Theo plötzlich verschwindet. Hat etwa der Serienmörder, der gerade in Hannover sein Unwesen treibt, etwas damit zu tun? Der Verdacht erhärtet sich, als ein menschlicher Schädel am Ufer der Leine gefunden wird... Wer wird dem Werwolf von Hannover als nächstes zum Opfer fallen?

Revised and updated with new information, this Jane Addams Award-winner is an in-depth examination of the Emmett Till murder case, a catalyst of the civil rights movement.

In der Ehe von Alexander Bergmann und seiner thailändischen Frau Suna stehen die Zeichen auf Sturm. Immer öfter zieht es Suna in ihre Heimat; immer weniger interessiert sie sich für Alexander und sein Leben. Eines Tages ist Suna spurlos verschwunden - und mit ihr die kleine Elara, ihre gemeinsame Tochter. In größter Verzweiflung bittet Alexander eine Freundin, die Psychologin Florentine Fuchs, um Hilfe. Als er unangemeldet in ihre Praxis stürmt, sitzt dort ihr neuester Klient, ein Mann, dem sie gerade mühsam klarzumachen versucht, dass jeder einmal eine Ruhepause braucht.

Everyone eventually loses their childhood dreams. It's a fact of life, an indelible element of growing up. You get wiser, older, more jaded, and realize that all the things you wanted when you were young are impractical. Difficult. Impossible, maybe. This is the story of a man who never gave up on his childhood dream: to become an actor. But when the television and film markets proved a tough nut to crack, he took his acting skills to the streets and used them as a con man.

Cowboy stories and movies about the Wild West are full of amazing characters. Yet many of the lawmen we think of as heroes were anything but - some were violent scoundrels and outlaws themselves. Among all the lawmen of the frontier, one man stands out as a true hero: Bass Reeves. In his day, Bass Reeves was the most successful federal marshal in the United States. True to the mythical code of the West, he never drew his gun first. He rounded up hundreds of outlaws and was shot at countless times but was never hit. Bass Reeves was born into slavery.

Acclaimed author of The Real Lolita and editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America) and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin), Sarah Weinman brings together an exemplary collection of recent true-crime tales. She culls together some of the most refreshing and exciting contemporary journalists and chroniclers of crime working today.