Urban Crime

In working-class Bay Ridge, Michael drives for a car service and gives lifts to his father, a former sanitation worker and current small-time bookie. He has a friend with a heroin habit, and a longtime girlfriend who expects they’ll get married one of these days. Michael spends most of his time on the familiar streets where he grew up, but now he’s crossing the bridge into Manhattan for some college classes—where he meets a seductive female classmate who seems to come from a whole different world.

On March 11, 2003, in Brownsville, Texas - one of America's poorest cities - John Allen Rubio and Angela Camacho murdered their three young children. The apartment building in which the brutal crimes took place was already run down, and in their aftermath a consensus developed in the community that it should be destroyed. It was a place, neighbors felt, that was plagued by spiritual cancer.

Yesterday John Fontanelli was just a pizza delivery guy in New York City. One day later, he's the richest man in the world. One trillion dollars - one million times one million - $1,000,000,000,000: more money than anyone could imagine. For generations the Vacchis, an old Italian family of lawyers and asset managers, had supervised the fortune as it grew over five hundred years, until one particular date that the benefactor had stipulated in his will.

John Ridley is an acclaimed screenwriter and best-selling author. His first novel featuring LAPD mutant hunter Soledad O'Roark, Those Who Walk in Darkness, was an instant hit. Soledad's second adventure finds her hunting down a vigilante who is murdering metanormals indiscriminantly. She has no love for the mutants, but no one is above the law. So with her modified sidearm at her hip, she hits the pavement, determined to dish out some street justice.

Summer in Red Hook, Brooklyn, an isolated blue-collar neighborhood where hipster gourmet supermarkets push against tired housing projects and the East River opens into the bay. Bored and listless, 15-year-olds June and Val are looking for fun. Forget the boys, the bottles, the coded whistles. Val wants to do something wild and a little crazy: take a raft out onto the bay. But on the water during the humid night, the girls disappear. Only Val survives, washing ashore in the weeds, bruised and unconscious.

Detroit hustlers Free and Six have been together seven years, but their relationship has been nothing but drama. Free hasn't been faithful, and Six has taken out her hurt by physically hurting the other women. Free ends up in jail for three years, and when he's sprung, he's not happy to learn that Six has been living the high life on his dime and has blown through $100,000! Then Six gets entangled in one of Free's schemes and finds herself in a role almost too good to be true.

A young journalism student named Coffee is granted the opportunity of a lifetime. During her spring break, she has to follow Mickey Royal around day and night in order to do a report on The Pimp Game. As Coffee accompanies Mickey Royal throughout his daily life, she embarks on an adventure like no other. She immerses herself into the underbelly of the shadow world and learns lessons she won't soon forget.

James Dual, inspired by the racially integrated punky ska revival in England, starts the ON Klub, a ska, soul, and reggae club at the rough and ready pre-gentrified Silver Lake end of Sunset Blvd. He and partner in crime, Drea Dresden, try their best to make the transition out of the '70s in one piece. A journalist friend brings a mob-related music man connected to Bob Marley to visit the club, who becomes obsessed with the charismatic young Jamaican singer Loraine Sulley, who is performing that night.

After a reunion with an old friend goes wrong in a Long Island nightclub, Kasheef Williams is forced to protect himself by any means necessary. The only problem is that prying eyes see everything. Those eyes belong to Alija Bell. She runs, but Kasheef sees her face, and he tells her that it's best for her to get temporary amnesia. Afraid for her life and the safety of her daughter, she keeps her mouth shut, but when a tape of the murder surfaces, the only face that is visible is Alija's. Now the police are looking for their eyewitness.

Dawn and Reese Spencer just can't get ahead. Between her desperate desire to start a family and his gambling debts, they barely keep afloat, even with well-paying Norfolk International port jobs. But their calculating co-worker has the perfect plan: help him smuggle containers of precious, illegal - human - cargo past US Customs. Reese persuades Dawn that no one will get hurt. Then several immigrants turn up dead on arrival. Now the Feds and cold-blooded loan sharks are closing in, as the real brains behind the operation start killing off loose ends.

Before he was trying to save the world, he just wanted to save his own ass. Bill Ryder has a problem: the vampires under his rule don't respect him. Unfortunately, in the world of the supernatural, that makes him as good as dead.

It's been a while since Sadie Fuller has lived a normal life. Her obsessive compulsions make even daily life a constant struggle. Living in New Los Angeles doesn't help either. A haven for Descendants, gods and goddesses that suddenly woke up in mortal bodies, the city is ripe with the mysterious and macabre. But now Sadie is witness to a Descendant murder and thrown into an investigation that will test her in ways she could never have imagined. Soon, she herself becomes the hunted. Who is serially killing the Descendants and why do they want to kill her?

Social scientists have long argued over the links between crime and place. The authors of Communities and Crime provide an intellectual history that traces how varying images of community have evolved over time and influenced criminological thinking and criminal justice policy.

JB runs a private detective agency, but if business doesn’t pick up soon, he’ll have to close the doors for good. When someone steals Hekate’s chalice, JB and his maverick team jump at the chance to track down the supernatural object. They’re resourceful and determined, but can they outsmart wizards, witches, and daemons before the client’s deadline expires?

H is a boxer past his prime. Haunted by the memory of the fight that should have made him great, he is chasing his dream through the seedier side of the London boxing circuit, losing fights against his untalented opponents, his wife and, ultimately, himself. When a gunfight at an illegal gambling shebeen drags him down into a multicultural underworld of violence and extortion, H finds himself in debt to the sinister sociopath, White Alan.

On the mean streets where dog eats dog, there is always one that has sharper claws and bigger teeth, and in New York, her name is Egypt. Never an ordinary girl, Egypt learned the hard way that life, even when it is being kind, is a bastard. A survivor, she did what she needed to make it from day to day. And it turned out she was good at it. Better than good. Egypt grew into an extraordinary woman, cold, ruthless, a killer at heart, and New York witnessed her metamorphosis from that innocent child to the most feared assassin of the age.

Firmly ensconced in the criminal underworld, Carly and Jane Savage, along with girl gang the Unbeatable Bitches, their uncle Eddie and their cousins Dean and Harry, are finally making good money, running dubious errands for the notorious Tallan brothers. Rod and Neil Tallan wield almighty power over their patch, and their reputation for ruthless revenge on traitors is legendary. The Savage sisters feel invincible until trouble arrives in the form of Jack Alexander. Recently released from notorious hellhole prison, nicknamed Monster Mansion, he’s dangerous, ambitious, and broodingly handsome.

They say blood is thicker than water. That's not going to stop it being spilled. Life hasn't been easy for the Miller family. Finally mum Babs has had one bit of luck. She plans to share the profits with her daughters. She thought they'd be pleased.... But money always causes trouble, especially when it's desperately needed. Jen wants to make a better life for her kids. Tiff owes a lot of bad men a lot of money. And Dee is worried that her husband is getting back into the criminal life.

Lily King has spent years behind bars. Convicted of murdering her husband, London villain Leo King, she hasn't been missed. Everyone believes she got what she deserved, but Lily knows she was fitted up. Now she's out, and she doesn't do forgiveness. In her absence things have moved on, and the old order has changed. But now she's ready to reclaim her position as head of the King family. Fuelled by vengeance, Lily King is back, and some people aren't going to know what's hit them.

Paul Reeves is a successful immigration lawyer, but his passion is collecting old maps of New York, tangible records of the city's rich history in an increasingly digital world. One afternoon he attends an auction with his neighbor Jennifer Mehraz, the beautiful young wife of an Iranian financier-lawyer, but halfway through the auction a handsome man in soldier fatigues appears in the aisle and whisks Jennifer away.