After the events of Scratchin' on the Eight Ball, Reason Nelson embarks on a personal journey of discovery that will take him closer to the edge. He struggles with the loss of his friend, coming to grips with a new outlook on life that means sacrificing the things he holds dear.If you are familiar with Scratchin' on the Eight Ball, you should be able to figure out what's going on in this book without too much trouble.
For one year, writer Jay Atkinson worked as a private eye for the storied firm McCain Investigations, founded by the late Joe McCain, one of the most decorated police officers in Boston history. In this colorful narrative, Atkinson describes the cases he worked that year, chasing down an assortment of felons, thieves, and con artists, as well as the ghost of a real American hero, legendary cop Joe McCain. Big Joe was the genuine article, a detective so committed to his work that a gunshot wound suffered in the line of duty took thirteen years to kill him. In Legends of Winter Hill Atkinson traces Big Joe’s career from the day he put on his Boston Metropolitan Police uniform in the 1950s through the heyday of his run-ins with mafiosi, bad cops, and ruthless killers, up to his death in 2001. Atkinson also follows the career of Joe McCain’s son, Joe Jr., a tattooed motorcycle fanatic who took up the mantle of his father and became a cop himself. Legends of Winter Hill takes you into an alluring and gritty world where heroes go unsung every day and moral boundaries aren’t always black and white.
Jason Shaw is a police officer in Huntsville, California. A former US Marine, he is a happy father and husband who takes his job seriously and has just been transferred from narcotics and vice to the Huntsville Gang Task Force Unit. A month after the transfer, mysterious attacks begin one night when a criminal sets a trap outside the Shaw home. Although the Shaws escape the clumsy attempt, there are no suspects, and Shaw believes the amateurish trap might have been a juvenile prank. As time passes, however, the attacks escalate. Who is trying to terrorize the cop and his family? Is it an ex-con Shaw put away or gang member with a beef? Someone is desperately trying to put Shaw in the ground, but the police have no leads. As a media frenzy ensues after every attack, a community once thought to be safe falls further into the grip of panic and terror. Meanwhile, Shaw will do what it takes to keep his family safe, even if it means taking matters into his own hands and letting the attackers know that no one messes with a cop on his own beat.
"[The] weird, beautiful, unapologetically apocalyptic Last Policeman trilogy is one of my favorite mystery series."—John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns Winner of the 2013 Edgar® Award Winner for Best Paperback Original! What’s the point in solving murders if we’re all going to die soon, anyway? Detective Hank Palace has faced this question ever since asteroid 2011GV1 hovered into view. There’s no chance left. No hope. Just six precious months until impact. The Last Policeman presents a fascinating portrait of a pre-apocalyptic United States. The economy spirals downward while crops rot in the fields. Churches and synagogues are packed. People all over the world are walking off the job—but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week—except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares. The first in a trilogy, The Last Policeman offers a mystery set on the brink of an apocalypse. As Palace’s investigation plays out under the shadow of 2011GV1, we’re confronted by hard questions way beyond “whodunit.” What basis does civilization rest upon? What is life worth? What would any of us do, what would we really do, if our days were numbered? Ebook contains an excerpt from the anticipated second book in the trilogy, Countdown City.
"The murder of three detectives in quick succession in the 87th Precinct leads Detective Steve Carella on a search through the city's underside and ultimately into the murderer's sights"--NoveList.
B-Day, as it came to be known, finally arrived. It was a Friday. A school day. I identified with Cinderella as I watched Dad get ready for work. Holster, check. Gun, check. Billy club, check. Handcuffs, check. . . . Saturday morning I got up early. Dad was already gone. Back to work. Ushering the Beatles out of town. On the table . . . there were two small bars of soap, slightly used, the words "Coach House Inn" still legible. One book of matches with four missing. And a note from Dad, "From their room." . . . No one else’s dad comes home from work with something that might, just might, have been intimate with a Beatle. Growing up, Mel Miskimen thought that a gun and handcuffs on the kitchen table were as normal as a gallon of milk and a loaf of Mrs. Karl’s bread. Her father, a Milwaukee cop for almost forty years was part Super Hero (He simply held up his hand and three lanes of traffic came to a screeching halt) and part Supreme Being (He could be anywhere at anytime. I never knew when or where he would pop up.) Miskimen’s memoir, told in humorous vignettes, tells what it was like for a girl growing up with a dad who packed a lunch and packed heat.
This groundbreaking history of how American police forces have been militarized is now revised and updated. Newly added material brings the story through 2020, including analysis of the Ferguson protests, the Obama and Trump administrations, and the George Floyd protests. The last days of colonialism taught America’s revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny. As a result, our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement. But over the last two centuries, America’s cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. The consequences have been dire: the home is no longer a place of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and police today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as enemies. In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians’ ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. His fascinating, frightening narrative that spans from America’s earliest days through today shows how a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collision course with the values of a free society.
Violent crime has been rising sharply in many American cities after two decades of decline. Homicides jumped nearly 17 percent in 2015 in the largest 50 cities, the biggest one-year increase since 1993. The reason is what Heather Mac Donald first identified nationally as the “Ferguson effect”: Since the 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, officers have been backing off of proactive policing, and criminals are becoming emboldened. This book expands on Mac Donald’s groundbreaking and controversial reporting on the Ferguson effect and the criminal-justice system. It deconstructs the central narrative of the Black Lives Matter movement: that racist cops are the greatest threat to young black males. On the contrary, it is criminals and gangbangers who are responsible for the high black homicide death rate. The War on Cops exposes the truth about officer use of force and explodes the conceit of “mass incarceration.” A rigorous analysis of data shows that crime, not race, drives police actions and prison rates. The growth of proactive policing in the 1990s, along with lengthened sentences for violent crime, saved thousands of minority lives. In fact, Mac Donald argues, no government agency is more dedicated to the proposition that “black lives matter” than today’s data-driven, accountable police department. Mac Donald gives voice to the many residents of high-crime neighborhoods who want proactive policing. She warns that race-based attacks on the criminal-justice system, from the White House on down, are eroding the authority of law and putting lives at risk. This book is a call for a more honest and informed debate about policing, crime, and race.
The shocking ninth novel in the Martin Beck mystery series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö finds Beck investigating parallel cases that have shocked a small rural community. In a country town, a woman is brutally murdered and left buried in a swamp. There are two main suspects: her closest neighbor and her ex-husband. Meanwhile, on a quiet suburban street a midnight shootout takes place between three cops and two teenage boys. Dead, one cop and one kid. Wounded, two cops. Escaped, one kid. Martin Beck and his partner Lenart Kollberg are called in to investigate. As Beck digs deeper into the murky waters of the young girl’s murder, Kollberg scours the town for the teenager, and together they are forced to examine the changing face of crime.
In 1998, Richard Price returned to the gritty urban landscape of his national bestseller Clockers to produce Freedomland, a searing and unforgettable novel about a hijacked car, a missing child, and an embattled neighborhood polarized by racism, distrust, and accusation. Freedomland hit bestseller lists from coast to coast, including those of the Boston Globe, USA Today and Los Angeles Times; garnered universally rave reviews; and was selected as the Grand Prize Winner of the Imus American Book Award and as a New York Times Notable Book. On May 11, this highly lauded bestseller is available in paperback for the first time. A white woman, her hands gashed and bloody, stumbles into an inner-city emergency room and announces that she has just been carjacked by a black man. But then comes the horrifying twist: Her young son was asleep in the back seat, and he has now disappeared into the night. So begins Richard Price's electrifying new novel, a tale set on the same turf--Dempsey, New Jersey--as Clockers. Assigned to investigate the case of Brenda Martin's missing child is detective Lorenzo Council, a local son of the very housing project targeted as the scene of the crime. Under a white-hot media glare, Lorenzo launches an all-out search for the abducted boy, even as he quietly explores a different possibility: Does Brenda Martin know a lot more about her son's disappearance than she's admitting? Right behind Lorenzo is Jesse Haus, an ambitious young reporter from the city's evening paper. Almost immediately, Jesse suspects Brenda of hiding something. Relentlessly, she works her way into the distraught mother's fragile world, befriending her even as she looks for the chance to break the biggest story of her career. As the search for the alleged carjacker intensifies, so does the simmering racial tension between Dempsey and its mostly white neighbor, Gannon. And when the Gannon police arrest a black man from Dempsey and declare him a suspect, the animosity between the two cities threatens to boil over into violence. With the media swarming and the mood turning increasingly ugly, Lorenzo must take desperate measures to get to the bottom of Brenda Martin's story. At once a suspenseful mystery and a brilliant portrait of two cities locked in a death-grip of explosive rage, Freedomland reveals the heart of the urban American experience--dislocated, furious, yearning--as never before. Richard Price has created a vibrant, gut-wrenching masterpiece whose images will remain long after the final, devastating pages.
