American Crime

In Clan MacKenzie, we fight for each other. We die for each other. And when I fell for Chevelle, those same rules applied to her. She loves me, but hates the family business. So, I hid the villain in me until today. Today, I need to do what must be done and that requires the help of the same people she would rather us keep our distance from.

By legitimizing bigotry and redefining so-called American values, a revived Klan in the 1920s left a toxic legacy that demands reexamination today. Boasting four to six million members, the reassembled Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s dramatically challenged our preconceptions of hooded Klansmen, who through violence and lynching had established a Jim Crow racial hierarchy in the 1870s South.

Jimmy Smith has been immersed in violence since he was 17 when his beloved missionary mother was murdered in Cameroon by a roving gang from the Congo. For the next few years Jimmy hunted down the renegades and exterminated hundreds of them while earning the feared title "White Death." Jimmy later came to a tiny village in Mexico where he was forced to kill four cartel recruiters who came looking for young girls to abduct into the sex trade in the USA. Jimmy sneaks into America where circumstances put him in the path of a Peruvian gang operating in Louisiana. This is Jimmy's harrowing story ...

Marissa Thomas’s childhood story was that of Hospitals, Doctors, and Clinics. She was sure she would die before they figured out what was causing her cycle of sickness. Now an adult, Marissa felt a calling to help others in need. She became the finest head nurse one small-town hospital had ever seen. She was hailed a hero, saving little lives who were also on the brink of death. Or were they?

America's most talented storytellers share their most courageous, compelling, unputdownable work in a collection made for story lovers. Praised early on by Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk author Ben Fountain and The Weight of Blood author Laura McHugh, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES is a new annual short story anthology whose guiding philosophy is that a collection of interesting "full meal" short stories could, as one @JustCoolStories Twitter follower put it, "make America cool again." Toward this end, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2022 features a previously unpublished story by the multi-major-book-...

In the winter of 1873, a small band of prospectors lost their way in the frozen wilderness of the Colorado Rockies. Months later, when the snow finally melted, only one of them emerged. His name was Alfred G. Packer, though he would soon become infamous throughout the country under a different name: "the Man-Eater."

Paris Minton is a man who would just as soon walk away from trouble as stand up to it. But in 1950s Los Angeles, sometimes trouble just comes and gets you. When one of L.A.'s wealthiest women hires Paris and his friend Fearless Jones to find a missing nephew, Paris steps into the a complex and terrifying corner of the black bourgeoisie, and wonders whom he should fear more - the people he's looking for or the people he's working for.

In the heart-stopping thriller "Cowboy Hazard," Blair Oakley, an indomitable search and rescue worker, and her faithful companion, Diamond embark on a perilous mission to uncover the truth behind the disappearance of teenage girls in the eerie woods surrounding a small town. As Blair delves deeper into the chilling mystery, she unearths sinister secrets lurking beneath the town's tranquil facade. With the reluctant help of Maverick, a rugged cowboy renowned for his tracking skills, Blair races against time to follow cryptic clues and unearth the whereabouts of the missing girls. But as ...

A Nutty Fruitcake, a Nuttier Ghost, and a Murder... FREE on Kindle Unlimited! The newlyweds Mandy and Rick are looking forward to their first Christmas in wedded bliss when the untimely death of a real estate developer puts a crimp in their plans. A bite of deadly dessert at a trendy bakery seems to be the culprit, and now the naughty ghost of Woody Napoleon is demanding justice. A spirited investigation turns up a plethora of suspects, but only Mandy’s special gift can unwrap the killer in this holiday edition of the Manhattan Mystery Series. Wicked as a Christmas Fruitcake is part of ...

Black Wall Street: its prosperity, power and wealth had been a bright beacon to the African American community during the race riots of the Red Summer - but its light never burned brighter than the night it was systematically burned and bombed to the ground. This is the story of the Black community of Greenwood, Oklahoma, and the war it was fated to fight when, outnumbered 200 to 1, even against aerial bombardment, they stood with their allies in Tulsa to bravely fight back - buying necessary time for a daring evacuation of their community’s most vulnerable members. An Old West Sheriff ...

Artist Annie Shaw seems to have it all: a dream career, a devoted husband, and a whip-smart teenage daughter. But when her mother, a Vietnam War refugee, dies suddenly one night, Annie’s carefully curated life starts to unravel. She’s spent her adulthood trying to escape her difficult upbringing—and has tried her best to give her own daughter a completely different, idyllic childhood. But in the wake of her mother’s death, Annie’s obsessive-compulsive disorder comes roaring back, and this time, the disturbing fixations swirling around in Annie’s brain might actually be coming true.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and Caesar King feels weighted to the ground. The Five Families are in complete disarray, and Caesar realizes too late that stepping down was the wrong thing to do. It’s up to him to make the puzzle whole again. But when another war comes to their doorsteps and a past mistake comes back for blood, death rips through the boroughs like a tornado. In the end, there might not be any pieces left to put back together.

In the summer of 2017, twenty-two-year-old Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind vanished. A week after she disappeared, police arrested the white couple who lived upstairs from Savanna and emerged from their apartment carrying an infant girl. The baby was Savanna’s, but Savanna’s body would not be found for days. The horrifying crime sent shock waves far beyond Fargo, North Dakota, where it occurred, and helped expose the sexual and physical violence Native American women and girls have endured since the country’s colonization.

Dr. Kasen Phillips has the magic touch when it comes to helping his patients who are in dire need of counseling services, but when the love of his life winds up missing in action, Kasen's life takes a horrific turn for the worse. His office manager, Voncile Harper, is there to lend a helping hand. She's on a mission to shake Kasen from his misery by offering him her sweet heat, which he can't resist. It's not long before Kasen finds himself caught up in a web of Voncile's lies.

Down, down the Wicked hole… FREE on Kindle Unlimited! With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, Rick and Mandy might have chocolate kisses and blushing roses in mind, but instead they’re drawn into a new case by NYC FBI Chief Hernandez when his daughter’s favorite author bites the dust. Up and coming graphic novelist Eve Wellington has been murdered, and no one’s more surprised than she is to find herself newly dead. The list of suspects who wanted to erase the self-styled cartoon diva includes rival artists, exhausted editors, and overworked assistants, but it’s the trail of...

For decades, Indigenous women and girls have gone missing or been found murdered along an isolated stretch of highway in Northwestern British Columbia. The corridor is known as the Highway of Tears, and it has come to symbolize a national crisis. Journalist Jessica McDiarmid meticulously investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate in which Indigenous women and girls are overpoliced yet underprotected.

The Arthur G. Dozier Boys School was a well-guarded secret in Florida for over a century, until reports of cruelty, abuse, and “mysterious” deaths shut the institution down in 2011. Established in 1900, the juvenile reform school accepted children as young as six years of age for crimes as harmless as truancy or trespassing. The boys sent there, many of whom were Black, were subject to brutal abuse, routinely hired out to local farmers by the school’s management as indentured labor, and died either at the school or attempting to escape its brutal conditions.

'When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child and reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up my childish ways.' -1 Corinthians 13:11 Alfonzo Diaz has the quintessential New York City swag born from growing up in a neighborhood where respect hinges on how much you're feared. His well-laid plans to leave a life of crime is thwarted when his beloved Uncle is murdered in a botched hit. In Alfonzo's search for the killer, he is about to uncover that crime is in his DNA. There are no saints or sinners in Alfonzo's world, but there are imperfect people. Alfonzo 1-30 ...

Meet Marcel and Sabrina, a hitman and a bookkeeper for the Mob. The couple should have never met, let alone fallen in love. When they decide to go against the grain, all hell breaks loose. Somebody wants them dead; they just don't know who. It could be Leo, Marcel's jealous older brother; Othello, Sabrina's crooked father; or it could be The Family, a roundtable of the top contenders in the underworld. There is no honor amongst thieves. Marcel and Sabrina will find the old adage to be true the hard way.

Julie Wilder returns to her hometown of Cranberry Cove to live with her aging aunt, Emma Babbage. Julie's nursing career leads her to a position on the surgical floor of Oceanview General Hospital. After she encounters her high school friend, Lucas Ethridge, her former attraction to the handsome lawyer is reawakened. But when she begins to suspect Lucas of a murder that occurred fifteen years earlier, she recalls an incriminating photo she'd hidden in her aunt's antique desk. She searches for the evidence only to find that it's vanished. To add to her misgivings, she gets mysterious phone ...