Books with category 🚨 True Crime
Displaying 14 books

Project Terror

2018

by Jamal Lewis

In a street war, there's always a body to be discovered.

Lamar Dunken is a dedicated monster who presents the perfect image of a street terrorist. He knows how to respond when a desperate crisis threatens his operation, and he exacts horrifying tactics to get things under control.

FBI Special Agent Livingston is faced with the serious task of investigating Lamar's tactics while connecting killings start to terrorize Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs.

Also, a violent criminal locked behind bars a year before Lamar was even born is back on the streets and looking for him. Lamar is forced to call on his deepest strength to face his accusers and ensure that the values that he holds most dear will survive.

The nightmare has begun. Again. And, over again.

The Speed of Life

The Speed of Life launches with a crime so horrific that if the first great tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—had imagined it, no historical record remains to prove it.

From themes as modern as #MeToo to leitmotifs of Greek tragedy, the novel tells the stories of diverse characters who are brought together by the seminal crime and rewards the reader with psychological revelations worthy of Stendhal.

From the courtroom to the swamp primeval to the underpinnings of the universe, James Jordan takes us on a wild ride. This ground-breaking, scientific/philosophical novel is wrapped in a Carl Hiaasen-flavored thriller. Jordan relates cutting-edge theoretical physics to ancient Seminole shamanistic practices and produces a credible explanation of why and how old magical methods may have tangible effects in our world.

At the same time, this novel is sparklingly contemporary, bright and crisp around the edges of its plot, and ingenious in braiding elaborate storylines to bring an extraordinary cast of characters together. And it fires itself forward at a break-neck velocity; this is not a book you will want to put down.

It blends human courage and cruelties with solid astrophysics and with Seminole culture and mythology—resulting in a richness that holds you tightly in its grip.

Cut and Run

2018

by Mary Burton

Twin sisters separated by the past are reunited by unspeakable crimes in New York Times bestselling author Mary Burton’s throat-clutching novel of suspense. Trauma victims are not new to medical examiner Faith McIntyre, but this one is different. The unconscious woman clinging to life after a hit and run is FBI agent Macy Crow. What the woman from Quantico was doing in a dark alley after midnight is just one mystery. The other is more unsettling: Macy is Faith’s mirror image—the twin sister she never knew she had.

Faith knew that she was adopted, but now she’s finding that her childhood concealed other secrets. Following the trail of clues Macy left behind, Faith and Texas Ranger Mitchell Hayden make a shocking discovery on an isolated country ranch—a burial ground for three women who disappeared thirty years before.

They weren’t the only victims in a killer’s twisted plot. And they won’t be the last. As the missing pieces of Faith’s and Macy’s dark lives snap into place, Faith is becoming more terrified by what she sees—and by what she must do to save her sister and herself from the past.

Billion Dollar Whale

Billion Dollar Whale reveals the epic story of how a young social climber from Malaysia, Jho Low, pulled off one of the biggest financial heists in history. In 2009, Low set in motion a fraud that would symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system.

With the aid of Goldman Sachs and others, Low siphoned billions of dollars from an investment fund, all under the watchful eyes of global financial industry watchdogs. His elaborate schemes financed elections, luxury real estate, extravagant parties, and even Hollywood films like The Wolf of Wall Street.

This harrowing parable of hubris and greed in the financial world is a classic tale of a 'modern Gatsby', who emerged from obscurity to orchestrate a heist that shook the financial industry, and how this industry let it happen.

Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America's Strangest Jail

2018

by Rusty Young

Rusty Young was backpacking in South America when he heard about Thomas McFadden, a convicted English drug trafficker who ran tours inside Bolivia's notorious San Pedro prison. Intrigued, the young Australian journalist went to La Paz and joined one of Thomas's illegal tours. They formed an instant friendship and then became partners in an attempt to record Thomas's experiences in the jail. Rusty bribed the guards to allow him to stay and for the next three months he lived inside the prison, sharing a cell with Thomas and recording one of the strangest and most compelling prison stories of all time.

The result is Marching Powder. This book establishes that San Pedro is not your average prison. Inmates are expected to buy their cells from real estate agents. Others run shops and restaurants. Women and children live with imprisoned family members. It is a place where corrupt politicians and drug lords live in luxury apartments, while the poorest prisoners are subjected to squalor and deprivation. Violence is a constant threat, and sections of San Pedro that echo with the sound of children by day house some of Bolivia's busiest cocaine laboratories by night. In San Pedro, cocaine—"Bolivian marching powder"—makes life bearable. Even the prison cat is addicted.

Yet Marching Powder is also the tale of friendship, a place where horror is countered by humor and cruelty and compassion can inhabit the same cell. This is cutting-edge travel-writing and a fascinating account of infiltration into the South American drug culture.

The World of Lore: Wicked Mortals

2018

by Aaron Mahnke

A chilling, lavishly illustrated Who's Who of the most despicable people ever to walk the earth, featuring both rare and best-loved stories from the hit podcast Lore, soon to be an online streaming series.

Here are the incredible true stories of some of the mortals who achieved notoriety in history and folklore through horrible means. Monsters of this sort—serial killers, desperate criminals, and socially mobile people with a much darker double-life—are, in fact, quite real, including:

  • H. H. Holmes, the infamous Chicago serial killer;

  • William Brodie, the Edinburgh criminal mastermind who inspired The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde;

  • And Bela Kiss, a Hungarian tinsmith with a most disturbing hobby: collecting women in gasoline drums.

This riveting best-of-the-worst roundup will haunt your thoughts, chill your bones, and leave you wondering if there are mortal monsters lurking even closer than you think.

Dark Places

2018

by Gillian Flynn

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl, and the basis for the major motion picture starring Charlize Theron Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas.” She survived—and famously testified that her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, the Kill Club—a secret society obsessed with notorious crimes—locates Libby and pumps her for details. They hope to discover proof that may free Ben. Libby hopes to turn a profit off her tragic history: She’ll reconnect with the players from that night and report her findings to the club—for a fee. As Libby’s search takes her from shabby Missouri strip clubs to abandoned Oklahoma tourist towns, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started—on the run from a killer.

The 17th Suspect

Sergeant Lindsay Boxer puts her life on the line to protect San Francisco from a shrewd and unpredictable killer.

When a series of shootings exposes San Francisco to a mysterious killer, a reluctant woman decides to put her trust in Sergeant Lindsay Boxer. The confidential informant's tip leads Lindsay to a disturbing conclusion: something has gone horribly wrong inside the police department.

The hunt for the killer lures Lindsay out of her jurisdiction and impacts her in dangerous ways. She suffers unsettling medical symptoms, and her friends in the Women's Murder Club warn her against taking the crimes to heart. But with lives at stake, the detective can't help but follow the case into terrifying terrain.

A decorated officer, loving wife, devoted mother, and loyal friend, Lindsay has always acted with unwavering integrity. But now she is confronting a killer who is determined to undermine it all.

The Girl in the Ice

2018

by Robert Bryndza

Her eyes are wide open. Her lips parted as if to speak. Her dead body frozen in the ice…

She is not the only one. When a young boy discovers the body of a woman beneath a thick sheet of ice in a South London park, Detective Erika Foster is called in to lead the murder investigation. The victim, a beautiful young socialite, appeared to have the perfect life. Yet when Erika begins to dig deeper, she starts to connect the dots between the murder and the killings of three prostitutes, all found strangled, hands bound, and dumped in water around London.

What dark secrets is the girl in the ice hiding? As Erika inches closer to uncovering the truth, the killer is closing in on Erika. The last investigation Erika led went badly wrong, resulting in the death of her husband. With her career hanging by a thread, Erika must now battle her own personal demons as well as a killer more deadly than any she’s faced before. But will she get to him before he strikes again?

Los Divinos

2018

by Laura Restrepo

Un crimen real que conmovió a una sociedad entera. Un alegato contra el feminicidio, por una de las autoras más importantes en español.

El cuerpo de una niña es encontrado flotando en el agua en lo que parece un ritual. En el fondo de este episodio se encuentra el mundo superficial de unos jóvenes ricos y exitosos que mantienen desde la infancia una hermandad maligna y que contrasta con el de la víctima, pobre, sobreviviente de la violencia de su lugar de origen.

Los divinos es la recreación hecha desde la ficción de un crimen real pero, sobre todo, es la novela más importante de una de las mejores escritoras de Latinoamérica.

Una historia basada en uno de los crímenes más impactantes cometidos en Colombia en los últimos años.

The Tea Master and the Detective

Welcome to the Scattered Pearls Belt, a collection of ring habitats and orbitals ruled by exiled human scholars and powerful families, and held together by living mindships who carry people and freight between the stars. In this fluid society, human and mindship avatars mingle in corridors and in function rooms, and physical and virtual realities overlap, with the appearance of environments easily modified and adapted to interlocutors or current mood.

A transport ship discharged from military service after a traumatic injury, The Shadow's Child now ekes out a precarious living as a brewer of mind-altering drugs for the comfort of space-travellers. Meanwhile, abrasive and eccentric scholar Long Chau wants to find a corpse for a scientific study. When Long Chau walks into her office, The Shadow's Child expects an unpleasant but easy assignment. When the corpse turns out to have been murdered, Long Chau feels compelled to investigate, dragging The Shadow's Child with her.

As they dig deep into the victim's past, The Shadow's Child realises that the investigation points to Long Chau's own murky past--and, ultimately, to the dark and unbearable void that lies between the stars...

I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

A masterful true crime account of the Golden State Killer—the elusive serial rapist turned murderer who terrorized California for over a decade—from Michelle McNamara, the gifted journalist who died tragically while investigating the case."You’ll be silent forever, and I’ll be gone in the dark."For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area.Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called "the Golden State Killer." Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was.At the time of the crimes, the Golden State Killer was between the ages of eighteen and thirty, Caucasian, and athletic—capable of vaulting tall fences. He always wore a mask. After choosing a victim—he favored suburban couples—he often entered their home when no one was there, studying family pictures, mastering the layout. He attacked while they slept, using a flashlight to awaken and blind them. Though they could not recognize him, his victims recalled his voice: a guttural whisper through clenched teeth, abrupt and threatening.I’ll Be Gone in the Dark—the masterpiece McNamara was writing at the time of her sudden death—offers an atmospheric snapshot of a moment in American history and a chilling account of a criminal mastermind and the wreckage he left behind. It is also a portrait of a woman’s obsession and her unflagging pursuit of the truth. Framed by an introduction by Gillian Flynn and an afterword by her husband, Patton Oswalt, the book was completed by Michelle’s lead researcher and a close colleague. Utterly original and compelling, it is destined to become a true crime classic—and may at last unmask the Golden State Killer.

Ana Rocha: Shadows of Justice

Ana Rocha is a woman on fire. Being talented and from a well-off family, Ana could have become anything. But driven by her sister's murder, Ana chose the path of an undercover narcotics officer. Ana has made a vow to help clean up the streets of Houston. The journey her duty takes her on forces her to confront her worst nightmares and face the city's most ruthless criminals. The further she goes down this path, the more the line between her two lives begins to blur. And soon, this journey brings her face-to-face with a monster from her past.

Deadly Pretty Strangers: One dead body, one bereaved mother, one small favour ...

2018

by Max Thorn

"Help me find out who killed my son. Please." A heartfelt plea, and a little money involved. An ordinary city worker tries to help out a bereaved old lady. If he’d known it would lead to a confrontation with Russian murderers using an outlawed nerve agent on the streets of London, a pretty sharpshooter with unreliable motives, and a deadly spider scuttling around his living room, he’d have kept his front door firmly closed.

A long-forgotten genetic research experiment just makes things even stranger. And more deadly.

Set mostly in London, the city's landmarks are the backdrop to a modern tale of murder, cyber tracking, chases, and shootings. Meet Christmas, a beautiful girl with more guns than credit cards. She is gleeful in her planning, fearsome and relentless in execution, and tenderly compassionate to the deserving. Though Zav doesn't like guns, his fearless ally thinks they're the best way to dispense justice. But her lethal power comes from a dark secret which could make her friend or foe.

Zav seeks answers from the ever-present web of surveillance while haunted by strange dreams and attacked by brutal villains. The answer to the mystery death is somehow connected to a long-forgotten military research program. And in trying to find one killer, an ordinary man must confront an existential crisis greater than anyone's worst nightmares.

Are you sure you want to delete this?