African American Crime

At the age of nine, Issac J. Bailey saw his hero, his eldest brother, taken away in handcuffs, not to return from prison for thirty-two years. Bailey tells the story of their relationship and of his experience living in a family suffering guilt and shame. Drawing on sociological research as well as his expertise as a journalist, he seeks to answer the crucial question of why Moochie and many other young black men - including half of the ten boys in his own family - end up in the criminal justice system. What role did poverty, race, and faith play? What effect did living in the South, in the Bible Belt, have?

In the early 20th century, most African Americans still lived in the South, disenfranchised, impoverished, terrorized by white violence, and denied the basic rights of citizenship. As the Democrats swept into the White House on a wave of black defectors from the Party of Lincoln, a group of...

Today, Americans are debating our criminal justice system with new urgency. Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics - and their impact on people of color - are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done. But what if we only know half the story? In Locking Up Our Own, the Yale legal scholar and former public defender James Forman Jr. weighs the tragic role that some African Americans themselves played in escalating the war on crime.

“My story has been told many times and by highly regarded experts in their fields—judges, prosecutors, juvenile probation officers, sociologists, journalists. But I would like to try to tell it to you myself. I have reason to believe the experts may be wrong about me. You see, today, thirty...

Named a 2022 People Magazine best book of the summer! A riveting Harlem Renaissance Mystery featuring Louise Lloyd, a young Black woman working in a hot new speakeasy when she gets caught up in a murder that hits too close to home... Harlem, 1927. Twenty-seven-year-old Louise Lloyd has found the...

Two opposites. Undeniable attraction. Three mobsters. An offer they can’t refuse. It sounds like trouble as Jackson Jones and Mackenzie Cunningham, reluctant partners and two of the best private investigators in Los Angeles, return to solve their most dangerous case yet. Jackson Jones and...

A smash debut novel from rising star Yasmin Angoe, Her Name Is Knight features an elite assassin heroine on a mission to topple a human trafficking ring and avenge her family....

"Narrators Shayna Small and Neil Shah transport listeners to 1940s New York in this dark fantasy set against a backdrop of racial tension and brewing war...Both narrators also excel at a range of accents, making this audiobook a fully immersive experience." -- AudioFile Magazine The dangerous...

“A moving and beautifully crafted memoir.”—SCOTT TUROW “A daring act of justified defiance.”—SHAKA SENGHOR “Nothing less than heroic.”—JOHN GRISHAM He was seventeen when an all-white jury sentenced him to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Now a pioneering lawyer, he...

The inspiring story of a Black doctor who was deeply affected by the violence that plagued his Brooklyn childhood and later dedicated himself to addressing trauma and violence as public health issues Rob Gore first encountered violence when he was beaten and robbed as a 10-year old; it was...

The high priestess of the hood, Nikki Turner, is back with the novel fans have been feenin’ for: the sequel to her #1 bestselling novel, A Hustler’s Wife. Des, Virginia’s slickest gangsta, is about to become a dad when he is charged with the murder of his own attorney. But with Yarni, his...

The “riveting”* true story of the fiery summer of 1970, which would forever transform the town of Oxford, North Carolina—a classic portrait of the fight for civil rights in the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird *Chicago Tribune On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a twenty-three-year-old...

Written with the voice and vision that have made Mosley one of the most entertaining writers in America, "Fear Itself" marks the return of a master at the top of his form...

As a painter travels the world and creates his art, he also mourns the death of his queen, his wife. He is secluded from the world and finds an escape through the drawings in his work. Not until he gets an unexpected knock at his door does his life take a drastic turn. The guest presents a problem that traps them inside of a home for 72 hours and this quiet suburban estate becomes the devil’s playground. The painter is then thrown into a psychological game that has twists and turns, which leads to an unforeseeable ending.

A revelatory history of American division through the prism of two ships, whose widespread use to define that division has been lost to memory despite their enduring legacy In the bitterly polarized decades leading up to the American Civil War, it was commonplace to argue that America’s strife...

The second mystery starring the colorful members of the Bigglesweigh Pardner, which finds Miss Hortense and her friends grappling with the question, “What happens when a man who can’t die, dies?” When the second scariest man in the neighborhood barges into your home with a gun and a demand...

What elevates teaching my mother how to give birth, what gives the poems their disturbing brilliance, is Warsan Shire's ability to give simple, beautiful eloquence to the veiled world where sensuality lives in the dominant narrative of Islam; reclaiming the more nuanced truths of earlier times -...

Augustus 'Gus' Martin is an embattled LAPD negotiator. Evelyn 'Lynn' Kennedy is the new Police Commissioner hired under curious circumstances. Thrust into an explosive terrorist crisis, they must trust one another to save the lives of over thirty hostages. But as the bodies drop, what they are faced with is a chess match against the most formidable criminal mind either has ever faced. What is really happening and why? Will any hostages survive?

Though battle-wounded and scarred, Raphael has survived the criminal underworld in Benin with the help of the US government. Together with his wife, Essie, and their adoptive son, Kaion, they enjoy a seemingly picture-perfect life. Their harmony is shattered when CIA agent Rhys unexpectedly shows up at their doorstep. No aspect of life comes without a cost, and Raphael soon realizes that even his comfortable existence has a price.

Nothing casts a more sinister shadow over our nation's history than the gruesome lynchings that happened between 1882 and 1937, claiming 4,680 victims. Often, in a show of racist violence, the lynchers tortured their victims before murdering them. Most killers were never brought to justice; some were instead celebrated as heroes, their victims' bodies displayed or even cut up and distributed as trophies.