Crime Culture

When Max Marshall arrived on the campus of the College of Charleston in 2018, he hoped to investigate a small-time fraternity Xanax trafficking ring. Instead, he found a homicide, several student deaths, and millions of dollars circulating around the Deep South. He also opened up an elite world hidden to outsiders. Behind the pop culture cliches of “Greek life” lies one of the major breeding grounds of American power: 80 percent of Fortune 500 executives, 85 percent of Supreme Court justices, and all but four presidents since 1825 have been fraternity members.

The word spread through the hacking underground like some unstoppable new virus: Someone - some brilliant, audacious crook - had just staged a hostile takeover of an online criminal network that siphoned billions of dollars from the U.S. economy. The FBI rushed to launch an ambitious undercover operation aimed at tracking down this new kingpin. Other agencies around the world deployed dozens of moles and double agents.

A former US naval intelligence worker, Milton William Cooper published his manifesto Behold a Pale Horse in 1991. Since then it has gone on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, becoming the number-one best seller in the American prison system. According to Behold a Pale Horse, JFK was assassinated - because he was about to reveal that extraterrestrials were about to take over the earth - by his driver, an alien himself; AIDS is a government conspiracy; and much more.

Audrey Rose Wadsworth and her partner-in-crime-investigation, Thomas Cresswell, are en route to New York to help solve another blood-soaked mystery. Embarking on a week-long voyage across the Atlantic on the opulent RMS Etruria, they're delighted to discover a traveling troupe of circus performers, fortune tellers, and a certain charismatic young escape artist entertaining the first-class passengers nightly. But then, privileged young women begin to go missing without explanation, and a series of brutal slayings shocks the entire ship.

Fresh off the boat from England, Vita Marlowe has a job to do. Her beloved grandfather Jack has been cheated out of his home and possessions by a notorious conman with Mafia connections. Seeing Jack's spirit is broken, Vita is desperate to make him happy again, so she devises a plan to outwit his enemies and recover his home. She finds a young pickpocket, working the streets of the city. And, nearby, two boys with highly unusual skills and secrets of their own are about to be pulled into her lawless, death-defying plan.

Aggie Morton lives in a small town on the coast of England in 1902. Adventurous and imaginative but deeply shy, Aggie hasn't got much to do since the death of her beloved father...until the fateful day when she crosses paths with 12-year-old Belgian immigrant Hector Perot and discovers a dead body on the floor of the Mermaid Dance Room! As the number of suspects grows and the murder threatens to tear the town apart, Aggie and her new friend will need every tool at their disposal - including their insatiable curiosity, deductive skills, and not a little help from their friends.

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, thanks to the oil that was discovered beneath their land. Then, one by one, the Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances, and anyone who tried to investigate met the same end. As the death toll surpassed more than 24 Osage, the newly created Bureau of Investigation, which became the FBI, took up the case, one of the organization's first major homicide investigations.

Journalist Maximillian Potter uncovers a fascinating plot to destroy the vines of La Romance-Conti, Burgundy's finest and most expensive wine. In January 2010, Aubert de Villaine, the famed proprietor of the Domaine de la Romance-Conti, the tiny, storied vineyard that produces the most expensive, exquisite wines in the world, received an anonymous note threatening the destruction of his priceless vines by poison - a crime that in the world of high-end wine is akin to murder - unless he paid a one million euro ransom.

Rarely does a week go by without a well-known executive being indicted for engaging in a white-collar crime. Perplexed as to what drives successful, wealthy people to risk it all, Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes spent seven years in the company of the men behind the largest corporate crimes in history - from the financial fraudsters of Enron, to the embezzlers at Tyco, to the Ponzi schemers Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford.

Along with Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman, the Joker stands out as one of the most recognizable comics characters in popular culture. While there has been a great deal of scholarly attention on superheroes, very little has been done to understand supervillains. This is the first academic work to provide a comprehensive study of this villain, illustrating why the Joker appears so relevant to audiences today.

ALA notable author Iain Lawrence pens a moving tale with a Dickensian atmosphere about a young man's life aboard a cruel 19th-century prison ship. 14-year-old Tom Tin is forced to scavenge on the grimy streets of London after his father is sent to debtor's prison. Tom's survival is threatened by the sinister lowlifes that inhabit his hopeless world. But when he is unjustly arrested for murder, he finds a place that is even worse than the dark city streets.

Murderers, mob bosses, and convicts . . . these guys are not your average neighbors. Unless you live on Alcatraz. It's 1935 and 12-year-old Moose Flanagan and his family have just moved to the infamous island that's home to criminals like notorious escapee Roy Gardner, Machine Gun Kelly, and of course, Al Capone. Now Moose has to try to fit in at his new school, avoid getting caught up in one of the warden's daughter's countless plots, and keep an eye on his sister Natalie, who's not like other kids.

The sequel to Chili Palmer's hit movie Get Leo tanked, and now Chili's itching for a comeback. So when a power-lunch with record label executive and former associate Tommy Athens ends in a mob hit, he soon finds himself in an unlikely alliance with organized crime detective Darryl Holmes and the likely next target of Russian gangsters. But where others see danger, Chili Palmer sees story possibilities.

From former Vice journalist and executive producer of hit Netflix documentary Fyre comes an eye-opening look at the con artists, grifters, and snake-oil salesmen of the digital age - and why we can’t stop falling for them.

Bruce Sterling delves into the world of high-tech crime and punishment in one of the first books to explore the cyberspace breaches that threaten national security. From the crash of AT&T’s long-distance switching system to corporate cyberattacks, he investigates government and law enforcement efforts to break the back of America’s electronic underground in the 1990s.

Goodbye, Guns N' Roses is a genre-rattling attempt to explain the appeal of America's most divisive rock band. While it includes uncharted history and the self-lacerating connoisseurship of a Guns N' Roses fetishist, it is not a recycled chronicle - this book is a deconstruction of myth, one that blends high and low art sketches to examine how Guns N' Roses impacted popular culture.

While sleeping on the roof of his father's hotel-spy school, 13-year-old Lucas Benes finds a baby alone and learns that the Good Company has restarted its profitable brainwashing business. Brainwashed (Crime Travelers Spy Series book number one) tracks the secret urban adventures of the new resistance, a school of international teenage spies. Lucas leads a group of friends through the hotspots of Paris - from the catacombs to the Eiffel tower - in an all-out effort to sabotage a brainwashing ceremony that could potentially turn them all into "good" kids.

The case of D. B. Cooper is a modern legend that has obsessed and cursed his pursuers for generations with everything from bankruptcy to suicidal despair. Now, with Skyjack, Geoffrey Gray obtains a first-ever look at the FBI’s confidential Cooper file, uncovering new leads in the infamous case.

When a petty thief falls though a glass roof in his attempt to escape from the police, what should have been the death of him marks the beginning of a while new life. After his broken body is reconstructed by an ambitious young doctor, he is released from prison, and, with the help of Victorian London's extensive sewer system, he becomes the most elusive burglar in the city.

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.