Growing up on Cape Cod in the 1960s, Liza Rodman was a lonely little girl. During the summers, while her mother worked days in a local motel and danced most nights in the Provincetown bars, her babysitter - the kind, handsome handyman at the motel where her mother worked - took her and her sister on adventures in his truck. He bought them popsicles and together, they visited his “secret garden” in the Truro woods. To Liza, he was one of the few kind, understanding, and safe adults in her life.

Years before the name Alex Murdaugh was splashed across every major media outlet in America, local South Carolina journalist Mandy Matney had an instinct that something wasn’t right in the Lowcountry. The powerful Murdaugh dynasty had dominated rural South Carolina for generations. No one dared to cross them.

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.

In November 1987, a young couple on an overnight trip to Seattle vanished without a trace. A week later, the bodies of Tanya Van Cuylenborg and her boyfriend Jay Cook were found in rural Washington. It was a brutal crime, and it was the perfect crime: With few clues and no witnesses, an international manhunt turned up empty, and the sensational case that shocked the Pacific Northwest gradually slipped from the headlines.

In September of 1990, in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, sixteen-year-old Lisa Pruett was on her way to a midnight tryst with her boyfriend when she was viciously stabbed to death only thirty feet from the boy's home. The murder cast a palpable gloom over the upscale community and sparked accusations, theories, and rumors among Lisa's friends and peers. With a fresh perspective and painstaking research, James Renner reconstructs the events leading up to and following that heartbreaking night. What emerges is a portrait of a community seething with dark undercurrents.

Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.

After his first grisly crime, Harvey Louis Carignan beat a death sentence and continued to manipulate, rape, and bludgeon women to death - using want ads to lure his young female victims. And time after time, justice was thwarted by a killer whose twisted legal genius was matched only by his sick savagery. Here, complete with the testimony of women who suffered his unspeakable sexual abuses and barely escaped with their lives and of the police who at last put him behind bars, is one of the most shattering and thought-provoking true-crime stories of our time.

After Hurricane Katrina struck and power failed, amid rising floodwaters and heat, exhausted staff at Memorial Medical Center designated certain patients last for rescue. Months later, a doctor and two nurses were arrested and accused of injecting some of those patients with life-ending drugs.

On February 13, 2017, two Indiana teenagers, Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14, went for a walk in the woods near the abandoned Monon High Bridge. They never returned home.

In and out of hospitals since birth, angelic nine-month-old Morgan Reid finally succumbed to what appeared to be sudden infant death syndrome. Morgan's Texas-born mother, Tanya, a nurse and devoted wife, pulled up stakes with her grieving husband, Jim, and moved on. It was the best way to put the past behind them. Until their son, Michael, a boy who by all accounts was terrified of his mother, began showing signs of the same affliction that stole the life of his baby sister....

Shocked by a five-month arson spree that left rural Virginia reeling, Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse drove down to Accomack County to cover the trial of Charlie Smith, who pled guilty to 67 counts of arson. But Charlie wasn't lighting fires alone: he had an accomplice - his girlfriend, Tonya Bundick. Through her depiction of the dangerous shift that happened in their passionate relationship, Hesse brilliantly brings to life the once-thriving coastal community and its distressed inhabitants.

Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept. She was able to escape and eventually identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker. Ronald insisted that she was mistaken - but Jennifer's positive identification was the compelling evidence that put him behind bars. After 11 years, Ronald was allowed to take a DNA test that proved his innocence. He was released after serving more than a decade in prison for a crime he never committed.

Barbara Butcher was early in her recovery from alcoholism when she found an unexpected lifeline: a job at the Medical Examiner’s Office in New York City. The second woman ever hired for the role of Death Investigator in Manhattan, she was the first to last more than three months. The work was gritty, demanding, morbid, and sometimes dangerous—and she loved it. In What the Dead Know, she writes with the kind of New York attitude and bravado you might expect from decades in the field, investigating more than 5,500 death scenes, 680 of which were homicides.

Fifteen-year-old Ellie Mack was the perfect daughter. She was beloved by her parents, friends, and teachers. She and her boyfriend made a teenage golden couple. She was days away from an idyllic summer vacation, with her whole life ahead of her. And then she was gone. Now her mother, Laurel Mack, is trying to put her life back together.

Growing up gifted and working-class poor in the foothills of the Ozarks, Monica and Darci became fast friends. The girls bonded over a shared love of reading and learning, even as they navigated the challenges of their declining town and tumultuous family lives—broken marriages, alcohol abuse, and shuttered stores and factories. They pored over the giant map in their middle school classroom, tracing their fingers over the world that awaited them, vowing to escape. In the end, Monica left Clinton for college and fulfilled her dreams; Darci did not.

In 1984, John Thompson was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a prominent white man in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was sent to Angola Prison and confined to his cell for 23 hours a day. However, Thompson adamantly proclaimed his innocence and just needed lawyers who believed that his trial had been mishandled and would step up to the plate against the powerful DA’s office. But who would fight for Thompson’s innocence when he didn’t have an alibi for the night of the murder and there were two key witnesses to confirm his guilt?

Here is the critically acclaimed inside story, now in an expanded edition, about the rise and fall of Philadelphia's notorious Scarfo organization. Blunt and unsparing, it is a firsthand account of murder, money, and corruption told by wiseguy-turned-witness Nick Caramandi, whose testimony put Nicky Scarfo and many of his associates behind bars for the rest of their lives. In this updated edition of Blood and Honor, author George Anastasia picks up the story where he left off, filling us in on the fates of all the characters - major and minor - in recent years.

Before the internet became widely known as a global tool for terrorists, one perceptive US citizen recognized its ominous potential. Armed with clear evidence of computer espionage, he began a highly personal quest to expose a hidden network of spies that threatened national security. But would the authorities back him up? Cliff Stoll's dramatic firsthand account is "a computer-age detective story, instantly fascinating [and] astonishingly gripping" - Smithsonian.

On January 11, 1995, deputies outside Austin, Texas, found a mutilated body laid across a cold campfire—head destroyed, hands cut off, skin singed by fire. In less than three days, they had the kill zone: a small apartment, where shy Christopher Hatton was shot at point blank range in his bed.

For centuries, the mysterious dark-robed figure has roamed the globe, searching for those whose complicity and cowardice have fed into the rapids of history’s darkest waters - and now it is heading in our direction.It has been years since Helen Franklin left England. In Prague, working as a translator, she has found a home of sorts - or, at least, refuge. That changes when her friend Karel discovers a mysterious letter in the library, a strange confession and a curious warning that speaks of Melmoth the Witness, a dark legend found in obscure fairy tales and antique village lore.

Lacey Spears made international headlines in January 2015, when she was charged with the "depraved mind" murder of her five-year-old son, Garnett. Prosecutors alleged that the 27-year-old mother had poisoned him with high concentrations of salt through his stomach tube. To the outside world, Lacey had seemed like the perfect mother, regularly posting dramatic updates on her son's harrowing medical problems. But in reality, Lacey was a textbook case of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

Four children were abducted and murdered outside of Detroit during the winters of 1976 and 1977; their bodies eventually dumped in snow banks around the city. J. Reuben Appelman was six years old at the time the murders began and had evaded an abduction attempt during that same period, fueling a lifelong obsession with what became known as the Oakland County Child Killings. There were few credible leads and equally few credible suspects. That's what the cops had passed down to the press, and that's what the city of Detroit and J. Reuben Appelman had come to believe.

A groundbreaking major best seller in Italy, Gomorrah is Roberto Saviano's gripping nonfiction account of the decline of Naples under the rule of the Camorra, an organized crime network with a large international reach and stakes in construction, high fashion, illicit drugs, and toxic-waste disposal. Known by insiders as "the System," the Camorra affects cities and villages along the Neapolitan coast

Dr. Carder Stout's clientele includes Oscar-, Golden Globe-, Emmy-, Tony- and Grammy-winners, best-selling authors, and billionaires. He may not be able to share their dark secrets, but for the first time, everyone will know his. At the age of 34, Carder would have gladly pawned the silver spoon he was born choking on for a rock of crack. His downfall was as swift as his privilege was vast - or had he been falling all along?

Before Angalia Bianca became one of Chicago's foremost authorities on violence interruption and prevention, receiving international recognition and a Resolution for Bravery from the City of Chicago, she was a criminal, a master manipulator, and a brilliant con artist. Bianca spent 12 years in prison for forgery, embezzlement, drug dealing, and theft. But now she has gone far beyond the expectations for recovery to a life of service fueled by an unrelenting determination to make a difference.

On June 22, 1954, teenage friends Juliet Hulme - better known as best-selling mystery writer Anne Perry - and Pauline Parker went for a walk in a New Zealand park with Pauline’s mother, Honora. Half an hour later, the girls returned alone, claiming that Pauline’s mother had had an accident. But when Honora Parker was found in a pool of blood with the brick used to bludgeon her to death close at hand, Juliet and Pauline were quickly arrested, and later confessed to the killing.

Gloria Burtzlaff feared for her life one day back in April of 1991 when her abusive husband, Larry, drunk and violent, slapped her, hit her, and began pelting her with glasses. After he tried to drown her in a tub, she got the family shotgun and confronted him in his underwear. “Larry, I’m going to kill you,” she declared. Defense lawyers would later claim he lifted a glass as if to say, “Have at it, sister.” Have at It, Sister is a true-crime tale about Gloria, a South Dakota woman who shot her abusive husband and was put on trial in a precedent-setting case.

Battle Creek, Michigan, is famous as the birthplace of breakfast cereal, and the nearby suburb of Marshall is as wholesome as shredded wheat. Well-known for its colorful Victorian mansions, this stately slice of 19th-century Americana became infamous on a frigid night in February of 1991. Newscaster Diane Newton King was stepping out of her car, her children strapped into the backseat, when a sniper's bullet cut her down.

In 1976, the body of Anna Mae Aquash, an American Indian luminary, was found frozen in the Badlands of South Dakota—or so the FBI said. After a suspicious autopsy and a rushed burial, friends had Aquash exhumed and found a .32-caliber bullet in her skull. Using this scandal as a point of departure, The Unquiet Grave opens a tunnel into the dark side of the FBI and its subversion of American Indian activists. But the book also discovers things the Indians would prefer to keep buried. What unfolds is a sinuous tale of conspiracy, murder, and cover-up.

Twenty-two years in the FBI, 16 of them as a member of the Bureau's Behavioral Science Unit. Roy Hazelwood, like many investigators, has seen it all. But unlike most, he's gone further into the dark and twisted psyches of serial killers and sadistic sexual offenders and has emerged as one of the world's foremost experts on the sexual criminal. Acclaimed true-crime writer Stephen G. Michaud takes you into the heart of Hazelwood's work through dozens of startling cases, including those of the Lonely Heart Killer, the "Ken and Barbie" killings, and the Atlanta Child Murders.