The New York Times–bestselling author's pioneering true crime classic: It's "Truman Capote's In Cold Blood turned inside out" ( Newsweek).During an armed robbery in 1974, five hostages were held in the basement of a small home-audio store in Ogden, Utah, by a group of enlisted US Air Force airmen stationed at a nearby base. The victims—including wife and mother Carol Naisbitt—were brutally tortured, shot in the head, and left for dead. Ye...

An epic and intimate firsthand account of a true American hero's daring journey into the heart of the Amazon forest in the nineteenth century.Captain William Lewis Herndon was memorialized in Gary Kinder's bestselling book Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, which recounts Herndon's final acts of heroism as his ship foundered in a hurricane off the Carolina coast in 1857. Seven years before those tragic events, the secretary of the Navy had appointed Herndo...

Tracing an awe-inspiring oceanic route from Boston, around Cape Horn, to the California coast, Two Years Before the Mast is both a riveting story of adventure and the most eloquent, insightful account we have of life at sea in the early nineteenth century. Richard Henry Dana is only nineteen when he abandons the patrician world of Boston and Harvard for an arduous voyage among real sailors, amid genuine danger. The result is an astonishing read, replete with vivid descriptions of storms, w...

As a young man in the summer of 1897, Jack London joined the Klondike gold rush. From that seminal experience emerged these gripping, inimitable wilderness tales, which have endured as some of London’s best and most defining work. With remarkable insight and unflinching realism, London describes the punishing adversity that awaited men in the brutal, frozen expanses of the Yukon, and the extreme tactics these adventurers and travelers adopted to survive. As Van Wyck Brooks observed, “One f...

This true crime saga reveals the case of a missing Nashville woman, a husband on the run, and a rare cold case murder conviction.Janet March had it all: a corporate lawyer husband, two beautiful children, a promising career as an artist, and a dream house she designed herself. But behind closed doors, her husband led a destructive double life. On August 16, 1996, Janet had an appointment to finally file for divorce. But she never arrived. On the night of August 15, ...

Gold digging, adultery, and a slaying on Valentine's Day, 1923, in this "juicy . . . page-turner" of a true crime story ( Chicago Tribune).It was a Roaring Twenties fatal attraction. Nettie Herskovitz was wealthy and widowed when she met Harry Diamond. The attentive, irresistibly sexy twenty-three-year-old suitor would become Nettie's fifth husband. He was also a bootlegger, pimp, and first-class hustler who thought he'd wed a goldmine. What Harry found in...

The explosive true story of America's most corrupt police unit, the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), which terrorized the city of Baltimore for half a decade.When Baltimore police sergeant Wayne Jenkins said he had a monster, he meant he had found a big-time drug dealer—one that he wanted to rob. This is the story of Jenkins and the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a super group of dirty detectives who exploited some of America's greatest problems: guns, drugs, toxic mascul...

The shocking true story of the Russian serial killer who brutally murdered more than fifty victims—and evaded capture for over a decade.By the time he was brought to trial in 1992, Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo had killed more than fifty women and children, often sexually abusing them and leaving their bodies mutilated beyond recognition. Although he was initially arrested in 1984, the police lacked enough evidence to pin the unsolved murders on him and he w...

This Edgar Award finalist—one of Ann Rule's top five true-crime picks—is a "gripping" definitive account of the Dr. Sam Sheppard murder case ( The New York Times Book Review)."My God . . . I think they've killed Marilyn!"At 5:40 a.m. on July 4, 1954, the mayor of Bay Village, a small suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, received a frantic phone call from his neighbor Dr. Sam Sheppard. The news was too terrible to comprehend: Marilyn, Sam's lovely wif...

In "The Forty-Niners: A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado," Stewart Edward White meticulously chronicles the tumultuous journey of those seeking fortune during the Gold Rush era. Employing a vivid literary style characterized by rich descriptive prose and a robust narrative structure, White immerses readers in the personal stories and collective experiences of pioneers navigating the perilous California Trail. The book captures both the rugged landscape of the American West a...

The riveting true story of the rise and fall of Murder, Inc. and the executioner-turned-informant whose mysterious death became a turning point in Mob history.In the fall of 1941, a momentous trial was underway that threatened to end the careers and lives of New York's most brutal mob kingpins. The lead witness, Abe Reles, had been a trusted executioner for Murder, Inc., the enforcement arm of a coast-to-coast mob network known as the Commission. But the man respons...

A convicted murderer tells the story of the years of domestic abuse she endured that drove her to kill her police sergeant husband.The day we met in October of 1997, I was working at the District Court in Traverse City, Michigan as a Deputy Clerk. It was like most other days with arraignments, sentencings, civil case hearings and the like. People shuffling in and out, everyone taking care of their important business with court appearances, document filings, paying t...