True Crime

On April 26th, 1871, a police constable walking one of London's remotest beats stumbled upon a brutalized young woman kneeling in the muddy road, her face smashed and battered. The policeman gaped in horror as the woman stretched out her hand to him, collapsed in the mud, muttered "let me die," and slipped into a coma. Five days later, she died, her identity still unknown.

Within hours of her discovery, scores of Metropolitan Police officers were involved in the investigation, while Scotland Yard sent one of its top detectives to lead it. On the day of her death, the police discovered the girl's identity: Jane Maria Clouson, a sixteen-year-old servant to the Pooks, a respectable Greenwich family. Hours later, they arrested her master's son, twenty-year-old Edmund, for her murder.

An epic tale of law and disorder, Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane is the story of a criminal case conducted at the time of the birth of modern forensic science. It is the story of the majesty-and the travesty-of the nineteenth-century British legal system: the zealous prosecutors determined to convict young Pook; and the remarkable lawyer equally determined to obtain his acquittal by any means possible. At the heart of this story are the alleged killer and his alleged victim: Edmund Pook, the young Victorian gentleman caught up in a legal nightmare, and Jane Maria Clouson, the young maid whose hard life before her tragic death serves as a bracing corrective to Downton Abbey fantasies about the lives of British servants.

Using an abundant collection of primary sources, Paul Thomas Murphy creates a gripping narrative of the police procedural and the ensuing legal drama, with its many twists and turns, from the discovery of the body until the final judgement-and beyond. For while the murder of Jane Clouson has for nearly one hundred and fifty years remained unsolved, much of the evidence remains, and Murphy, applying contemporary forensic methods to this Victorian cold case, reveals definitively the identity of Jane Clouson's murderer-and provides the resolution that Jane's angry supporters long ago demanded.

One day in November 1958, the celebrated historian Hugh Trevor-Roper received a curious letter. It was an appeal for help, written on behalf of a student at Magdalen College, with the unlikely claim that he was being persecuted by the Bishop of Oxford. Curiosity piqued, Trevor-Roper agreed to a meeting. It was to be his first encounter with Robert Parkin Peters: plagiarist, bigamist, fraudulent priest, and imposter extraordinaire.

The Professor and the Parson is a witty and charming portrait of eccentricity, extraordinary narcissism, and a life as wild and unlikely as any in fiction. Motivated not by money but by a desire for prestige, Peters lied, stole, and cheated his way to academic positions and religious posts from Cambridge to New York. Frequently deported, and even more frequently discovered, he left a trail of destruction including seven marriages (three of which were bigamous) and an investigation by the FBI.

"I was captivated from start to finish by this utterly mad, and wholly delightful story of chicanery and fantasy, and which involves a man who relentlessly duped our most cherished institutions of godly pursuit and higher learning. Plus I learned how to defrock a priest, always good to have on hand in these troubling times." --Simon Winchester, author of The Perfectionists

One evening in 2009, April Balascio was searching online, as she had been every night, for unsolved murders in the towns her family had lived growing up, when she stumbled across the latest investigations into the "Sweetheart Murders" cold case. All at once, the buried memories of her father's dark history were awakened, and she knew she had to take action. She picked up the phone to call a detective and the rest is infamous true crime history.

In her unflinching memoir, Balascio bravely reveals an astonishing tale of a lifetime of manipulation, unexplained upheavals, and silent fear. Some part of her had always known what her father was capable of, but the full truth of how she came to these revelations is as riveting as it is quietly terrifying. Through searing storytelling, dedicated research, and intimate insight, Raised by a Serial Killer is a gripping, courageous memoir unlike any other.

After meeting at a house party in London, where they discovered a mutual obsession for all things true crime, Suruthi Bala and Hannah Maguire drunkenly promised to one day start their own murder podcast. Six weeks later they ordered their first microphones and the rest is history. From the hosts of the hit podcast RedHanded, a Listeners' Choice British Podcast Awards Winner three years in a row, and dubbed by Anna Paquin as her "all- time favorite true crime podcast," Bala and Maguire have amassed a cult following of "spooky bitches."

What is it about killers, cults, and cannibals that capture our imaginations even as they terrify and disturb us? Do we find these stories endlessly and equally compelling because they hold up a mirror to society's failings and to the horrors that we humans are capable of? RedHanded rejects the outdated narrative of killers as monsters and that a victim "was just in the wrong place at the wrong time." Instead, it dissects the stories of killers in a way that challenges perceptions and asks the hard questions about society, gender, poverty, culture, and even our politics.

With their trademark humor, in-depth research on real-life cases, and unflinching analysis of what makes a murderer, Bala and Maguire take you through what drives the most extreme of human behavior to find out once and for all what makes a killer tick.

"A cult hit balancing true crime, progressive politics, and a lot of charm." ―Vox

"Laugh-out-loud yet wildly informative." ―Refinery29​

A chilling investigation into the unsolved "boy in the woods" murder; journalist Jim Cosgrove chronicles his decades-long struggle to uncover the truth of a family friend's disappearance and death -- perfect for fans of I'll be Gone in the Dark and Memorial Drive.

For nine years, South Carolina officials struggled to identify "the boy in the woods," a young man whose body had been discovered just south of Myrtle Beach in a fishing village called Murrells Inlet.

Meanwhile, 1,200 miles away in Kansas City, Missouri, Frank McGonigle's family searched for him at Grateful Dead concerts and in the face of every long-haired hitchhiker they passed. Consumed by guilt for how they'd treated him, Frank's eight siblings slowly came to understand that -- like Jerry Garcia sang -- he's gone and nothin's gonna bring him back.

Frank McGonigle was finally found -- and identified as "the boy in the woods."

Four years later, the case still unsolved, Jim Cosgrove, a McGonigle family friend and investigative journalist, picked up the trail of Frank's cold case and began uncovering connections to a ruthless local crime boss and blunders by the threadbare sheriff's department.

When his research began to stall, a chance meeting with the soft-hearted, straight-talking "energy reader" Carol Williams provided a metaphysical spark that reignited Jim's resolve. Although his work as a journalist trained him to be skeptical, Cosgrove found himself starting to become a believer when Carol provided details about Frank's murder that turned out to be freakishly accurate.

In 2019, Cosgrove returned to Murrells Inlet with one of Frank's brothers to dredge up some old leads and settle Frank's case once and for all...

Patrick Radden Keefe has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his meticulously-reported, hypnotically-engaging work on the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from The New Yorker. As Keefe says in his preface "They reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial."

Keefe brilliantly explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines, examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist, spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black market arms merchant, and profiles a passionate death penalty attorney who represents the "worst of the worst," among other bravura works of literary journalism.

The appearance of his byline in The New Yorker is always an event, and collected here for the first time readers can see his work forms an always enthralling but deeply human portrait of criminals and rascals, as well as those who stand up against them.

"A king of contemporary nonfiction." --Entertainment Weekly

Scarred is Sarah Edmondson's compelling memoir of her recruitment into the NXIVM cult, the 12 years she spent within the organization (during which she enrolled over 2,000 members and entered DOS--NXIVM's "secret sisterhood"), her breaking point, and her harrowing fight to get out, to expose Keith Raniere and the leadership, to help others, and to heal. Complete with personal photographs, Scarred is also an eye-opening story about abuses of power, female trust and friendship, and how sometimes the search to be "better" can override everything else.

- In the tradition of Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman, Escape by Carolyn Jessop, and Troublemaker by Leah Remini
- This tell-all follows Sarah from the moment she takes her first NXIVM seminar, to the invitation she accepts from her best friend, Lauren Salzman, into DOS, to her journey toward become a key witness in the federal case against its founders
- Evokes questions about friendship, ethics, good and evil, making it a brilliant selection for book clubs

Audio edition read by the author.

Houston, Texas, in the early 1970s was an exciting place--the home of NASA, the city of the future. But a string of missing teenage boys, many from the same neighborhood, hinted at a dark undercurrent that would go ignored for too long. While their siblings and friends wondered where they'd gone, the Houston Police Department dismissed them as thrill-seeking runaways, fleeing the Vietnam draft or conservative parents, likely looking to get high and join the counterculture.

It was only after their killer, Dean Corll, was murdered by an accomplice that many of those boys' bodies were discovered in mass graves. Known as the "Candy Man," Corll was a local sweet shop owner who had enlisted two teenage boys to lure their friends to parties where they would be tortured and killed, and then buried.

All of Corll's victims' bodies were badly decomposed; some were only skeletal. Known collectively as the Lost Boys, many were never identified. Decades later, when forensic anthropologist Sharon Derrick discovered a box of remains marked "1973 Murders" in the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office, she knew she had to act. It would take prison interviews with Corll's accomplices, advanced scientific techniques, and years of tireless effort to identify the young men whose lives had been taken. But one by one, nearly all of their names have been returned to them.

Investigative journalist Lise Olsen immerses readers in this astonishing story, simultaneously bringing to life the teens who were hunted by a killer hiding in plain sight and the extraordinary woman who would finally give his victims back their dignity and their names. The upside-down murder mystery reveals new information about this case and astonishing facts about why these victims were forgotten in the 1970s--and why what happened to them remains relevant.