Modern Crime

Revisiting Dr. Michael Stone's groundbreaking 22-level Gradations of Evil Scale, a hierarchy of evil behavior first introduced in the book The Anatomy of Evil, Stone and Dr. Gary Brucato, a fellow violence and serious psychopathology expert, here provide even more detail, using dozens of cases to exemplify the categories along the continuum. The New Evil also presents compelling evidence that, since a cultural tipping-point in the 1960s, certain types of violent crime have emerged that in earlier decades never or very rarely occurred.

When DS Royston Chase is called to the scene of a fatal road collision, his task is to identify the girl who died alongside the ex-Chief Constable of Wiltshire Police. Paired with the bold and strident DC Claire Laney, Chase is given the task of closing the case quickly and quietly. But when the girl’s DNA provides a familial link to a child who vanished from her home twenty years earlier, Chase and Laney refuse to accept the coincidence. The pair start looking harder at the ex-cop’s life, at which point they encounter serious opposition. Perhaps deadly serious.

When acclaimed mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers first began compiling anthologies of the best crime stories in the 1920s and ’30s, the genre was in the flush of its first golden age. While it is hard to imagine today - after every possible mystery plot has been told, retold, subverted, and played straight again by hundreds of writers over nearly a century - in Sayers’s day there were still twists that had never been seen, and machinations of crime that would shock even jaded Jazz Age fans.

The US government has spent half the time covering up conspiracies as it has spent helping the American people. In Hidden History, you will see the amount of effort over the past fifty years that our government has dedicated to lying and covering up the truth to the world. Starting with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Don Jeffries chronicles a wide variety of issues that have plagued our country's history.

Exit Wounds is a thrilling anthology of crime stories written by masters of the genre, including Dean Koontz, Val McDermid, Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, Elly Griffiths, Dennis Lehane, Joe R. Lansdale, and others.

It is the Whitsun weekend of 1931 in the once-fashionable resort of Frencham-on-Sea. A housewarming party at Seaview One, the thoroughly modern home of Sir James and Lady Theodora Phillips, goes horribly wrong when Lady Theodora is found drowned in the swimming pool. Suspicion falls immediately on one of the servants, but the police are unable to make the charge stick. Two of the house guests, Clarice Thompson and Cliff Thorley, begin to notice the undercurrents of tension and rivalry among the guests, and that one person in particular is acting very suspiciously.

Detective Jake Cashen is called to a cul-de-sac on the edge of Blackhand Hills, where a teenage girl has discovered the victims of a murder-suicide. Newlyweds, shot in their own home. It looks open-and-shut. But something about the scene feels wrong—and Jake can't shake the parallels to his past. The case dredges up memories of his own parents' deaths under the same circumstances. His father snapped. His mother paid with her life. End of story. But as Jake digs deeper into the present-day investigation, he finds unsettling threads that lead straight to the tragedy that defined his childhood.

A double suicide. A dark investigation into historic abuse. Can DI Ruth Hunter link the present killings to secrets of the past before the killer strikes again? Detective Inspector Ruth Hunter has resolved to put her past life in London behind her. So when two seemingly routine suicides start to look suspicious, Ruth is keen to throw herself into a new investigation, lead her CID team and solve what appears to be a complex case. However, as the former London detective digs into the past of the victims’ lives, she uncovers a dark web of abuse within the music industry.

A dangerous Islamic terrorist. A safe house in the middle of Snowdonia. Can DI Ruth Hunter and DS Nick Evans deliver the suspect safely before there is a deadly rescue attempt?

DCI Tom Raven is enjoying the long summer days when an encounter with an old army pal spouting conspiracy theories reignites long-buried memories he would rather forget. A few days later, walkers crossing the North York Moors discover the burnt remains of a body beside a stone cross on a Bronze Age burial mound. When the investigation leads to a top-secret military base, Raven is drawn into a plot that threatens national security.

A fanatical religious cult. A growing list of missing teenagers. Can DI Ruth Hunter and DS Nick Evans uncover the dark secrets of Solace Farm before there is another ritual killing?

A beautiful model's death uncovers an ugly conspiracy stretching all the way to Westminster in Rosie Gilmour's darkest case to date. When rags-to-riches Scots supermodel Bella Mason plunges to her death from the roof of a glitzy Madrid hotel, everyone assumes it was suicide. Except that one person saw exactly what happened to Bella that night, and she definitely didn't jump. But Millie Chambers has no one she can tell - alcoholic, depressed herself and now sectioned by her bullying politician husband, who would believe her?

When the body of a homeless man is discovered on Southend seafront, wedged between the beach huts of Thorpe Bay, the people of Essex don’t raise an eyebrow. But when the post-mortem reveals the identity to be that of local MP, Herbert Tucker, the town begins to sit up.

This audiobook presents a fundamental reinterpretation of changes to crime control in the age of the new police. It breaks new ground by providing a highly detailed, empirical analysis of everyday crime control in Victorian provincial cities - revealing the tremendous activity that ordinary people displayed in responding to crime - alongside a rich survey of police organization and policing in practice.

A fascinating examination of the world of private investigators by a 21st-century private eye. Today's world is complicated: companies are becoming more powerful than nations, the lines between public and corporate institutions grow murkier, and the internet is shredding our privacy. To combat...

Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black Southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

Eddie's on his way back from a routine investigation when his horse almost runs down a half-naked blonde in serious trouble. Against his better judgment, he promises to protect the frightened young woman, only to find himself waylaid by unknown assailants and left for dead beside her mutilated body.

New Deal Law and Order follows President Franklin Roosevelt, Attorney General Homer Cummings, and their war on crime coalition, which overcame the institutional and political challenges to the legitimacy of national law enforcement. Promises of law and order helped to manage tensions among key Democratic Party factions—organized labor, Black Americans, and white Southerners. Their anticrime program, featuring a strengthened criminal code, an empowered FBI, and the first federal war on marijuana, was essential to the expansion of national authority previously stymied on constitutional grounds.

When homicide detective Gabe Quinn returns to the Los Angeles streets after the senseless murder of his wife Hope, he thinks he's fought off all the demons that life can throw his way. But his first case back may prove to be his last. A repeat killer is in town. A killer who is on a personal mission to bring Gabe to his knees, luring him into a deadly game of cat and mouse.

Forcible Confinement is a study of the warped thinking that went into some of the world's most macabre crimes, as well as a clinical examination of the purpose-built rooms, hidden spaces, and soundproofed dungeons prepared for victims.