American Crime

On June 7, 1998, James Byrd, Jr., a 49-year-old black man, was dragged to his death while chained to the back of a pickup truck driven by three young white men. It happened just outside of Jasper, a sleepy East Texas logging town that, within 24 hours of the discovery of the murder, would be inextricably linked in the nation's imagination to an exceptionally brutal, modern-day lynching. In this superbly written examination of the murder and its aftermath, award-winning journalist Joyce King brings us on a journey that begins at the crime scene.

Sixteen-year-old Jenna Harbough's parents had finally given in, and there she was, at a New York club with her best friends, watching the legendary band Avenue A, carrying her demo in hopes of slipping it to the guitarist, Jake Kincade. Then, from the stage, Jake catches her eye, and smiles. It's the best night of her life. It's the last night of her life. Minutes later, Jake's in the alley getting some fresh air, and the girl from the dance floor comes stumbling out, sick and confused and deathly pale.

Niles has just returned from eight years of serving his country as a Special Forces sniper. He's looking forward to a consulting job with Dynamic Defense and spending time with his family, including his bipolar mother, Lorna, and his hard-drinking uncle, Willie. What Niles doesn't know is that Dynamic Defense is actually a CIA front. He's not interested in joining them, but they won't take no for an answer.

She entered the ring to settle a debt. He dragged her out and claimed her as his prize instead. Talia is thrown into a brutal underground fight club to pay off her cousin’s mistake. Alone, terrified, and completely unprepared, she is shoved into the ring like meat for slaughter. But before the final blow lands, a man steps from the shadows. Alexei, a Bratva enforcer with ice in his eyes and power in every breath. He stops the fight, but not out of mercy. He takes her. Not to save, but to keep. Alexei is cold control made flesh. Everything he does is calculated and precise. But Talia tests...

This debut novel marks the beginning of my storytelling journey — a dramatic tale of friendship, betrayal, and the tangled threads of love and loyalty. Since writing Entangled, my voice has deepened, but this first story remains a raw and heartfelt snapshot of where it all began. Rita Meyers and Lisa Richards were more than best friends — they were sisters in spirit, lighting up Baltimore’s nights and navigating their careers with ambition and flair. But when a high-profile scandal rocks the brokerage firm where they once thrived, the two women land on opposite sides of a criminal ...

"How do you overturn an election?" It's a question that has obsessed presidential candidate Jamie Carter ever since her loss to businessman and political neophyte President Jack Smart. In spite of the election results, she's determined to take what she sees as her rightful place in the White House - through any means possible.

From Richard Wright comes a compelling story of one man's attempt to escape his past and start anew in Harlem. Cross Damon is a man at odds with society and with himself—a man of superior intellect who hungers for peace but who brings terror and destruction wherever he goes. The Outsider is an important work of fiction that depicts American racism and its devastating consequences in raw and unflinching terms. Brilliantly imagined and frighteningly prescient, it is an epic exploration of the tragic roots of criminal behavior.

Benton Marcotte is a man of many talents but with an aversion to commitment. At age 33 he's a duly qualified CPA and lawyer in New York State but for the past two years he's worked as a long-haul truck driver. The poor kid hasn't yet found a career he enjoys. Benton accepts a temporary job at his uncle's kitty litter factory in Wellsville, New York to work undercover as the company's truck driver while he tries to figure out why the plant is losing money each year. Perhaps Benton can finally put his extensive education to good use. Who knows? Maybe he'll even meet a fantastic girl in the ...

After refusing to participate in a police department cover-up involving the death of a young black man, Chicago detective Ashe Cayne is pushed out of the force. But he won’t sit quietly on the sidelines: he’s compelled to fight for justice as a private investigator. When a young woman, Tinsley Gerrigan, goes missing, her wealthy parents from the North Shore hire Cayne to find her. As Cayne looks into her life and past, he uncovers secrets Tinsley’s been hiding from her family. Cayne fears he may never find Tinsley alive.

Joe Leaphorn may be long retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, but his detective skills are still sharp, honed by his work as a private detective. His experience will be essential to solve a compelling new case: finding the birth parents of a woman who was raised by a bilagáana family but believes she is Diné based on one solid clue, an old photograph with a classic Navajo child’s blanket.

Ke'yoko and Ka'yah are identical twins with two totally different personalities. As young girls they formed a bond that could not be broken. It isn't until they become grown women that their loyalty is tested by secrets, deception, and lies. Growing up with a strict and controlling father and a weak and sniveling mother, Ke'yoko's only goal is to get as far away from them as possible, even if it means leaving Ka'yah behind. Being rescued by Ja'Rel is like a dream come true.

He pulled off what some deem the crime of the century: skyjacking a commercial jetliner, collecting a ransom of $200,000, parachuting off the aft stairs of the Boeing 727 into the night, and simply disappearing. Since November 1971, “D. B. Cooper”—no one knows his real name or identity—has become a figure of enduring fascination and obsession. The FBI pursued him for over forty years, before closing the case and leaving it unsolved. Unsolved, perhaps, but much admired. D. B. Cooper’s exploit over the skies of the American Northwest has inspired books, films, and endless speculation.

In the summer of 2017, twenty-two-year-old Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind vanished. A week after she disappeared, police arrested the white couple who lived upstairs from Savanna and emerged from their apartment carrying an infant girl. The baby was Savanna’s, but Savanna’s body would not be found for days. The horrifying crime sent shock waves far beyond Fargo, North Dakota, where it occurred, and helped expose the sexual and physical violence Native American women and girls have endured since the country’s colonization.

America's most talented storytellers share their most courageous, compelling, unputdownable work in a collection made for story lovers. Praised early on by Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk author Ben Fountain and The Weight of Blood author Laura McHugh, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES is a new annual short story anthology whose guiding philosophy is that a collection of interesting "full meal" short stories could, as one @JustCoolStories Twitter follower put it, "make America cool again." Toward this end, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2022 features a previously unpublished story by the multi-major-book-...

Organized crime - the Italian American kind - has long been a source of popular entertainment and legend. Now Thomas Reppetto provides a balanced history of the Mafia's rise - from the 1880s to the post-World War II era - that is as exciting as it is authoritative. Structuring his narrative around a series of case histories featuring such infamous characters as Lucky Luciano and Al Capone, Reppetto draws on a lifetime of field experience and access to unseen documents to show us a locally grown Mafia.

Killing Thatcher is the gripping account of how the IRA came astonishingly close to killing Margaret Thatcher and to wiping out the British Cabinet – an extraordinary assassination attempt linked to the Northern Ireland Troubles and the most daring conspiracy against the Crown since the Gunpowder Plot.

On a moonless night in the summer of 1793 a crime was committed in the back room of a New York brothel—the kind of crime that even victims usually kept secret. Instead, seventeen-year-old seamstress Lanah Sawyer did what virtually no one in US history had done before: she charged a gentleman with rape. Her accusation sparked a raw courtroom drama and a relentless struggle for vindication that threatened both Lanah’s and her assailant’s lives.

In the tranquil seaside town of Asbury Park, New Jersey, 10-year-old schoolgirl Marie Smith is brutally murdered. Small-town officials, unable to find the culprit, call upon the young manager of a New York detective agency for help. It is the detective’s first murder case, and now, the specifics of the investigation and daring sting operation that caught the killer is captured in all its rich detail for the first time.

Who ya gonna call? Wicked! FREE on Kindle Unlimited! Baby, it’s cold outside, and no one needs an escape more than Mandy, whose well-meaning family members simply must know when the newlyweds will be starting a family. Midnight feedings and teething rings will have to wait, though, while the Rowlings solve their latest case. A chance rescue of a kidnapped child and the mutterings of a hypnotized game show contestant draw the stars of USCAB into the 5-year-old mystery of three missing girls. All they need is a hot lead in this cold case, but as the suspects pile up, so do Mandy’s ...

Romanov diamond… Fabergé egg… and a Murder! FREE on Kindle Unlimited! Mom-to-be Mandy just wants to enjoy a stress-free maternity leave, but before she can say pink or blue, her well-meaning dad-in-law Dan Rowling hands her another case to crack. With his memories slightly scrambled, a newly dead groom-to-be can’t recall how he ended up deceased, but his murder is definitely related to the theft of a Fabergé egg from one of society’s upper crustiest of families. The pressure’s on since solving the case won’t just free a trapped soul and restore countless poached objects to ...