Crime Memoir

Eddie Trascher was a gentleman gangster, but he never wanted to be part of the mob. For 50 years, from the pre-Castro Havana casinos to Los Angeles, Trascher stole from mob-owned casinos, scammed gangsters, and was one of the top bookies in the country. He capped his career as a confidential informant for Florida law enforcement and was the source for getting inside the Trafficante Mafia family.

Here local priest Father Byrne meets his unexpected demise. Jack and Sarah investigate - who could harm the beloved Father? And what secrets did he take to the grave? The Cherringham Regatta is shaken when vandalism of boots turns into bloody murder. And when a murder suspect is freed from prison after 25 years, it's apparent someone in Cherringham wants him to continue serving his sentence - to death. But Jack and Sarah start to question... did he commit the crime in the first place?

They were the DeMeo gang - the most deadly hit men in organized crime. Their Mafia higher-ups came to know, use, and ultimately fear them as the Murder Machine. They killed for profit and for pleasure, following cold-blooded plans and wild whims, from the mean streets of New York to the Florida Gold Coast, and from coast to coast. Now complete with personal revelations of one of the key players, this is the savage story that leaves no corpse unturned in its terrifying telling.

Douglas Preston's journalistic explorations have taken him from the haunted country of Italy to the jungles of Honduras. The Lost Tomb brings together an astonishing and compelling collection of true stories about buried treasure, enigmatic murders, lost tombs, bizarre crimes, and other fascinating tales of the past and present.

Ruth Markel is the mother of the late Dan Markel, a noted law professor who was murdered in Tallahassee, Florida, in 2014. In The Unveiling, she describes her experiences since the day of Dan's death from several distinct perspectives.

In the romantic narrative of the Old West, two larger-than-life characters emerged as the perfect foils for each other - the rampant outlaw and the heroic peace officer. Without the villain, sheriffs would not have needed to uphold the law; and without the sheriff, villains would have had no law to break. Together, both personalities fought, lost, and triumphed amid shootouts, train robberies, and bank holdups against the backdrop of the lawless American frontier.

When she was twelve years old, Kirra Mandarian’s parents were murdered and she barely escaped with her life. Fourteen years later Kirra is a commonwealth attorney back home in Porte Franklin, Virginia, and her goal is to find out who killed her parents and why. She assumes the identity of E.N.—Eliot Ness—and gathers proof to bring down the man she believes was behind her parents’ deaths. She quickly learns that big-time criminals are very dangerous indeed and realizes she needs Dillon Savich’s help.

In 1971, Go Ask Alice reinvented the young adult genre with a blistering portrayal of sex, psychosis, and teenage self-destruction. The supposed diary of a middle-class addict, Go Ask Alice terrified adults and cemented LSD's fearsome reputation, fueling support for the War on Drugs. Five million copies later, Go Ask Alice remains a divisive bestseller, outraging censors and earning new fans, all of them drawn by the book's mythic premise: A Real Diary, by Anonymous.

True Crime Case Histories - Volume 16 brings you twelve shocking true crime stories that never made major headlines but are just as disturbing as the most famous cases. In “The Highway of Tears,” a simple traffic stop reveals bloody tools and a suspiciously calm driver. Police soon learn he wasn’t just killing women along remote highways—he was hunting them.

Two victims of the infamous Cleveland kidnapper share the story of their abductions, their decade in captivity, and their final, dramatic rescue. On May 6, 2013, Amanda Berry made headlines around the world when she fled a Cleveland area home and called 911, saying: “Help me, I’m Amanda Berry...I’ve been kidnapped, and I’ve been missing for 10 years". A horrifying story rapidly unfolded. Ariel Castro, a local school bus driver, had separately lured Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight to his home, where he kept them chained in the basement.

On the morning of July 18, 2014, 41-year-old Florida State law professor Dan Markel dropped his boys off at preschool, hit the gym, and headed home to his quiet, tree-canopied neighborhood. Within seconds of pulling into his garage, two .38-caliber bullets fired from point-blank range were lodged in his brain. His brutal slaying defied explanation.

Will Sandeson seemed like a model son. A member of the Dalhousie University track and field team, he was about to start classes at Dalhousie’s medical school. He worked at a group home for adults with disabilities. He came from a good family. “There’s times for whatever reason that things don’t go quite as planned,” a Halifax police officer told Sandeson shortly after he was arrested for the first-degree murder of Taylor Samson, who also, on the surface, seemed like a model son.

Martin Suarez, a legend within the FBI who specialized in Colombian drug cartels, holds the record for the longest time spent continuously undercover. As his alter ego Manny, Martin followed the unspoken rules of the cartels: He knew the right lingo to use, the right whiskey to drink, the right watch to wear, the wrong questions to ask. He smuggled over $1 billion worth of cocaine into the United States for the Medellín Cartel and, as his cover deepened, he graduated to become a high-level money launderer for the North Coast Cartel.

Leonardo DiCaprio. Alex Rodriguez. Tobey Maguire. Affleck. Damon. Cassavetes. What do these people have in common? Not just fame and fortune; all these men are also alumni of the ultra-exclusive, high-stakes poker ring that inspired Aaron Sorkin's Oscar-nominated film, Molly's Game. But Houston Curtis, the card shark who co-founded the game with Tobey Maguire, knows that Sorkin's is the whitewashed version. In Billion Dollar Hollywood Heist, Curtis goes all-in, revealing the true story behind the game.

The romance of the West is built on an endless armature of shootouts and train robberies, cowboys versus Indians, white hat versus black, and everybody versus the wilderness. From John Colter's harrowing escape from the Blackfeet to Hugh Glass' six-week crawl to civilization after a grizzly attack, from Custer's final moments to John Wesley Powell's treacherous run through the rapids of the Grand Canyon, Cowboys, Mountain Men, and Grizzly Bears takes the top 50 wildest episodes in the region's history and presents them to the listener in one convenient, narrative-driven package.

Josef Fritzl was a 73-year-old retired engineer in Austria. He seemed to be living a normal life with his wife, Rosemarie, and their family - though one daughter, Elisabeth, had decades earlier been "lost" to a religious cult. Throughout the years, three of Elisabeth's children mysteriously appeared on the Fritzls' doorstep; Josef and Rosemarie raised them as their own. But only Josef knew the truth about Elisabeth's disappearance.... For 27 years, Josef had imprisoned and molested Elisabeth in his man-made basement dungeon.

Acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen’s haunting investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, from the heights of brilliant promise to the forensic psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. A story about friendship, love, and the price of self-delusion, The Best Minds explores the ways in which we understand—and fail to understand—mental illness.

Profiler Roy Hazelwood is one of the world's leading experts on the strangest and most dangerous of all aberrant offenders - the sexual criminal. In Dark Dreams he reveals the twisted motive and thinking that go into the most reprehensible crimes. He also catalogs the innovative and remarkably effective techniques that allow law enforcement agents to construct psychological profiles of the offenders who commit these crimes.

Former district attorney Jeanine Pirro was cast as the bad guy 15 years ago when she reopened the cold case of Kathleen Durst, a young and beautiful fourth-year medical student who disappeared without a trace in 1982, never to be seen again. Kathie Durst's husband was millionaire real estate heir Robert Durst, son of one of the wealthiest families in New York City - but though her friends and family suspected him of the worst, he escaped police investigation.

This book starts where the first book, The Unknown Mongol, ended. The year is 1998, and Scott "Junior" Ereckson, the national president of the Mongols Motorcycle Club, has been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. Because he's an ex-felon and it’s his second strike, he's been sentenced to 14 years in state prison.