WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2019 A BARACK OBAMA BEST BOOK OF 2019 SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION 2019 TIME''s #1 Best Nonfiction Book of 2019 A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ''A must read'' Gillian Flynn One night in December 1972, Jean McConville, a mother of ten, was abducted from her home in Belfast and never seen alive again. Her disappearance would haunt her orphaned children, the perpetrators of the brutal crime and a whole society in Northern Ireland for decades.
Through the unsolved case of Jean McConville''s abduction, Patrick Radden Keefe tells the larger story of the Troubles, investigating Dolours Price, the first woman to join the IRA, who bombed the Old Bailey; Gerry Adams, the politician who helped end the fighting but denied his IRA past; and Brendan Hughes, an IRA commander who broke their code of silence. A gripping story forensically reported, Say Nothing explores the extremes people will go to for an ideal, and the way societies mend - or don''t - after long and bloody conflict.
''10 Best Books of 2019'' - The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Slate, NPR''s Fresh Air ''Best History Book of 2019'' - Amazon ''10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2019'' - TIME ''10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade'' - Entertainment Weekly ''20 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade'' - Literary Hub ''10 Best True Crime Books of the Decade'' - CrimeReads
Now a major TV miniseries starring Andrew Garfield ''A provocative look at the twisted roots of American fundamentalism.'' Will Self, Evening Standard Books of the Year ''Excellent . . . a lucid, judicious, even sympathetic account not just of Mormon Fundamentalism but of the seductive power of fanaticism in general.'' Daily Telegraph ''Remarkable . . . for anyone interested in the wilder frontiers of spiritual conviction, this book is a must.'' Independent Brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty insist they were commanded to kill by God. In Under The Banner of Heaven , Jon Krakauer''s investigation is a meticulously researched, bone-chilling narrative of polygamy, savage violence and unyielding faith: an incisive look inside isolated Mormon Fundamentalist communities in America, this gripping work of non-fiction illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behaviour.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 'A triumph on every level. One of the losses to literature is that Harper Lee never found a way to tell a gothic true-crime story she'd spent years researching. Casey Cep has excavated this mesmerizing story and tells it with grace and insight and a fierce fidelity to the truth.' DAVID GRANN, author of Killers of the Flower Moon _____________________________ The stunning story of an Alabama serial killer and the true-crime book that Harper Lee worked on obsessively in the years after To Kill a Mockingbird Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell's murderer was acquitted - thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the Reverend.
As Alabama is consumed by these gripping events, it's not long until news of the case reaches Alabama's - and America's - most famous writer. Intrigued by the story, Harper Lee makes a journey back to her home state to witness the Reverend's killer face trial. Harper had the idea of writing her own In Cold Blood, the true-crime classic she had helped her friend Truman Capote research. Lee spent a year in town reporting on the Maxwell case and many more years trying to finish the book she called The Reverend.
Now Casey Cep brings this story to life, from the shocking murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South. At the same time, she offers a deeply moving portrait of one of the country's most beloved writers and her struggle with fame, success, and the mystery of artistic creativity.
This is the story Harper Lee wanted to write. This is the story of why she couldn't.
_____________________________ 'Fascinating ... Cep has spliced together a Southern-gothic tale of multiple murder and the unhappy story of Lee's literary career, to produce a tale that is engrossing in its detail and deeply poignant... [Cep] spends the first third of Furious Hours following the jaw-dropping trail of murders ... Engrossing ... Cep writes about all this with great skill, sensitivity and attention to detail.' SUNDAY TIMES 'It's been a long time since I picked up a book so impossible to put down. Furious Hours made me forget dinner, ignore incoming calls, and stay up reading into the small hours. It's a work of literary and legal detection as gripping as a thriller. But it's also a meditation on motive and mystery, the curious workings of history, hope, and ambition, justice, and the darkest matters of life and death. Casey Cep's investigation into an infamous Southern murder trial and Harper Lee's quest to write about it is a beautiful, sobering, and sometimes chilling triumph.' HELEN MACDONALD, author of H is for Hawk 'This story is just too good ... Furious Hours builds and builds until it collides with the writer who saw the power of Maxwell's story, but for some reason was unable to harness it. It lays bare the inner life of a woman who had a world-class gift for hiding ... [this] book makes a magical leap, and it goes from being a superbly written true-crime story to the sort of story that even Lee would have been proud to write.' MICHAEL LEWIS, author of Moneyball and The Big Short
Genteel society ladies who compare notes on their husbands' suicides. A hilariously foul-mouthed black drag queen. A voodoo priestess who works her roots in the graveyard at midnight. A morose inventor who owns a bottle of poison powerful enough to kill everyone in town. A prominent antiques dealer who hangs a Nazi flag from his window to disrupt the shooting of a movie. And a redneck gigolo whose conquests describe him as a 'walking streak of sex'. These are some of the real residents of Savannah, Georgia, a city whose eccentric mores are unerringly observed - and whose dirty linen is gleefully aired - in this utterly irresistible book. At once a true-crime murder story and a hugely entertaining and deliciously perverse travelogue, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is as bracing and intoxicating as half-a-dozen mint juleps.
The dead talk. To the right listener, they tell us all about themselves: where they came from, how they lived, how they died - and who killed them. Forensic scientists can unlock the mysteries of the past and help justice to be done using the messages left by a corpse, a crime scene or the faintest of human traces. Forensics draws on interviews with top-level professionals, ground-breaking research and Val McDermid's own experience to lay bare the secrets of this fascinating science. And, along the way, she wonders at how maggots collected from a corpse can help determine time of death, how a DNA trace a millionth the size of a grain of salt can be used to convict a killer and how a team of young Argentine scientists led by a maverick American anthropologist uncovered the victims of a genocide. In her novels, McDermid has been solving complex crimes and confronting unimaginable evil for years. Now, she's looking at the people who do it for real. It's a journey that will take her to war zones, fire scenes and autopsy suites, and bring her into contact with extraordinary bravery and wickedness, as she traces the history of forensics from its earliest beginnings to the cutting-edge science of the modern day.
THE CRIMES. THE STORIES. THE LAW ''Fascinating'' - Sunday Times ''Masterful'' - Judith Flanders ''A page-turning read'' - Prof. David Wilson Totally gripping and brilliantly told, Murder: The Biography is a gruesome and utterly captivating portrait of the legal history of murder.
The stories and the people involved in the history of murder are stranger, darker and more compulsive than any crime fiction. There''s Richard Parker, the cannibalized cabin boy whose death at the hands of his hungry crewmates led the Victorian courts to decisively outlaw a defence of necessity to murder. Dr Percy Bateman, the incompetent GP whose violent disregard for his patient changed the law on manslaughter. Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England in the 1950s, played a crucial role in changes to the law around provocation in murder cases. And Archibald Kinloch, the deranged Scottish aristocrat whose fratricidal frenzy paved the way for the defence of diminished responsibility. These, and many more, are the people - victims, killers, lawyers and judges, who unwittingly shaped the history of that most grisly and storied of laws.
Join lawyer and writer Kate Morgan on a dark and macabre journey as she explores the strange stories and mysterious cases that have contributed to UK murder law. The big corporate killers; the vengeful spouses; the sloppy doctors; the abused partners; the shoddy employers; each story a crime and each crime a precedent that has contributed to the law''s dark, murky and, at times, shocking standing.
THE BESTSELLING TRUE STORY THAT INSPIRED THE MAJOR NETFLIX SERIES FBI Special Agent and expert in criminal profiling and behavioural science, John Douglas, is a man who has looked evil in the eye and made a vocation of understanding it. Now retired, Douglas can let us inside the FBI elite serial crime unit and into the disturbed minds of some of the most savage serial killers in the world.
The man who was the inspiration for Special Agent Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs and who lent the film's makers his expertise explains how he invented and established the practice of criminal profiling; what it was like to submerge himself mentally in the world of serial killers to the point of 'becoming' both perpetrator and victim; and individual case histories including those of Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy and the Atlanta child murders.
With the fierce page-turning power of a bestselling novel, yet terrifyingly true, Mindhunter is a true crime classic.
John Douglas knows more about serial killers than anybody in the world - Jonathan Demme, Director of The Silence of the Lambs A cracker of a book - Esquire
____________________ THE Sunday Times BESTSELLER 'An angry and important work of historical detection, calling time on the misogyny that has fed the Ripper myth. Powerful and shaming' Guardian 'GRIPPING' New York Times Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888.
Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by the press has become far more famous than any of these five women.
Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, historian Hallie Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, and gives these women back their stories.
__________________ 'At last, the Ripper's victims get a voice... An eloquent, stirring challenge to reject the prevailing Ripper myth.' Mail on Sunday 'Devastatingly good. The Five will leave you in tears, of pity and of rage.' LUCY WORSLEY, author of bestselling Jane Austen at Home 'How fitting that in the year when we celebrate the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage, dignity is finally returned to these unfortunate women.' PROFESSOR DAME SUE BLACK, author of bestselling All that Remains 'Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly deserve to be thought of as more than eviscerated bodies on an East London street. This haunting book does something to redress that balance' Sunday Times 'What a brilliant and necessary book' JO BAKER, author of Sunday Times bestselling Longbourn 'A Ripper narrative that gives voice to the women he silenced; I've been waiting for this book for years. Beautifully written and with the grip of a thriller, it will open your eyes and break your heart.' ERIN KELLY, Sunday Times bestselling author of He Said/She Said 'An outstanding work of history-from-below ... magnificent' The Spectator
A comprehensive examination into the frightening true crime history of serial homicide--including information on Americas most prolific serial killers such as: Ted Bundy Co-ed Killer Ed Kemper The BTK Killer Highway Stalker Henry Lee Lucas Monte Ralph Rissell Shoe Fetish Slayer Jerry Brudos Night Stalker Richard Ramirez Unabomber Ted Kaczynski Ed Gein The Butcher of Plainfield Killer Clown John Wayne Gacy Andrew Cunanan And more... In this unique book, Peter Vronsky documents the psychological, investigative, and cultural aspects of serial murder, beginning with its first recorded instance in Ancient Rome through fifteenth-century France on to such notorious contemporary cases as cannibal/necrophile Ed Kemper, the BTK killer, Henry Lee Lucas, Monte Ralph Rissell, Jerry Brudos, Richard Ramirez, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and the emergence of what he classifies as the serial rampage killer such as Andrew Cunanan, who murdered fashion designer Gianni Versace. Vronsky not only offers sound theories on what makes a serial killer but also makes concrete suggestions on how to survive an encounter with one--from recognizing verbal warning signs to physical confrontational resistance. Exhaustively researched with transcripts of interviews with killers, and featuring up-to-date information on the apprehension and conviction of the Green River killer and the Beltway Snipers, Vronskys one-of-a-kind book covers every conceivable aspect of an endlessly riveting true crime phenomenon. INCLUDES PHOTOGRAPHS
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Brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty insist they were commanded to kill by God. Here, Jon Krakauer provides a riveting account of Taliban-like theocracies in the American heartland controlled by renegade Mormon prophets.
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