Art Crime

Throughout John Mortimer's career, he established profound friendships with people accused of various crimes. He also indulged his passion for writing, penning Paradise Postponed and a series of stories about Rumpole, for whom he was often mistaken. With wit, wisdom and tenderness, he has written the story of his life.

How can she prove her innocence to save her son, when she's already been convicted of murdering his father? Art school dropout Lucie is on a backpacking trip across Europe when she arrives in the idyllic Swiss Alps. A holiday romance with ski instructor Mathieu takes a crucial turn when Lucie discovers she is pregnant. Spiralling into a relationship of coercion and dark domestic abuse, Lucie is powerless to escape her marriage without losing her son.

Max the Forger is an artist and gentleman whose colorful lifestyle has spanned over 70 years. He has lived under the strict regime of Barnardo’s children’s homes, been an elephant handler in the circus, lived rough, busked his way from Brighton to Bombay, sold his fakes up and down the country, dined with dukes, socialized with celebrities, associated with gangsters, served time in prison, and donated tens of thousands to charity. And through it all, he never stopped smiling, and loving life - and missing his mum.

A cop as well as an art historian, Marco Valoni leads a crack team of investigators in a race to solve a crime he's certain is about to shock the world: someone is planning to steal the Holy Shroud of Turin.

In Long Island, a farmer found a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discovered a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumbled upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime were turning up all over New York, but the police were baffled: There were no witnesses, no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era's most perplexing murder.

Idiosyncratic detective duo Max Matthews and Sean Armitage are back for three more series, in which they expertly extract confessions from their suspects during the course of one interview. Their relationship has evolved since they were first paired up, back when Armitage was a rookie constable, but their interrogation technique is as incisive as ever. These 11 compelling dramas all shine the spotlight on a different suspect, each with their own tale to tell - and their own selective version of events.

Brainstorm is an amazing five-year probe into the mysterious death of beloved movie star Natalie Wood by a real-life criminal law authority who determinedly pursued the truth in the face of Los Angeles County officials hell-bent on keeping it buried forever. Brainstorm: An Investigation of the Mysterious Death of Film Star Natalie Wood is the first-person account of Sam Perroni’s probing investigation of the actress’s death.

As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger's Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him centuries later. For seven years a no-account painter named Han van Meegeren managed to pass off his paintings as those of one of the most beloved and admired artists who ever lived. As Edward Dolnick reveals, his true genius lay in psychological manipulation, and he came within inches of fooling the world. Instead, he landed in an Amsterdam court on trial for his life.

Master Forger David Henty has a problem: a forgery he painted is rejected and suddenly he owes a murderous, blind, female Japanese gangster £5 million.

Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby has become one of the world's best-loved books, delighting audiences across the world. Careless People tells the true story behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, exploring in newly rich detail the relation of Fitzgerald's classic to the chaotic world he in which he lived. Fitzgerald set his novel in 1922, and Careless People carefully reconstructs the crucial months during which Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald returned to New York in the autumn of 1922.

A group of criminals in 1946 pull off the heist of the century, stealing a dozen priceless works of art from a Boston museum. But while the thieves get caught, the art is never found. Forty years later, the last surviving thief gets out of jail and goes hunting for the loot, involving some innocent college students in his dangerous plan—and twenty-eight years after that, in the present day, the former college kids, now all grown up, are drawn back into danger as the still-missing art tempts a deadly new generation of treasure hunters.

The Good Samaritan has been a thorn in Detective John Corbin’s side for years as he tries to hunt down the rogue killer with what few leads he has. As the bodies pile up each one is proven guilty of some profound evil thanks to the evidence provided by the mysterious avenger. No criminal in the city is safe as The Good Samaritan chooses his next victim who will learn, through unimaginable amounts of pain, what it’s like to be the one begging for mercy.

For well over twenty years, Poe Ballantine traveled America, taking odd jobs, living in small rooms, and wondering the big whys. At age 46, he finally settled with his Mexican immigrant wife in Chadron, Nebraska, where they had a son who was red-flagged as autistic. Poe published four books about his experiences as a wanderer and his observations of America.

In this page-turning novel set in 2003 New York City, a genderqueer book conservator feels trapped by her gender presentation, her ill-fitting relationship, and her artistic block—until she discovers a decades-old hidden queer love letter and becomes obsessed with tracking down its author. ...

Nada Alic's women—the perverts, nobodies, reality TV stars, poetic hopefuls, shameless party girls, and self-help addicts of Los Angeles and its environs—are all wrestling with a shared stark reality: the modern world. To cope, they live in their baddest thoughts: the lush, strange landscape of female make-believe.

A friend in his cigar club asks Antoine Verlaque to visit Rene Rouquet, a retired postal worker who has found a rolled-up canvas in his apartment. As the apartment once belonged to Paul Cezanne, Rouquet is convinced he's discovered a treasure. But when Antoine arrives at the apartment, he finds Rene dead, the canvas missing, and a mysterious art history professor standing over the body. When the painting is finally recovered, the mystery only deepens.

Gallery owner Ally Blake risks everything to exhibit at an art fair in Bogotá in the 1990s. She needs wealthy collectors to boost her gallery's sales and save her family from bankruptcy. When her art crates are tampered with and she discovers an ex-boyfriend and colleague from her State Department days in Santiago has involved her in a money laundering scheme, she devises a strategy to thwart the fraud, protect her children, and secure her family's future—but pulling it off will require her to make the art deal of a lifetime.

This audiobook celebrates the individuals who are striving to protect us in an ever-expanding technological era. Data and technology are so important to our lives that protecting people who use technology is incredibly important. The professionals working to protect children, adults, and corporations have a tough job, and this audiobook celebrates their work while advocating ways for improving cyber security services and fighting cyber crime.

“Road Dogs is terrific, and Elmore Leonard is in a class of one.” —Dennis Lehane, author of Shutter Island and Mystic River “You know from the first sentence that you’re in the hands of the original Daddy Cool....This one’ll kill you.” —Stephen King Elmore Leonard is eternal...

Chuck Palahniuk's world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. These pieces from Stranger Than Fiction, his first nonfiction collection, prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling.