The newspaper crime beat sunk its talons into my flesh nearly 50 years ago and has never let go. As Shakespeare knew, the best stories—about love and hate, life and death, good and evil—can be found on the daily police blotter. I’ve spent my career writing about those tales in newspapers, online, and in books. My interest has never really been the gore—a tally of the knife wounds or the volume of blood lost. No, my fascination is the mind and the psychology of the criminal, who always believes he is smarter than the rest of us—and is generally proven wrong.
In the true crime-writing biz, access to key sources is everything. Capote and his assistant, the writer Harper Lee, enjoyed nearly unfettered contact with Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, the two sad sack ex-cons who committed the infamous murders of the Clutter family in 1959 in a Kansas whistle-stop town—and swung from a rope for it.
Capote made the most of the secrets he learned from Hickock and Smith, painting a psychological portrait of the pair that stands even today as a model of reporting (even if he did bend a few facts). Capote’s descriptive genius left me feeling as if I were standing beside him on the vast Kansas prairie, pencil and notebook in hand.
The chilling true crime 'non-fiction novel' that made Truman Capote's name, In Cold Blood is a seminal work of modern prose, a remarkable synthesis of journalistic skill and powerfully evocative narrative published in Penguin Modern Classics.
Controversial and compelling, In Cold Blood reconstructs the murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children. Truman Capote's comprehensive study of the killings and subsequent investigation explores the circumstances surrounding this terrible crime and the effect it had on those involved. At the centre of his study are the amoral young killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickcock, who, vividly…
Do you like to root for the bad guy? Then George Jung, the central figure in this true crime classic about the Columbia-to-America cocaine snowstorm of the 1980s, might just be your man.
Author Porter weaves a brisk, vivid narrative about his anti-hero Jung, a likable goofball stoner who stumbles into the big-time international coke biz and isn’t smart enough to get out (and he had his chances, lord knows).
Johnny Depp did a memorable job of portraying Jung in the film version of Blow (released in 2001), but the Porter’s book takes the reader three or four levels deeper into the absurdities of Jung’s narcotics hellscape.
BLOW is the unlikely story of George Jung's roller coaster ride from middle-class high school football hero to the heart of Pable Escobar's Medellin cartel-- the largest importer of the United States cocaine supply in the 1980s. Jung's early business of flying marijuana into the United States from the mountains of Mexico took a dramatic turn when he met Carlos Lehder, a young Colombian car thief with connections to the then newly born cocaine operation in his native land. Together they created a new model for selling cocaine, turning a drug used primarily by the entertainment elite into a massive…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I don’t know of a criminal case—or a true crime book—that better exemplifies America’s fractured political divide. With deep access to the central figures in this heartbreaking story, author Sexton investigates the gulf between one side and the other and how we got there.
The book focuses on a night of violent conflict in Omaha, Nebraska, in May 2020, during the social unrest following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Sexton takes readers inside the decision-making process of key players in the drama, including family members as well as law enforcement and criminal justice professionals.
You will not be surprised to learn that misinformation and half-truths from spurious social media sources played a key role in this case, equal parts tragedy and debacle.
“A meticulously researched and briskly written account that deftly weaves the influences of racial injustice, economic disparity, incendiary social media, and guns.” —Associated Press
From the award-winning journalist Bob Woodward calls “one of the truly great reporters working today,” a searing account of two linked and tragic deaths stemming from the 2020 George Floyd protests that explores the complex political and racial mistrust and division of today’s America.
“One of the most superb testaments about the confusion, despair, and—hopefully—humility that frames our century that one could ever hope to read.” —Hilton Als
The bad guy at the center of Egan’s book has something in common with every scoundrel who somehow manages to talk a sucker out of his last dime: He was adept at the dark art of flimflam. D.C. Stephenson, a smooth-talking serial sex predator, showed up in Indiana during the Roaring Twenties and was soon handed the keys to the government, setting in motion a master plan for a Ku Klux Klan takeover of American politics.
Egan’s story left me flabbergasted: Even as a longtime journalist who has done my share of writing about the KKK, I was not aware of the depth of the racist organization’s reach into our country’s business and political establishment a century ago.
"With narrative elan, Egan gives us a riveting saga of how a predatory con man became one of the most powerful people in 1920s America, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, with a plan to rule the country—and how a grisly murder of a woman brought him down. Compelling and chillingly resonant with our own time." —Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and the Vile
“Riveting…Egan is a brilliant researcher and lucid writer.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
A historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
A full quarter-century later, what did we learn about the how and why of modern American school shootings from the 1999 slaughter at Columbine High School in Colorado? Not much, apparently, since they still occur with random regularity.
But it’s all here, in Cullen’s remarkable account, in granular detail—the who, how, and why of two rather isolated boys who donned their dusters and walked into their school with guns blazing. The subject matter might be sickening, but this indelible portrait of the perps and victims is essential reading if we have any hope of stemming the madness.
'Excellent . . . amazing how much still comes as a surprise' New York Times Book Review
'Like Capote's In Cold Blood, this tour de force gets below the who and the what of a horrifying incident to lay bare the devastating why' People
'A staggering work of journalism' Washington Post
'The tragedies keep coming. As we reel from the latest horror...' So begins the epilogue, illustrating how Columbine has become the template for nearly two decades of "spectacle murders." It makes the imperative to understand the crime that sparked this flame more urgent than…
A half-century after Charles Manson's appalling murders, David J. Krajicek takes a fresh look at his life in a portrait of evil that reveals the dark side of the Sixties. Using Manson's own words and those of his followers, Krajicek shows how the ex-con built a harem of naïve acolytes who committed murder at his direction.
Freshly paroled after spending most of his young life locked up, Manson stumbled into San Francisco in 1967 just as thousands of impressionable young people were streaming into town for the Summer of Love. Using manipulation skills honed in prison, he assembled a personal commune cult of hippies, taking control of their bodies and minds. As Krajicek writes, Manson became the personification of Flower Power gone to seed.
