Thorndike Press Large Print Crime Scene

From "one of crime fiction's most interesting and passionate voices" (Laura Lippman) comes a new "noir crime classic" (Mystery Ink) about one of the most notorious towns in American history. Reviewing White Shadow, the Associated Press wrote, "It is as gritty as James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential. And yet, the prose is as lyrical as James Lee Burke's Crusader's Cross. With White Shadow, Atkins has found his true voice." And with Wicked City, it is even truer. In 1955, Look magazine called Phenix City, Alabama, "The Wickedest City in America," but even that may have been an understatement. It was a stew of organized crime and corruption, run by a machine that dealt with complaints forcefully and with dispatch. No one dared cross them-no one even tried. And then the machine killed the wrong man. When crime-fighting attorney Albert Patterson is gunned down in a Phenix City alley in the spring of 1954, the entire town seems to pause just for a moment- and when it starts up again, there is something different about it. A small group of men meet and decide that they have had enough, but what that means and where it will take them is something they could not have foreseen. Over the course of the next several months, lives will change, people will die, and unexpected heroes will emerge-like "a Randolph Scott western," one of them remarks, "played out not with horses and Winchesters but with Chevys and .38s and switchblades." Peopled by an extraordinary cast of characters, both real and fictional, Wicked City is a novel of uncommon intensity-rich with atmosphere and filled with sensuality and surprise.**

Jason Palmer loved being a soldier. But after returning from Iraq with an "other than honourable" discharge, he's finding rebuilding his life the toughest battle yet.Elena Cruz is a talented cop, the first woman to make Chicago's prestigious Gang Intelligence Unit. She's ready for anything the job can throw at her.Until Jason's brother, a prominent communityt activist, is murdered in front of his own son.Now, stalked by brutal men with a shadowy agenda, Jason and Elena must unravel a conspiracy stretching from the darkest alleys of the ghetto to the manicured lawns of the city's power brokers. In a world where corruption and violence are simply the cost of doing business, two damaged people are all that stand between an innocent child – and the killers who will stop at nothing to find him.

Crime reporter Howie Carr takes us into the heart of the life of Johnny Martorano. For two decades, Martorano struck fear into anyone even remotely connected to his world. His partnership with Whitey Bulger and the infamous Winter Hill Gang led to twenty murders--for which Johnny would serve twelve years in prison. Carr also looks at the politicians and FBI agents who aided Johnny and Whitey, and at the flamboyant city of Boston, which Martorano so ruthlessly ruled. A plethora of paradoxes, Johnny Martorano was Mr. Mom by day and man-about-town by night. Surrounded by fast-living politicians, sports celebrities, and showbiz entertainers, Johnny was charismatically colorful--as charming as he was frightening. After all, he was, in the end, a hitman.--From publisher description.

(goodreads) A fictional account about rural England and its people. (goodreads review by RW) Correlli is one of my favorite moralist Victorian novelists. Her themes are simple/straightforward and most are still relevant today. Some 21st Century readers might find her writing as cumbersome, but that is one of the reasons why I like to read and re-read her books. She writes before writing became abbreviated. Luckily for her, her career was almost over when Hemingway started slashing words from text and starting a less is better phase of literature. Holy Orders is melancholy, sweet, sad and triumphal. Good overcomes evil, if only within the 500 + pages of this book. ** (goodreads, about author) Marie Corelli (born Mary MacKay) was a best-selling British novelist of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, whose controversial works of the time often label her as an early advocate of the New Age movement. In the 1890’s Marie Corelli’s novels were eagerly devoured by millions in England, America and the colonies. Her readers ranged from Queen Victoria and Gladstone, to the poorest of shop girls. In all she wrote thirty books, the majority of which were phenomenal best sellers. Despite the fact that her novels were either ignored or belittled by the critics, at the height of her success she was the best selling and most highly paid author in England. She was the daughter of poet, journalist, author, anthologist, novelist, and songwriter Charles MacKay. Her brother was the poet Eric MacKay. [Open Confession: To a Man From a Woman /1925 / ]

Forensic expert Dr. Michael Baden of the HBO series Autopsy and trial attorney and legal commentator Linda Kenney Baden bring us a chilling new thriller featuring their crack crime-fighting duo: Dr. Jake Rosen, world-famous pathologist, deputy chief medical examiner, and devoted scientist; and top litigator Manny Manfreda, who is as lovely (and accessorized) as she is gutsy.The case begins with New York City on high alert for a most bizarre serial killer--a strange kind of thief who stalks his victims for the purpose of extracting a vial of blood, earning him the tabloid nickname the Vampire. As the attacks become more and more vicious and escalate to torture and then to murder, Jake and Manny begin to suspect there is a connection between the killer's seemingly random victims. But what is the link between the Vampire and a case that Manny's been working for a kid whose high school prank-gone-wrong has earned him the moniker the Preppy Terrorist and an FBI electronic ankle bracelet? Jake's careful forensic examinations, Manny's courtroom tenaciousness, and an unusual clue suggesting that a high-ranking politician has risen from the grave take the pair from the bowels of the morgue to the world of international intrigue. At the heart of this story is a tragic tale of corruption interlaced with cover-ups, conspiracies, death squads, and dictators who committed crimes that to this day go unpunished.A fast-paced, boldly imagined work from an exuberant new team in suspense.From the Hardcover edition.

A man wakes naked and cold on a deserted beach. The only sign of life for miles is an empty BMW. Inside it he finds clothes that fit perfectly, shoes for his tattered feet, a Rolex and a driving licence in the name of Daniel Hayes, resident of Malibu, California. None of them is familiar. When the cops kick in the door of his dingy motel room with guns drawn, the man flees into the night. All he remembers is a woman's face, so he sets off for the only place where he might find her. Might that be the way back to himself? But that raises the most chilling question of all: what will he find when he gets there?

"Profiler Sarah Armstrong knows what it's like to be in a sticky situation. As a single mother and one of the few female Rangers in Texas history, she has had to work twice as hard to rank among the best cops in the Lone Star State. But when megawealthy businessman Edward Lucas III is found murdered along with his mistress, their bodies posed in grotesque ways, Sara quickly senses that this will be the deadliest case of her career. While others focus the investigation on Lucas's estranged wife, Sarah disagrees and hunts a suspect only she believes in. Yet nothing in her career could have prepared her for the horror of a young man who believes he has been sent from heaven to massacre innocent people. When Sarah picks up on the killer's elusive trail, following his scent all over Texas, the psychopath makes her his next target. And as Sarah closes in, the madman sets his sights on all she holds dear. Singularity features a feisty, funny, and tough heroine and a truly creepy killer, as it races along to a chilling and unexpected climax."--Publisher's description.

An Ohio death row inmate, convicted of killing his 16-year-old girlfriend when he was 17 years old, dies of heart disease. Six years later, the police arrest a Canadian expatriate living in Sweden for repeatedly kicking a drunken man in the head. A cantankerous Det. Supt. Ewert Grens of the Stockholm police discovers that the foreigner in their jail cell is a convicted murderer, the same death row inmate who supposedly died in America six years earlier.

1950s Ireland. As a deep, bewildering fog cloaks Dublin, a young woman is found to have vanished. When Phoebe Griffin, still haunted by the horrors of her past, is unable to discover news of her friend - Quirke, fresh from drying out in an institution, responds to his daughter's request for help.

In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn - then a young novelist struggling with fatherhood and a dissolving marriage - set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from an animal shelter in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector. Thus began a fifteen-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who, one day, would be shockingly unmasked as a brazen serial impostor and brutal double-murderer. This is a one-of-a-kind story of an innocent man duped by a real-life Mr Ripley, taking us on a bizarre and haunting journey from the private club rooms of Manhattan to the courtrooms and prisons of Los Angeles.

"In Beating the Devil's Game, Katherine Ramsland traces the development from thirteenth-century Chinese studies of decomposition rates through the flowering of science during the Renaissance and its veritable explosion during the era of Newtonian physics in the nineteenth century, up to the marvels of the present day and beyond. Along the way, she introduces us to fascinating forensic pioneers such as Spain's Mathieu Orfila, the father of toxicology; Eugene Francois Vidocq, the criminal-turned-detective who founded the Parisian Surete; and current trailblazers like William Bass, whose fully integrated program in entomology, anthropology, and pathology at the Forensic Anthropology Center has galvanized the field. These are visionaries who have persisted in raising investigative standards - and whose efforts keep us just steps ahead of increasingly sophisticated criminals."--BOOK JACKET.

In the follow-up to Tana French’s runaway bestseller In the Woods, itʼs six months later and Cassie Maddox has transferred out of the Dublin Murder Squad with no plans to go back—until an urgent telephone call summons her to a grisly crime scene. The victim looks exactly like Cassie and carries ID identifying herself as Alexandra Madison, an alias Cassie once used as an undercover cop. Cassie must discover not only who killed this girl, but, more important, who was this girl?

The second book in the Criminal Minds seriesAn elite team of FBI profilers is called in to help Chicago detectives investigate a series of bizarre murders. Though all are violent and disturbing, the crimes seem unrelated—until profiler David Rossi makes the connection. He recognizes each grisly tableau as one modeled on the crime scenes of three of the country's most notorious serial killers: David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer. Someone is taking the cult of true crime to terrifying extremes, and with so many killers left to emulate, Rossi wonders how he can possibly profile a killer who's hiding within the killer profiles of others…

As a blizzard swells just days before Christmas, the car belonging to the wife of a retired local judge is discovered abandoned on a rural road in Tamarack County. After days of fruitless effort, the search-and-rescue team has little hope that she'll be found alive, if at all. Cork O'Connor, former sheriff and now private investigator, is part of that team. Early on, Cork notices small things about the woman's disappearance that disturb him. But when the beloved pet dog of a friend is brutally killed and beheaded, he begins to see a startling pattern in these and other recent dark occurrences in the area. After his own son comes close to peril, Cork understands that someone is spinning a deadly web in Tamarack County. At the center is a murder more than twenty years old, for which an innocent man may have been convicted. Cork remembers the case only too well. He was the deputy in charge of the investigation that sent the man to prison. With the darkest days of the year at hand, the storms of winter continue to isolate Tamarack County. Somewhere behind the blind of all that darkness and drifting snow, a vengeful force is at work. And Cork has only hours to stop it before his family and his friends pay the ultimate price for the sins of others.

"Cork O'Connor has gone bow-hunting with Jubal Little, Minnesota's first Native American governor-elect, when an arrow out of nowhere slices through Little's heart. Alas, the arrow belongs to O'Connor, and he must find out who framed him for this murder."--Library Journal.

"A master of the spy genre crafts an exemplary detective novel, starring a former CIA agent turned private investigator, that already has the feel of a classic Robert Littell has been widely praised as one of the best writers in the espionage genre. Now, he's turned his formidable skills towards crime fiction in A Nasty Piece of Work, a novel that has echoes of the great Raymond Chandler. Former CIA agent Lemuel Gunn left the battlefield of Afghanistan for the desert of New Mexico, where he works as a private investigator from the comforts, such as they are, of a mobile home. Into his life comes Ornella Neppi, a thirty-something woman making a hash out of her uncle's bail bonds business. The source of her troubles, Emilio Gava, was arrested for buying cocaine. He's jumped bail and now she's about to pay the price for it. Curiously, no photographs of Gava seem to exist. And once Gunn begins his search, for $95 a day plus expenses, it becomes unclear whether Gava even existed in the first place"-- "Robert Littell has been widely praised as one of the best writers in the espionage genre. Now, he's turned his formidable skills towards crime fiction in a novel that has echoes of the great Raymond Chandler. Former CIA agent Lemuel Gunn left the battlefield of Afghanistan for the desert of New Mexico, where he works as a private investigator from the comforts, such as they are, of a mobile home. Into his life comes Ornella Neppi, a thirty-something woman making a hash out of her uncle's bail bonds business. The source of her troubles, Emilio Gava, was arrested for buying cocaine. He's jumped bail and now she's about to pay the price for it. Curiously, no photographs of Gava seem to exist. And once Gunn begins his search, for $95 a day plus expenses, it becomes unclear whether Gava even existed in the first place"--

Dublin PI Ed Loy is trying to escape his past—a task easier said than done—in this new novel from Shamus Award-winning author Declan HughesShortly after moving from his childhood home on the outskirts of Dublin to an apartment in the city, Ed Loy is approached by Anne Fogarty, a woman whose father was killed fifteen years ago. She thinks the police nabbed the wrong person, and now she wants Loy to find the truth. At the top of the list of possible suspects are three men Anne's father, a revenue inspector, was preparing claims against for criminal activity: Bobby Doyle, an ex-IRA man turned property developer; Jack Cullen, also ex-IRA, now the head of a gang of disgruntled IRA men; and George Halligan, Loy's underworld nemesis.At the same time, Loy is asked to look into the death of Paul Delaney, a rising soccer star who may have been connected with Jack Cullen. With the two cases on a collision course, Loy scours the streets of a city divided—where the wounded Celtic Tiger walks hand in hand with the ghosts of a violent past.With his gripping mysteries in the tradition of Raymond Chandler's and Ross MacDonald's best, a striking portrayal of an Ireland seldom seen, and a classic hero in Ed Loy, Declan Hughes cements his place as one of the most talented new crime writers working today.