True Science

In the summer of 1937, a California crime stunned an already grim nation. Three little girls were lured away from a neighborhood park to unthinkable deaths. After a frantic week-long manhunt for the killer, a suspect emerged. Justice was swift, and the condemned man was buried away with the horrifying story. But decades later, Pamela Everett, a lawyer and former journalist, starts digging, following up a cryptic comment her father once made about losing two of his sisters. Everett unearths a truly historic legal case that included the genesis of modern sex offender laws and the last man sentenced to hang in California.

As acclaimed psychological researcher and author David Buss writes, "People are mesmerized by murder. It commands our attention like no other human phenomenon, and those touched by its ugly tendrils never forget." Though we may like to believe that murderers are pathological misfits and hardened criminals, the vast majority of murders are committed by people who, until the day they kill, would seem to be perfectly normal.

A Locus Award Finalist “Stretches the boundaries of the genre.” —The New York Times 1931, New Galveston, Mars: Fourteen-year-old Anabelle Crisp sets off through the wastelands of the Strange to find Silas Mundt’s gang who have stolen her mother’s voice, destroyed her father, and left...

Every day, innocent men across America are thrown into prison, betrayed by a faulty justice system, and robbed of their lives - either by decades-long sentences or the death penalty itself. Injustice tarnishes our legal process from start to finish. From the racial discrimination and violence used by backwards law enforcement officers, to a prison culture that breeds inmate conflict, there is opportunity for error at every turn.

According to investigative journalist Dan E. Moldea, for decades the National Football League has had a strong and unspoken understanding with a dangerous institution: Organized crime. In his classic expos, Interference, Moldea bares the dark, sordid underbelly of America's favorite professional team sport, revealing a nest of corruption that the league has largely ignored since its inception.

Frances Glessner Lee, born a socialite to a wealthy and influential Chicago family in the 1870s, was never meant to have a career, let alone one steeped in death and depravity. Yet she developed a fascination with the investigation of violent crimes and made it her life's work. Best known for creating the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a series of dollhouses that appear charming - until you notice the macabre little details: an overturned chair, or a blood-spattered comforter.

In the early 1900s, many Americans actually believed we had discovered intelligent life on Mars, as bestselling science writer David Baron chronicles in The Martians, his truly bizarre tale of a nation swept up in Mars mania. At the center of Baron's historical drama is Percival Lowell, the Boston Brahmin and Harvard scion, who observed "canals" etched into the surface of Mars. Lowell devised a grand theory that the red planet was home to a utopian society that had built gargantuan ditches to funnel precious meltwater from the polar icecaps to desert farms and oasis cities.

Most Evil II is Steve Hodel's follow-up investigation (2009-2015) into his father's potential murders and introduces new evidence and additional linkage obtained by him over the past six years. Included in that evidence is the solving of the Zodiac's 45-year-cryptic cipher, which gives us the answer to the question asked in Most Evil: Were Black Dahlia Avenger and Zodiac the same serial killer?

In 1848 Vermont, railroad foreman Phineas Gage sat above a hole, preparing to blast through some granite. A 13-pound iron rod fell from his hands into the hole, triggering the explosion and sending the rod straight through Phineas' head. Thirty minutes after this terrible accident, Phineas sat on the steps of a hotel, patiently waiting for the town doctor to arrive. He chatted with his amazed coworkers as if nothing had happened. But something terrible had happened.

The four spies at the center of this story were part of a ragtag unit known as the Arab Section, conceived during World War II by British spies and Jewish militia leaders in Palestine. Intended to gather intelligence and carry out sabotage and assassinations, the unit consisted of Jews who were native to the Arab world and could thus easily assume Arab identities. In 1948, with Israel's existence in the balance during the War of Independence, our spies went undercover in Beirut, where they spent the next two years operating out of a kiosk....

What do we see when we watch reality television? Sociologist and TV lover Danielle J. Lindemann takes a long, hard look in the “funhouse mirror” of this genre, from countless rose ceremonies on The Bachelor to the White House and more (so much more!). Beginning with the first episodes of The Real World, reality TV has not only remade our entertainment and cultural landscape—it also uniquely refracts our everyday experiences and social topography.

A collection of 13 award-winning short stories (true crime/narrative nonfiction) concerning the true adventures of California fish and game wardens, and the wildlife-destroying outlaws they pursue. These stories illustrate the wide variety of wildlife-related problems wardens face in California, which has a greater diversity of wildlife and wildlife habitat than any other state and is second only to Alaska in its vast expanses of wilderness.

Innocent people do go to jail. Sometimes mistakes are made. But even more terrifying is when the authorities conspire to frame them. That's what happened to Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey, who were convicted of murder and are serving life sentences. Un-Making a Murderer is an explosive book which uncovers the illegal, devious, and covert tactics used by Wisconsin officials.

Farm animals have been disappearing from our fields as the production of food has become a global industry. We no longer know for certain what is entering the food chain and what we are eating - as the UK horsemeat scandal demonstrated. We are reaching a tipping point as the farming revolution threatens our countryside, health, and the quality of our food wherever we live in the world.

On November 13, 2022, the peaceful town of Moscow, Idaho, was forever changed. Four vibrant college students—Ethan, Xana, Kaylee, and Maddie—were found brutally murdered in their off-campus home. The crime stunned the nation and left a community shattered. This is not just a true crime story. It’s a powerful wake-up call and survival guide in a world where danger can hide behind a smile.

What happens when conservationists meet rhinos in trouble? They arrange to airlift them to safety! Follow National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence Dereck and Beverly Joubert as they move rhinos out of harm's way and meet a courageous little Hawaiian monk seal and a pair of Siberian tiger cubs fighting for survival.

With makeup and an affected Elvis pout, Tucson’s Charlie Schmid was a crude parody of a bad-boy heartthrob. In 1964, he still had a hold on girls who’d follow him anywhere. He murdered three of them. It was the dawn of the free-love movement - perfect for a magnetic madman who’d also foreshadow its end a few years later in the malignant charisma of Charles Manson. The inspiration for a classic story by Joyce Carol Oates, Schmid, the most bizarre serial killer of any era, was the epitome of a narcissist flattered into believing he could get away with murder.

From the acclaimed author of JFK and Vietnam comes a book that uncovers the government's role in the Kennedy assassination more clearly than any previous inquiry. What was the extent of the CIA's involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald? Why was Oswald's file tampered with before the assassination of John F. Kennedy? And why did significant documents from that file mysteriously disappear? Oswald and the CIA answers these questions, not with theories, but with information from the primary sources themselves.

From scream queens to femmes fatale, horror isn’t just for the boys. Gothic media moguls Meg Hafdahl and Kelly Florence, authors of The Science of Monsters, and cohosts of the Horror Rewind podcast called “the best horror film podcast out there” by Film Daddy, present a guide to the feminist horror movies, TV shows, and characters we all know and love. Through interviews, film analysis, and bone-chilling discoveries, The Science of Women in Horror uncovers the theories behind women’s most iconic roles of the genre.

Perhaps no other television show captures our innate fascination with crime and criminals better than the original Forensic Files. Examining true crime cases from murders to insurance fraud, hit-and-runs to kidnappings, every case featured on the show is solved in large part with the help of forensic science like DNA evidence. In Forensic Files Now, author Rebecca Reisner shares her own gripping retellings of 40 favorite cases profiled on the show along with fascinating updates adapted from her popular blog, ForensicFilesNow.com.