Cesare Lombroso

An electrifying thriller about innocence and absolute evil.Now bereft of both youth and ambition, Detective Inspector Ray Lennox is recovering from a mental breakdown induced by occupational stress and cocaine abuse, and a particularly horrifying child sex murder case back in Edinburgh. On vacation in Florida, his fiancee Trudi is only interested in planning their forthcoming wedding, and a bitter argument sees a deranged Lennox cast adrift in strip-mall Florida. He meets two women in a seedy bar, ending up at their apartment for a coke binge interrupted by two menacing strangers. After the ensuing brawl, Lennox finds himself alone with Tianna, the terrified ten-year-old daughter of one of the women, and a sheet of instructions that make him responsible for her immediate safety.Lennox takes her across the state to an exclusive marina on the Gulf of Mexico, and quickly suspects that he has stumbled into a hornet's nest: a gang of organized paedophiles, every bit as threatening as the monster that haunted him back in Edinburgh. His priority is to protect the abused girl, but can the edgy Lennox trust his own instincts? And can he negotiate her inappropriate sexuality, as well as his own mental fragility, while still trying to get to grips with the Edinburgh murder and the emotions it unleashes in him? A novel about the corruption and abuse of the human soul and the possibilities of redemption, Crime is a thrilling journey into the bright glamour of the Sunshine State and a seething underworld of utter darkness.

Italian psychiatrist and criminal anthropologist Lombroso (d. 1909) is widely acknowledged as the founder of scientific criminology, but his reputation has suffered both because methods and especially standards of precision have outstripped his original work, and also because only readers of Italian had more than fragmentary and often anecdotal access to his ideas. To help alleviate the second problem, 28 of his articles published in English between 1890 and 1929 are presented, along with bibliographic appendices of books and periodical literature pertaining to him and to criminal anthropology. Among the article topics are the physiognomy of the anarchists, atavism and evolution, games among criminals and savages, insane characters in fiction and the drama, and left-handedness and left-sidedness. The text is double spaced. There is no index. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).