**A riveting investigation into the infamous 1991 yogurt shop murders in Austin, Texas, exploring false confessions, overturned convictions, and the enduring mystery behind the savage killing of four teenage girls. Featured in the HBO Documentary Series The Yogurt Shop Murders.“A true-crime page-turner.... Lowry exhausts every possible scenario behind the shocking, unsolved quadruple murder ... and offers a theory on what really happened.” —New York Post"Gripping, ...

“I am a woman that came from the cotton fields of the South; I was promoted from there to the wash-tub; then I was promoted to the cook kitchen, and from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations.”--Madam C. J. Walker, National Negro Business League Convention, 1912Now, from a writer acclaimed for her novels and the memoir Crossed Over, a remarkable biography of a truly heroic figure.Madam C. J. W...

From the award-winning novelist and biographer Beverly Lowry comes an astonishing re-imagining of the remarkable life of Harriet Tubman, the “Moses of Her People.”Tubman was an escaped slave, lumberjack, laundress, raid leader, nurse, fund-raiser, cook, intelligence gatherer, Underground Railroad organizer, and abolitionist. In Harriet Tubman, Lowry creates a portrait enriched with lively imagined vignettes that transform the legendary icon into flesh and blood. We travel ...

One mother's son is killed in a tragic accident; another's daughter murders two people in a wild rage. From these bitter facts, Beverly Lowry--the first child's mother and an acclaimed novelist--has fashioned a memoir in which the objectivity of true-crime reportage resonates with acute feeling and even, ultimately, with redemption.In Houston, in the early morning hours of June 13, 1983, twenty-three-year-old Karla Faye Tucker showed up with two friends at the apartment of a man th...

The stunning true story of a murder that rocked the Mississippi Delta and forever shaped one author’s life and perception of home.“Mix together a bloody murder in a privileged white family, a false accusation against a Black man, a suspicious town, a sensational trial with colorful lawyers, and a punishment that didn’t fit the crime, and you have the best of southern gothic fiction. But the very best part is that the story is true.” —John Grisham

On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "Nobody can read like a writer," Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction...

From the author of Crossed Over, another masterful account of a horrible crime: the murder of four girls, countless other ruined lives, and the evolving complications of the justice system that frustrated the massive attempts--for twenty-five years now--to find and punish those who committed it.The facts are brutally straightforward. On December 6, 1991, the naked, bound-and-gagged bodies of the four girls--each one shot in the head--were found in an I Can...

The novelist Beverly Lowry was mourning her son’s death in a hit-and-run accident when she came across a newspaper story about Karla Faye Tucker, the infamous Houston murderer who was then on death row. The article captured Tucker’s innocent beauty, the stunning brutality of her crimes—committed with a pickaxe—and the stories of her spiritual awakening on death row. Struck by these apparent contradictions, Lowry found herself inexplicably drawn to Tucker, who some ten years later would bec...

The stunning true story of a murder that rocked the Mississippi Delta and forever shaped one author’s life and perception of home.In 1948, in the most stubbornly Dixiefied corner of the Jim Crow south, society matron Idella Thompson was viciously murdered in her own home: stabbed at least 150 times and left facedown in one of the bathrooms. Her daughter, Ruth Dickins, was the only other person in the house. She told authorities a Black man she didn’t recognize had ...

An astonishing portrait of a murderer and his complex relationship with a crusading journalist Michael Ross was a serial killer who raped and murdered eight young women between 1981 and 1984, and several years ago the state of Connecticut put him to death. His crimes were horrific, and he paid the ultimate price for them. When journalist Martha Elliott first heard of Ross, she learned what the world knew of him-that he had been a master at hiding in plain sight. Elliott, a staunch critic o...

Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo investigates the notorious 1922 double murder of a high-society minister and his secret mistress, a Jazz Age mega-crime that propelled tabloid news in the 20th century.On September 16, 1922, the bodies of Reverend Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills were found beneath a crabapple tree on an abandoned farm outside of New Brunswick, New Jersey. The killer had arranged the bodies in a pose conveying intimacy.The murder of Hall, a pr...

With murder, court battles, and sensational newspaper headlines, the story of Lizzie Borden is compulsively listenable and perfect for the Common Core.Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.In a compelling, linear narrative, Miller takes listeners along as she investigates a brutal crime: the August 4, 1892, murders of wealthy and prominent Andrew and Abby Borden. The a...