A killer terrorizes a diverse Chicago neighborhood in this “impressive first mystery” (Publishers Weekly). Private investigator Paul Whelan’s specialty is tracking down missing persons. But when his good friend is found slain in an alley, Whelan is steered down a path of violence as he searches for answers in a murder case. His investigation is interrupted by the arrival of an attractive young woman who is on her own search for her missing kid brother. But as clues lead Whelan to believe the two cases may be connected, the body count rises quickly, and he finds himself racing to catch a killer before he strikes again . . . “Raleigh seems to have gotten so deeply inside his hero and his seamy world that there may be nothing left for a sequel. But it would be great to be wrong about that.” —Kirkus Reviews
Well aware that a killer is stalking her, Melvina continues her investigation into the grisly circumstances surrounding the death of Professor Paul Baskin, and she begins to suspect that someone at the university is to blame.
"Excellent writing, puzzling crimes, and plausible and interesting detectives." ― Saturday Review of Literature Meet Oliver Armiston, a writer whose ingenious mysteries inspired so many copycat crimes that the authorities began paying him not to write. Together with Deputy "Man Hunter" Parr of the New York Police Department, Armiston takes on cases of fraud, murder, and other nefarious activities in these ten dryly witty, cleverly constructed whodunits. Author Frederick Irving Anderson (1877–1947) was a star reporter for the New York World from 1898 to 1908 and a popular writer of crime fiction for The Saturday Evening Post and other popular magazines. Because so many of his superb detective stories were written for periodicals, they fell into undeserved neglect. Steeped in the evocative atmosphere of a bygone New York, this collection offers fiction that's seasoned with shrewd evaluations of crime and criminals and enhanced with a delightfully low-key sense of humor. "Anybody who enjoys crime novels should enjoy this book." — Jolly Elementary School
On February 25, 1938, in the early days of the welfare system, the reviled poormaster Harry Barck—wielding power over who would receive public aid—died from a paper spike thrust into his heart. Barck was murdered, the prosecution would assert, by an unemployed mason named Joe Scutellaro. In denying Scutellaro money, Barck had suggested the man's wife prostitute herself on the streets rather than ask the city of Hoboken, New Jersey, for aid. The men scuffled. Scutellaro insisted that Barck fell on his spike; the police claimed he grabbed the spike and stabbed Barck. News of the poormaster's death brought national attention to the plight of ten million unemployed living in desperate circumstances. A team led by celebrated attorney Samuel Leibowitz of &“Scottsboro Boys&” fame worked to save Scutellaro from the electric chair, arguing that the jobless man's struggle with the poormaster was a symbol of larger social ills. The trial became an indictment &“of a system which expects a man to live, in this great democracy, under such shameful circumstances.&” We live in a time where the issues examined in Killing the Poormaster—massive unemployment, endemic poverty, and the inadequacy of public assistance—remain vital. With its insight into our social contract, Killing the Poormaster reads like today's news.
From the bestselling and Emmy-nominated writer behind HBO's We Own This City: a "gripping, surprisingly soulful" mystery about an ex-offender who must choose between the man who got him out and the woman who showed him another path (Entertainment Weekly). Michael Hudson spends the long days in prison devouring books given to him by the prison's librarian, a young woman named Anna who develops a soft spot for her best student. Anna keeps passing Michael books until one day he disappears, suddenly released after a private detective manipulated a witness in Michael's trial. Outside, Michael encounters a Washington, D.C. that has changed a lot during his time locked up. Once shady storefronts are now trendy beer gardens and flower shops. But what hasn't changed is the hard choice between the temptation of crime and doing what's right. Trying to balance his new job, his love of reading, and the debt he owes to the man who got him released, Michael struggles to figure out his place in this new world before he loses control. Smart and fast-paced, The Man Who Came Uptown brings Washington, D.C. to life in a high-stakes story of tough choices.
Four bullet-torn bodies in a drug-ridden South Bronx alley. A college boy shot in the head on the West Side Highway. A wild shootout on the streets of Washington Heights, home of New York City's immigrant Dominican community and hub of the eastern seaboard's drug trade. All seemingly separate acts of violence. But investigators discover a pattern to the mayhem, with links to scores of assaults and murders throughout the city. In this bloody urban saga, Robert Jackall recounts how street cops, detectives, and prosecutors pieced together a puzzle-like story of narcotics trafficking, money laundering, and murders for hire, all centered on a vicious gang of Dominican youths known as the Wild Cowboys. These boyhood friends, operators of a lucrative crack business in the Bronx, routinely pistol-whipped their workers, murdered rivals, shot or slashed witnesses to their crimes, and eventually turned on one another in a deadly civil war. Jackall chronicles the crime-scene investigations, frantic car chases, street arrests at gunpoint, interviews with informants, and knuckle-breaking plea bargaining that culminated in prison terms for more than forty gang members. But he also tells a cautionary tale--one of a society with irreconcilable differences, fraught with self-doubt and moral ambivalence, where the institutional logics of law and bureaucracy often have perverse outcomes. A society where the forces of order battle not just violent criminals but elites seemingly aligned with forces of disorder: community activists who grab any pretext to further narrow causes; intellectuals who romanticize criminals; judges who refuse to lock up dangerous men; federal prosecutors who relish nailing cops more than crooks; and politicians who pander to the worst of our society behind rhetorics of social justice and moral probity. In such an up-for-grabs world, whose order will prevail?
The sequel to Blaque Barbie: Laini and Zoey Jefferies, 34 year old twin beauties running a multi million dollar apparel line, Purple Label. As with most high profile individuals love is a hard thing to catch when your every move is being documented in the tabloids and internet blogs. The women face the woes of finding love in a time where technology has taken over and it isn't uncommon to generate long distance relationships through social media. After the Affair who is left standing with the ultimate prize- real love? Each woman has their strings of sisterhood, professional, and personal affairs tested all in the name of love. This contemporary romance drama thriller will leave you on the edge of your seat wondering what will happen next in the life of the rich and famous.
Robert Prager, a lonely German immigrant searching for the American dream, was probably the most shameful U.S. casualty of World War I. From coast to coast, Americans had been whipped into a patriotic frenzy by a steady diet of government propaganda and hate-mongering. In Collinsville, Illinois, an enraged, drunken mob hung Prager from a tree just after midnight on April 5, 1918. Coal miners in the St. Louis suburb would show the nation they were doing their patriotic part—that they, too, were fighting the fight. And who would stop them anyway? Not the alderman or businessmen who watched silently. Not the four policemen who let Prager from their custody, without drawing a weapon. And who would hold the mob leaders accountable? Certainly not the jury that took just ten minutes to acquit them, all while a band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the courthouse lobby. Peter Stehman sheds light on the era’s hijacking of civil liberties and a forgotten crime some might say has fallen prey to “patriotic amnesia.” Unfortunately, the lessons from Patriotic Murder on intolerance and hate still resonate today as anti-immigration rhetoric and über-nationalism have resurfaced in American political discussion a century later.
“It is always a treat to read a Nero Wolfe mystery. The man has entered our folklore.”—The New York Times Book Review Introduction by David Handler It wasn’t Leonard Dykes’s writing style that offended. But something in his unpublished tome seemed to lead everyone who read it to a very unhappy ending. Now four people are dead, including the unfortunate author himself, and the police think Nero Wolfe is the only man who can close the book on this novel killer. So the genius sleuth directs his sidekick to set a trap . . . and discovers that the truth is far stranger—and far bloodier—than fiction. A grand master of the form, Rex Stout is one of America’s greatest mystery writers, and his literary creation Nero Wolfe is one of the greatest fictional detectives of all time. Together, Stout and Wolfe have entertained—and puzzled—millions of mystery fans around the world. Now, with his perambulatory man-about-town, Archie Goodwin, the arrogant, gourmandizing, sedentary sleuth is back in the original seventy-three cases of crime and detection written by the inimitable master himself, Rex Stout.
