True Crime Fiction

First, I Believe You is an astonishing memoir of resilience and recovery from severe childhood trauma she had no memory of. Terrifying flashbacks haunted her for decades despite an affluent, advantaged childhood, resulting in severe depression, food addiction, anxiety, and nightmares.

In the gold mining town of Greymouth, where drunks fell asleep smoking and burned down their houses, the town was constantly inundated with floods, and 57 hotels had sprung up in a year to accommodate the hordes of miners and gold thieves, Inspector William Henry James was tasked with keeping the town safe with a small force of troopers. In 1888, forced into retirement by government cuts, James walks home beside the Whanganui River remembering his association with a series of murders by the notorious Burgess gang: back in 1866 he had forced the gang to leave Greymouth.

On a hot rainy summer night in Nassau, the Bahamas, in 1943, someone murdered Sir Harry Oakes, one of the richest men in the world, as he slept. When police found him the next morning, there were four wounds to his skull. His corpse had been abused, covered ritualistically with feathers and set on fire. The murder was perverse, horrific, and jaded by anyone’s standards. A few evenings later in New York City, the phone rang in the home of Alan Hynd, identified in that era by the NY Times as America’s highest paid true crime reporter.

It is the spring of 1945, and in a dusty, remote community, the world’s most brilliant minds have come together in secret. Their mission: to split an atom and end a war. But among those who have come to Robert Oppenheimer’s "enchanted campus" of foreign-born scientists, baffled guards, and restless wives is a simple man in search of a killer. Michael Connolly has been sent to the middle of nowhere to investigate the murder of a security officer on the Manhattan Project.

Justice is blind, they say, but perhaps not to beauty. In supposedly dispassionate courts of law, attractive women have long avoided punishment, based largely on their looks, for cold-blooded crimes. The Beauty Defense: Femmes Fatales on Trial gathers the true stories of some of the most infamous femmes fatales in criminal history, collected by attorney and true crime historian Laura James.

¿De dónde procedía ese hedor? ¿A qué se debía el silencio sepulcral que rodeaba el número 594 de la calle Sauces, en Pioz? Siguiendo el rastro del insoportable olor, el 17 de septiembre del 2016 la Guardia Civil descubrió su origen: se trataba de los cuatro cadáveres de una familia brasileña metidos en seis bolsas de basura. Llevaban muertos más de un mes.

Nicholas Nicastro revisits a haunting mystery that still fascinates a nation a century later. His masterly re-imagining of these tragic events sees beyond the prejudices that destroys families and taints small communities but corrodes civilization itself. Nicastro’s simple storytelling style with its kaleidoscopic perspectives is moving, beautiful, and profound.

In the first installment of the Bowman Case Files, bored and entitled university student Julia Strauss meets a captivating man during a random encounter at a cafe. She is instantly attracted to the handsome stranger and pursues him obsessively. What she doesn’t know is that behind all the charm, he has a secret agenda of his own. Can Julia see beyond the haze of her infatuation before it’s too late?

Trügerische Erinnerung, tödliche Familienbande. Kalifornien, Sommer 1975: Die Kleinstadt Ojai wird von einem grausamen Doppelmord erschüttert: Die 14-jährige Poppy und der 17-jährige Danny werden erstochen in ihrem Elternhaus aufgefunden. Ein ungeheuerlicher Verdacht macht die Runde: Wurden die beiden von ihrem eigenen Bruder getötet? Kalifornien, 2024: Ghostwriterin Olivia Dumont erhält einen Auftrag, den sie am liebsten ablehnen würde. Sie soll ein Buch für ihren Vater schreiben, den gefeierten Schriftsteller Vincent Taylor.

Everybody likes Chris Goodman. Sure, he's a little odd. He wears those funny bell-bottoms and he really likes the word ennui and he shakes your hand when he meets you, but he's also the kind of guy who's always up for a good time, always happy to lend a hand. Everybody likes Chris Goodman, which makes it especially shocking when he's murdered.

Everyone eventually loses their childhood dreams. It's a fact of life, an indelible element of growing up. You get wiser, older, more jaded, and realize that all the things you wanted when you were young are impractical. Difficult. Impossible, maybe. This is the story of a man who never gave up on his childhood dream: to become an actor. But when the television and film markets proved a tough nut to crack, he took his acting skills to the streets and used them as a con man.

Nathan Heller is Chicago’s most celebrated private detective, hobnobbing with Hugh Hefner, getting written up in Life magazine, enjoying the fruits of a long career that began in a one-room office and now is a coast-to-coast agency. When he does a small favor for a friend - who handles PR for the Teamsters - Heller runs into an old West Side mob crony, a small-time hustler named Jack Ruby. And when that friend is found dead, warning signals start to flash. Suddenly Jimmy Hoffa wants to talk to Nate...and so does Hoffa’s arch enemy, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

This gripping historical crime fiction novel, based on fact, is set in Bradford, England, 1888. It explores the horrific murder of Johnny Gill; a murder and mutilation so gruesome, it stuns a nation. Even hardened detectives are affected by its savagery, swiftly comparing it to the work of Jack the Ripper.

R. Barri Flowers, award-winning author of Serial Killers & Prostitutes and The Sex Slave Murders, brings together seven of his best published true-crime stories in this captivating second volume of Murder and Menace: Riveting True Crime Tales.

From the bedroom terminals of teenagers isolated from their peers by their hyperactive intellects, to the nerve center of a nationwide long-distance phone company infiltrated by a hacker's hand, Masters of Deception offers an unprecedented tour of the murkiest reaches of the electronic frontier and a trenchant, blow-by-blow chronicle of the most notorious gang war in cyberspace.

This book is for listeners of true crime podcasts and audiences of both fiction and true-crime nonfiction. It's the true story of first-generation Irish-American nurse Jane Toppan, born as Honora Kelley. Jane Toppan was absolutely a monster, but she did not start out that way. When Jane was a young child, her father abandoned her and her sister to the Boston Female Asylum. From there, Jane was indentured to a wealthy family who changed her name, never adopted her, and wrote her out of the will.

From award winning criminologist R. Barri Flowers and the best-selling author of The Sex Slave Murders 1 & 2, Serial Killer Couples, and Murder of the Banker's Daughter comes Murder Chronicles, a gripping collection of true crime tales. Includes ten compelling stories of murder, madness, and mayhem that span nearly a century of American history and homicidal criminality that will keep you reading from beginning to end, while staying with long after.

Mike Powell’s blood and guts stories go far beyond his days working as a plainclothes officer in one of LAPD’s Zebra Units—a unit tasked with tracking down violent criminals in South Central L. A. “Shootin’ Newton” was notorious for its many police shootings including the Black Panther and Symbionese Liberation Army shootouts. Two of Mike’s four shootings occurred in Newton.

The Cornish Scoop is a novel, but I’ll be totally honest, there’s very little I’ve had to imagine, as I have experienced the majority of the content in this book in my career as a police officer. Treavey is a Cornish police officer who is just out of his probation in 1994 and making it alone in the big wide world of policing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this very much reflects the time and locations of my own policing experience, so I will leave it up to you which parts are made up and which are true. Remember that life tends to be stranger than fiction!

At the end of the Second World War, some of the highest ranking Nazis escaped from justice, Aided and abetted by the Vatican, they travelled down secret 'rat lines' and were taken in by shady Argentine secret agents. Vengeful Holocaust survivors and inept politicains attempted to bring them to justice and there were daring plots to kidnap or assassinate the fugititives.