An Edgar Award Finalist for Best Fact Crime“A thoroughly readable, thoroughly chilling account of a brilliant con man and his all-too vulnerable prey” (The Boston Globe)—the definitive story of preacher Jim Jones, who was responsible for the Jonestown Massacre, the largest murder-suicide in American history, by the New York Times bestselling author of Manson.In the 1950s, a young Indianapolis minister named Jim Jo...

The New York Times bestselling, authoritative account of the life of Charles Manson, filled with surprising new information and previously unpublished photographs: “A riveting, almost Dickensian narrative…four stars” (People).More than forty years ago Charles Manson and his mostly female commune killed nine people during thin 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, among them the pregnant actress Sharon Tate. It was the culmination of a criminal career that a...

Previous books and films have emphasized the supposed glamour of America's most notorious criminal couple, thus contributing to ongoing mythology. The real story is completely different—and far more fascinating.With newly discovered material, bestselling author Jeff Guin tells the real tale of two kids from a filthy Dallas slum who fell in love and then willingly traded their lives for a brief interlude of excitement and, more importantly, fame. The timing for thei...

“Impressively researched and written with storytelling verve” (The Wall Street Journal), this is t****he definitive account of the disastrous siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, featuring never-before-seen documents, photographs, and interviews, from former investigative reporter Jeff Guinn, bestselling author of Manson and The Road to Jonestown.For the first time in thirty years, more than a dozen forme...

It all started when Jeff Guinn was assigned to write a piece full of little-known facts about Christmas for his paper, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. A few months later, he received a call from a gentleman who told him that he showed the story to an important friend who didn’t think much of it. And who might that be? asked Jeff. The next thing he knew, he was whisked off to the North Pole to meet with this “very important friend,” and the rest is, well, as they say, history.

This follow-up to Jeff Guinn's bestselling holiday favorites The Autobiography of Santa Claus and How Mrs. Claus Saved Christmas takes readers on a sleigh ride through the history of Christmas in America that lands smack-dab in 2006, as a new reality TV show threatens to destroy the true spirit of Christmas.This third installment in Jeff Guinn's bestselling Christmas Chronicles series finds Santa facing perhaps the biggest challenge of his career. As Santa himself...

In How Mrs. Claus Saved Christmas, Jeff Guinn combines solid historical fact with glorious legend to deliver another heartwarming holiday book for the whole family.It's 1620 and Mrs. Claus's dear husband is off in the New World planting the seeds of what will become a glorious Christmas tradition. Meanwhile, Mrs. Claus has chosen to stay in England, where the first signs of a dangerous threat to Yuletide cheer are in evidence. The Puritans have gained control of Pa...

The New York Times bestselling author of The Last Gunfight turns his eye for evocative detail to a sweeping novel of the American West that “will delight historical fiction fans longing for the return of classic Westerns” (Library Journal).Cash McLendon has always had an instinct for self-preservation, honed by an impoverished childhood with an alcoholic father on the streets of St. Louis. He eventually builds himself up to become the son...

A New York Times bestseller, Jeff Guinn’s definitive, myth-busting account of the most famous gunfight in American history reveals who Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons and McLaurys really were and what the shootout was all about—“the most thorough account of the gunfight and its circumstances ever published” (The Wall Street Journal).On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, in a vacant lot in Tombstone, Arizona, a confrontation between eigh...

"If you're from Texas, then you probably know someone like this."Plunk Landy's dreams are the same as many middle-aged Texas men—he imagines the Dallas Cowboys finally ending their Super Bowl drought, enjoying the temperate love of a beautiful woman, owning a top-end Ford 150 truck and a gun, of course, and finding some way to become important. Instead, Plunk's life consists of a dead-end job, an addiction to televised sports and Fox News (what he thinks of as "da...

An “engagingly written” (The Wall Street Journal) account of the “Punitive Expedition” of 1916 that brought Pancho Villa and Gen. John J. Pershing into conflict, and whose reverberations continue in the Southwestern US to this day.Jeff Guinn, chronicler of the Southwestern US and of American undesirables (Bonnie and Clyde, Charles Manson, and Jim Jones) tells the “riveting and supremely entertaining narrative” (S.C. Gwynne, New York Times bestsell...

A “f****ascinating slice of rarely considered American history” (Booklist)—the story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison—whose annual summer sojourns introduced the road trip to our culture and made the automobile an essential part of modern life.In 1914 Henry Ford and naturalist John Burroughs visited Thomas Edison in Florida and toured the Everglades. The following year Ford, Edison, and tire maker Harvey Firestone joined together on a summer camping trip an...