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What Ever Happened to Eddy Crane?: A Memoir and a Murder Investigation
by Kate Crane
One night when Kate Crane was twelve, her father called to say he was on his way home from his trucking business. He never showed up. Kate and her family were left stunned, with no explanation or resolution on the horizon. Twenty years later, now a journalist in New York City, Kate reopens the investigation with Baltimore's Cold Case Unit, tracks down the retired detectives who'd worked Eddy's case, and chases leads with old friends through her hometown's dark alleys. Maybe she can find some answers--or at least a little solace. Part memoir, part true crime, part psychological suspense, What Ever Happened to Eddy Crane? is a brilliantly written, emotionally resonant story of searing loss and resilience, of Baltimore, of family ghosts, and the bravery required to confront the past.
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The Family Snitch: A Daughter's Memoir of Truth and Lies
by Francesca Fontana
A Wall Street Journal reporter confronts the most difficult source she's ever encountered--her own father--in this unsparing interrogation of the ways we deceive ourselves and others. Francesca's dad, who went to prison when she was 9, loved telling stories about his seemingly larger-than-life past. He said he would tell her anything she wanted to know. But more often than not, it was a total lie. This book started out as a youthful experiment in journalistic investigation, as Francesca began to uncover her father's secret criminal past. In her thought-provoking exploration, Francesca also interrogates her own relationship to the truth, finding that she trusts almost no one and refuses to believe anything that can't be backed by hard evidence. She turns to experts on memory and psychology, in search of someone to help explain the secrets kept between parents and children, and the inheritances they leave us in the fallout of their choices.
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Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks
by Benjamin Hale
A compelling true crime story about two young girls who went missing in the same Arkansas woods twenty-three years apart and the strange circumstances connecting them. This story begins in 2001 on top of Cave Mountain in the Arkansas Ozarks. A six-year-old girl named Haley--Benjamin Hale's cousin--got lost on a mountain trail, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state's history. Her disappearance--and her account, after she was found, of the imaginary friend she met in the woods--would eventually become connected to another story that took place in the same wilderness more than twenty years earlier: a dark and bizarre story of a cult, brainwashing, murder, and the apocalyptic visions of a teenage prophet. Enriched by Benjamin Hale's own family history and the lore of the Arkansas Ozarks, Cave Mountain is a gripping story about nature and survival, religion and skepticism, and good and evil.
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The Oracle's Daughter: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult
by Harrison Hill
A gripping chronicle of the rise and fall of a woman-led cult--and the enduring allure of extremism across America's turbulent religious history. On a cool fall night in 1999, twenty-six-year-old Sarah Green crept out of her house, retrieved a backpack from its hiding place, and ran for her life. She was escaping not just the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, a paramilitary religious cult operating out of the New Mexico desert, but also the punishments and cruelty of the cult's leader--her mother, Deborah. In The Oracle's Daughter, Harrison Hill traces the fascinating beginnings and violent end of ACMTC, from its early days as an outgrowth of the 1960s counterculture to its descent into conspiracy-fueled abuse. It is the story of three women--Deborah, the group's founder and self-proclaimed oracle; Maura, one of its first members; and Sarah, Deborah's daughter--bound together by a punitive, baroque set of radical beliefs and practices, including exorcism, kidnapping, and the horrific mistreatment of those who fell out of the leaders' favor.
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London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth
by Patrick Radden Keefe
From the bestselling, prizewinning author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, a spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret life which drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld that lies beneath London's glittering surface. It is also an intimate and deeply poignant inquiry into the nature of parental love and the challenges of being a parent today, a portrait of a family trying to solve the riddle not just of how their son died, but of who he really was in life.
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Riders on the Storm
by Sherri Kukla
Seventy-five years ago, in the winter of 1951, a young hitchhiker named Billy Cook set off on a brutal cross-country killing spree that shocked the nation. Over the course of several harrowing days, Cook left a trail of terror stretching from Missouri to California and beyond, targeting unsuspecting Good Samaritans who offered him a ride. His cold-blooded crimes captured headlines, terrified travelers, and led to one of the most intense manhunts at that time in American history. More than two decades later, the haunting legacy of Billy Cook would echo through popular culture-most notably in the eerie lyrics and mood of The Doors' iconic 1971 song, Riders on the Storm. Part true crime thriller, part historical chronicle, this book uncovers the full story behind Cook's rampage and the devastating impact of his actions on the families of his victims.
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Who's Watching Shorty?: Reclaiming Myself from the Shame of R. Kelly's Abuse
by Reshona Landfair
Reshona Landfair--known as Jane Doe when she testified at R. Kelly's trial--was the 14-year-old-girl in the child pornography video that ultimately led to racketeering and sex-trafficking convictions and a 30-year prison sentence for the R&B superstar. No one in her world was looking out for her interests or trying to protect her from someone who was a known predator. The people who should have stood up for her--from her family to music business executives to social services to law enforcement--all looked the other way, blinded by his fame and celebrity. In this deeply personal and ultimately empowering memoir, Reshona is finally ready to recount her story in her own words.
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Starstruck: A Journalist's Pursuit of a Fugitive Pop Star, Her Diabolical Maestro, and Their Teenage Sex Cult
by Christopher McDougall
In 2000, an international manhunt was underway for Mexican superstar Gloria Trevi, her manager Sergio Andrade, and the young girls in their entourage. They had gone on the run after Trevi and Andrade were accused of the abuse and rape of the girls in their care. How had a superstar gotten involved in a sex cult with nearly a dozen teenage girls? Andrade founded a performing arts school that plucked young girls out of obscurity and promised to cultivate them into stars. His first recruit was Gloria Trevi. For many girls and their parents, the opportunity was too tempting to pass up. When a known hitmaker and Mexico's most famous singer promised they could leave their hard life behind, how could they say no? But already, whispers of abuse had been circulating, and finally, the allegations caught up to them--resulting in a two-year, international chase for the pair and the girls they had taken with them. In this hair-raising, masterful investigation, bestselling author and journalist Christopher McDougall uncovers the dark secrets of the supreme diva of Mexican pop and her mercurial manager, catching us up on this remarkable case and the civil suit that has recently been brought against them in Los Angeles.
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The Deserving: What the Lives of the Condemned Reveal about American Justice
by Elizabeth Vartkessian
A groundbreaking new take on the American justice system from one of its unknown revolutionaries, offering a powerful new vision of responsibility, punishment, and repair. Elizabeth Vartkessian works with criminal defense teams as a mitigation specialist or "mercy worker." Her job is not to prove defendants' innocence, for they are often guilty, but rather to collect information that might make sense of their behavior. She spends hundreds of hours situating their crimes in context by investigating their histories and communities, talking to their parents, siblings, teachers, and neighbors. Here she offers both a window into the groundbreaking work that is mitigation and a moving account of the individuals whose lives she has defended. What if the values of mitigation--curiosity, context, and mercy--became the values of our criminal justice system? We might stop crime before it happens.
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Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York's Explosive '80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation
by Elliot Williams
On a dirty New York subway car on December 22, 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot four teenagers from the Bronx at point blank range. Goetz claimed they were going to mug him; the teens claim that one of them had simply asked for five dollars. Crime was at an all-time high. So was racial tension. Was Goetz, who was white, a hero who finally fought back? Or a bigot whose itchy trigger finger seriously wounded three unarmed black kids and condemned a fourth to irreversible brain damage? By the time Goetz went on trial for quadruple attempted murder, the Subway Vigilante saga had become a global sensation, and New Yorkers across race and class were split over whether he deserved decades in prison...or a medal. In Five Bullets, Elliot Williams vaults back to gritty 1980s Manhattan and reexamines the first major true-crime story of the cable news era.
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