The Back Bay File, details the fourth major case of the teacher turned private investigator, Max Cantu. While looking into the murder of a woman at an upscale Newport Beach shopping mall, he and his partner, his wife Bryn, uncover a larger plot to kill many innocent people. His investigation delves into the private lives of some very free spirits as well as some very disgruntled Americans. In addition, he is put in the position of having to look over his shoulder because of a threat stemming from a previous case involving a Mexican drug cartel.
In this bold and suspenseful true-crime story, former homicide prosecutor Timothy M. Burke makes his case against one Leonard Paradiso. Lenny “The Quahog” was convicted of assaulting one young woman and paroled after three years, but Burke believes that he was guilty of much more – that Paradiso was a serial killer who operated in the Boston area, and maybe farther afield, for nearly fifteen years, assaulting countless young women and responsible for the deaths of as many as seven. Burke takes the reader inside the minds of prosecutors, police investigators, and one very dangerous man who thought he had figured out how to rape and murder and get away with it. The Paradiso Files generated headlines when first published in February 2008. Nine days later, Paradiso died at the age of sixty-five without commenting on any of Burke’s accusations, including that he murdered Joan Webster, a Harvard graduate student who disappeared from Logan Airport in 1981. Boston-area prosecutors announced in September 2008 that Burke’s revelations had led them to reopen the unsolved murder cases of three young women – Melodie Stankiewicz, Holly Davidson, and Kathy Williams. There were “too many similarities between the individual cases to ignore,” a prosecutor involved in the new investigation said. Burke’s account leaves little doubt that Paradiso’s deeds should go down in infamy, alongside those of the Boston Strangler.
The “fascinating [and] informative” biography of a pioneering American computer scientist and his mysterious death during the Cold War (The Scotsman, UK). MIT professor Dudley Allen Buck was a brilliant young scientist on the cusp of fame and fortune when he died of mysterious causes in 1959. His latest invention, the Cryotron, was an early form of microchip that would have greatly advance ballistic missile technology. Shortly before Dudley’s death, he was visited by a group of Soviet computer experts. On the day that he died from a sudden bout of pneumonia, a close colleague of his was also found dead from similar causes. Some wonder if their deaths were linked. Dudley’s son Douglas was never satisfied with the explanation of his father’s death. He’s spent more than twenty years investigating it, acquiring his father’s lab books, diaries, correspondence, research papers and patent filings. Armed with this research, Douglas and award-winning journalist Iain Dey tell the story of Dudley’s life and groundbreaking work. The Cryotron Files is at once a gripping history of America’s Cold War era computer scientists, the dramatic personal story of Dudley Buck, and an eye-opening investigation into his mysterious death.
