True Crime

It was one of Britain’s most notorious post-war murders. On 7th November 1974, a nanny was bludgeoned to death in a Belgravia basement. Her killer, named as Lord Lucan at the inquest, was never caught.

In Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001, Debbie St. Germain is found dead in her trailer, apparently murdered by her fifth husband. For her twenty-year-old son, Justin, the tragedy marks the line that separates his world into before and after.

Long after his mother's death is solved, Justin still sleeps with a loaded rifle under his bed. Ultimately, he sets out into the desert landscape of his childhood in an attempt to make sense of the unfathomable. Justin's journey takes him back to the ghost town of Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, to the trailers he and Debbie shared, to the string of stepfathers who were a constant presence in his life. He confronts people from his past and delves into the police records in an attempt to make sense of his mother's life and death. All the while he tries to be the type of man she would have wanted him to be.

In 1992, Carnegie Mellon University student Emily Winslow was brutally raped by a male attacker. Despite an exhaustive search, the suspect was never brought to justice. Winslow moved on with her life—but in 2013, she received the shocking news that her rapist had been found. In this personal memoir, Winslow recounts her sexual assault and the years of knowing her attacker was still out there … and the redemption of meeting a fellow victim, now no longer Jane Does, thanks to DNA evidence and unrelenting police work.

One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert, after running through the oceanfront community of Oak Beach screaming for her life, went missing. Seven months later, when an unexpected discovery in a bramble alongside a nearby highway turned up four bodies, all evenly spaced, all wrapped in burlap. But none of them Shannan's.

Award-winning investigative reporter Robert Kolker delivers a haunting and humanizing account of the true-life search for a serial killer still at large on Long Island, in a compelling tale of unsolved murder and Internet prostitution.

Lost Girls is a portrait not just of five women, but of unsolved murder in an idyllic part of America, of the underside of the Internet, and of the secrets we keep without admitting to ourselves that we keep them.

Hell hath no fury like a teenager locked up. This is one sinister plot by a young woman left her mother dead and her father riddled with bullets.

From the outside looking in, Jennifer Pan seemed like a model daughter living a perfect life. But the real Jennifer spent her days in the arms of her high school sweetheart, Daniel Wong.

In an attempt to lead the life she dreamed of, she would do almost anything: forge school documents, invent fake late-night jobs, and lie about her sexual activities. When her father uncovered her lies, his ultimatum was severe. So was her revenge: a plan culminating in murder with one key twist … and it almost worked, except for one bad shot.

Early in the morning of Monday 8 July 1895, thirteen-year-old Robert Coombes and his twelve-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 neighbours, and their mother was visiting her family in Liverpool. Over the next ten 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 from the building.

What does a young footballer do to cut loose? At night, some play what they think of as pranks, or games: night games with women. Sometimes these involve consensual sex, sometimes not, and often the lines are blurred.

In Night Games, Anna Krien follows the rape trial of an Australian Rules footballer. She also takes a balanced and fearless look at the dark side of footy culture — the world of Sam Newman, Ricky Nixon, Matty Johns and the Cronulla Sharks.

Both a courtroom drama and a riveting work of narrative journalism, this is a breakthrough book by one of the leading young lights of Australian writing.

In the course of researching her bestselling novels McDermid has become familiar with every branch of forensics, and now she uncovers the history of this science, real-world murders and the people who must solve them. The dead talk—to the right listener.

They can tell us all about themselves: where they came from, how they lived, how they died, and, of course, who killed them. "Forensics" draws on interviews with some of these top-level professionals, ground-breaking research, and McDermid’s own original interviews and firsthand experience on scene with top forensic scientists. Along the way, McDermid discovers how maggots collected from a corpse can help determine one’s time of death; how a DNA trace a millionth the size of a grain of salt can be used to convict a killer; and how a team of young Argentine scientists led by a maverick American anthropologist were able to uncover the victims of a genocide. It’s a journey that will take McDermid to war zones, fire scenes, and autopsy suites, and bring her into contact with both extraordinary bravery and wickedness, as she traces the history of forensics from its earliest beginnings to the cutting-edge science of the modern day.

On June 22, 1954, teenage friends Juliet Hulme—better known as bestselling mystery writer Anne Perry—and Pauline Parker went for a walk in a New Zealand park with Pauline’s mother, Honora. Half an hour later, the girls returned alone, claiming that Pauline’s mother had had an accident. But when Honora Parker was found in a pool of blood with the brick used to bludgeon her to death close at hand, Juliet and Pauline were quickly arrested, and later confessed to the killing. Their motive? A plan to escape to the United States to become writers, and Honora’s determination to keep them apart.

Over eight terrifying months in the 1970s, seven elderly women were raped and murdered in Columbus, Georgia, a city of 200,000 people whose history and conservative values are typical of America's Deep South. The victims, who were strangled in their beds with their own stockings, were affluent and white, while the police believed from an early stage that the killer was black. In 1986, eight years after the last murder, an African-American, Carlton Gary, was convicted and sentenced to death. Though many in Columbus doubt his guilt, he is still on death row.

‘Violation’ is a tense and gripping drama, its pages filled with evocatively drawn characters, insidious institutions and the extraordinary connections that bind the past and present. A unique mélange of investigative journalism, true crime mystery, personal travelogue and historical scoop, the book is also a compelling, accessible and timely exploration of America's approach to race and criminal justice, addressing the corruption of legal due process as a tool of racial oppression.

Set against the backdrop of the 1920s—a time of prosperity, self-indulgence, and hedonistic excess in a lawless city on the brink of anarchy—For the Thrill of It draws the reader into a world of speakeasies and flappers, of gangsters and gin parties, with a spellbinding narrative of Jazz Age murder and mystery.

We have called him a devil and quarantined him behind such labels as “the most dangerous man alive.” But Charles Manson remains a shocking reminder of our own humanity gone awry. This astonishing book lays bare the life and the mind of a man whose acts have left us horrified. His story provides an enormous amount of new information about his life and how it led to the Tate-LaBianca murders, and reminds us of the complexity of the human condition.

The Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 continue to exert a macabre hold on our imagination. Among the first serial murders, their brutality and bizarreness, and the seeming impossibility of detection have a terrible fascination. What kind of person could have performed such horrific deeds, and could have overstepped the boundary of what marks humankind? How could they not have been caught by the unprecedented police effort? The murders were reported on around the world and the murderer was the first to be given a macabre nickname. He has been the subject of hundreds of books and several films but his identity remains a mystery.

This is the story of the extensive research of John Morris and his late father. Starting with the many unresolved questions about the murders they shockingly concluded that they could be answered if Jack was in reality a woman, not a man. But who could she be?

John Pearson knows more about the Krays than anyone alive. The Krays film was based on his book The Profession of Violence and it was Pearson who exposed the Boothby connection in 1994. In 1967 the twins asked Pearson to write their biography. He remained a confidant of the family and the brothers throughout their trial and prison years. Now Pearson revisits the twins' criminal past and lays bare the truth behind the legend. Drawing upon a mass of first-hand interviews and private information he was unable to use while the Krays were still alive, he finally recounts the chilling untold story of the Kray twins.

Called the "sex slave," and "the girl in the box" case, this is the story behind Colleen Stan's terrifying, seven-year-long imprisonment by Cameron Hooker as told by the district attorney who tried the case. Too bizarre to be anything but true, it is a tale of riveting intensity and gripping courtroom drama.