An ex-con struggles to adjust to life outside prison walls in "one of the great crime novels of the past 30 years" (James Ellroy).After eight years spent locked up, Max has gotten very good at being a prisoner. He knows the guards, the inmates, and how to survive. But the parole board has decided that he has sufficiently reformed, and it's time for him to say goodbye. When Max reaches the outside world, he finds that freedom doesn't make anything e...

" The best novel about armed robbery ever written" from the Reservoir Dogs actor and ex-con author of No Beast So Fierce (James Ellroy).Troy was born in Beverly Hills but raised in the prisons of Southern California. Two days before his parole from reform school, a run-in with a young black tough threatens to derail his release. He prepares to fight, ready to sacrifice freedom to maintain his reputation, but a friend comes to his ...

"A masterful summation of the hard and brutal life of crime and prison from . . . America's foremost chronicler of prison life." — Los Angeles TimesIn Education of a Felon, the reigning champion of prison novelists finally tells his own story. The son of an alcoholic stagehand father and a Busby Berkeley chorus girl, Bunker was—at seventeen—the youngest inmate ever in San Quentin. His hard-won experiences on L.A.'s meanest streets and in and out of...

Six stories from the papers of one of America's finest crime authorsRoger doesn't mean for the preacher and his wife to die. Released less than a year earlier from San Quentin, he's trying to make a living the only way he knows how: theft. His latest heist goes perfectly until his car breaks down. Sirens are closing in when an old black preacher stops to give him a lift. The police at the roadblock kill the elderly couple, but in the eyes of the law it's Roger's fa...

Here is the quintessential story of a young hoodlum's coming of age in post-Depression America, from the undisputed master of the genre."Bunker is a true original of American letters. His books are criminal classics." ―James Ellroy"The best first-person crime novel I've ever read." —Quentin TarantinoAlex Hamilton is young, intelligent, savvy, and independent—but also subject to violent fits of rage. Raised within th...

"Compact, brilliantly detailed" this sixties L. A. noir thriller is "[a] posthumous wild ride from a modern master of crime fiction" ( Publishers Weekly).Ex-con. Author. Actor. Legend. Edward Bunker is one of the acknowledged masters of crime fiction. Written in the late 1960's and discovered after Bunker's death in 2005, Stark is his first and perhaps his most explosive novel ever.1962. Oceanview, California. The girls are beautiful. The do...

In this dark thriller, two inmates become friends in California's San Quentin, a world of violence and paranoia where prisoners struggle to survive.Basis for the film starring Willem Dafoe, Edward Furlong, and Mickey Rourke―directed by Steve Buscemi.Ron Decker is a newbie, a drug dealer whose shot at a short two-year stint in the can is threatened from inside and outside. He's got to keep a spotless record or it's ten to life. But at San Qu...

The basis for the film Straight Time, this compelling novel, first published in 1973 and written by a man who had spent most of his life in prison, is the story of an ex-con’s attempt to negotiate the straight world-and his swan dive back into the paradoxical security of crime.

Charlie Resnick is the last person to see the attractive young woman who vanishes after a Christmas office party, but he can't even remember the color of the car in which she left. Days later, a tape-recorded ransom note arrives at police headquarters, and Resnick-along with his faulty memory-is the key to outsmarting the abductor.

**“The best living Italian crime writer.”—**Il ManifestoAn unscrupulous womanizer, as devoid of morals now as he once was full of idealistic fervor, returns to Italy, where he is wanted for a series of crimes. To earn himself the guise of respectability, he is willing to go as far as murder.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Prayers the Devil Answers and The Ballad of Tom Dooley**, a “fascinating historical fiction novel you won’t be able to put down” (Bustle)** based on one of the strangest murder trials in American history—the case of the Greenbrier Ghost.Lakin, West Virginia, 1930: Following a suicide attempt and consigned to a segreg...

Mississippi Sissy is the stunning memoir from Kevin Sessums, a celebrity journalist who grew up scaring other children, hiding terrible secrets, pretending to be Arlene Frances and running wild in the South.As he grew up in Forest, Mississippi, befriended by the family maid, Mattie May, he became a young man who turned the word "sissy" on its head, just as his mother taught him. In Jackson, he is befriended by Eudora Welty and journalist Frank Hains, but when Hains is brut...