Art Crime

Bishop Juan Gerardi, Guatemala's leading human rights activist, was bludgeoned to death in his garage on a Sunday night in 1998, two days after the presentation of a groundbreaking church-sponsored report implicating the military in the murders and disappearances of some 200,000 civilians.

In the predawn hours of a gloomy February day in 1994, two thieves entered the National Gallery in Oslo and made off with one of the world's most famous paintings, Edvard Munch's Scream. It was a brazen crime committed while the whole world was watching the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. Baffled and humiliated, the Norwegian police turned to the one man they believed could help: a half English, half American undercover cop named Charley Hill, the world's greatest art detective.

This is a STAND-ALONE sequel. “Midnight Requisition” - Book One “Midnight Requisition 2: Amateur Night”- Book Two “Midnight Requisition 3: Circular Run” - Book Three “Midnight Requisition 4: Charlie Foxtrot” – Book Four A series of brutal murders leaves a traumatized young woman on a hunt to find a killer. When they were just babies, Scorpio and her twin brother, Kane, tragically lost their parents under mysterious circumstances. Refusing to accept his father was dead, Kane set off on a mission to find a man he’d never met. A home invasion gone wrong leaves Scorpio ...

Gary Webb is the former San Jose Mercury News reporter whose 1996 "Dark Alliance" series on the so-called CIA-crack cocaine connection created a firestorm of controversy and led to his resignation from the paper amid escalating attacks on his work by the mainstream media. Author and investigative journalist Nick Schou published numerous articles on the controversy and was the only reporter to significantly advance Webb's stories.

Vengeance - The Art of Pain A savage attack on a Syrian family led by a British Jihadi in the early stages of the Syrian Civil war in 2013 leads to a bloody manhunt across Europe that not only seeks revenge but also the truth. The team hired to track down and punish the terrorist must use their unconventional skills and intimate knowledge of Europe's criminal underworld to cut through a cesspit of lies and deception to inflict a ruthless retribution on those guilty that is beyond their comprehension of terror. From the dust of Syria, the manhunt leads to the suburbs of Antwerp, to the hills...

Carmen De Luca, an intrepid art sleuth with a passion for recovering lost masterpieces, is thrilled to be in Luxembourg chasing down another lead. Yet her keen eye for detail is put to the test when she gets wind of a devious plan to transport stolen masterpieces through Europe's free ports. When the trail leads to Italy, Carmen discovers that smuggling is just the tip of the brush, and someone is determined to silence anyone who gets too close to the truth. Will Carmen outsmart the cunning criminals and expose the murderer before she’s painted out of the picture—permanently? Find out ...

Brainstorm is an amazing five-year probe into the mysterious death of beloved movie star Natalie Wood by a real-life criminal law authority who determinedly pursued the truth in the face of Los Angeles County officials hell-bent on keeping it buried forever. Brainstorm: An Investigation of the Mysterious Death of Film Star Natalie Wood is the first-person account of Sam Perroni’s probing investigation of the actress’s death.

Claude Monet, weary of painting haystacks and cathedrals and lily ponds, finally pursues his real passion: criminal investigation. And after two long months of waiting, he has his first case. He's called in to investigate the theft of two unremarkable paintings from Galerie Neuf in Paris. He’s thrilled to have his first case, but quickly finds out that the theory and practice of investigation are two different things. Despite the obstacles, he’s determined to crack the case and bring the perpetrator to justice. Only then will he be taken seriously as a private eye. Only then can he ...

This is a STAND-ALONE sequel. “Witness Protection” - Book One “Witness Protection 2 - The Return of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” - Book Two “Witness Protection 3 - Alpha Mike Foxtrot” - Book Three “Witness Protection 4 - O-Dark-Hundred” - Book Four “Witness Protection 5 - Outside the Wire” - Book Five “Witness Protection 6 - Alpha Dogs” - Book Six “Witness Protection 7- Bravo Foxtrot” - Book Seven “Witness Protection 8 – Midnight Requisition” - Book Eight “Witness Protection 9 – S.N.A.F.U.” – Book Nine “Witness Protection 10 - Bravo Zulu” - Book Ten A...

Dramatisations and readings of five of Josephine Tey's classic mystery novels. Scottish novelist and playwright Josephine Tey was one of the greatest Golden Age crime writers and the author of eight mysteries, including six featuring Scotland Yard inspector Alan Grant. The most famous of these, The Daughter of Time, was acclaimed the greatest crime novel of all time by the Crime Writers' Association. A full-cast dramatisation of this iconic story is included here, along with adaptations of four of her other much-loved mystery novels.

We all make mistakes, but starting the Third World War would have been a rather large one. To this day, I still maintain it was not entirely my fault. But I'm getting ahead of myself. During the course of my life, I've barely escaped the wrath of an arms dealer in Hamburg, been strafed by a MiG during the Nigerian civil war, and landed during a bloody coup in Guinea-Bissau.

When a Dutch art dealer hides the stock from his gallery - rather than turn it over to his Nazi blackmailer - he pays with his life, leaving a treasure trove of modern masterpieces buried somewhere in Amsterdam, presumably lost forever. That is, until American art history student Zelda Richardson sticks her nose in.

Before turning to her life of crime - running a one-woman forgery business out of a phone booth in a Greenwich Village bar and even dodging the FBI - Lee Israel had a legitimate career as an author of biographies. But by 1990, almost broke and desperate to hang onto her Upper West Side studio, Lee made a bold and irreversible career change: inspired by a letter she’d received once from Katharine Hepburn, and armed with her considerable skills as a researcher and celebrity biographer, she began to forge letters in the voices of literary greats.

In a secret meeting in 1981, a master thief named Louis Royce gave career gangster Ralph Rossetti the tip of a lifetime. As a kid, Royce had visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made a habit of sneaking in at night to find a good place to sleep. He knew the Museum's security was lax, and he gave this information to a boss of the Boston criminal underworld. It took years before the Museum was hit. But when it finally happened, it quickly became one of the most infamous art heists in history.

He was my friend. My lover. My ultimate undoing. I'm exiled. Banished from the concrete jungle I call home and forced to spend my summer on my uncle's farm. That's where I met my step-cousin, Tobias, a guy who takes the strong, silent type to the next level. We were told to stay away from each other. Bad influences, they said. But, as we'll soon discover, all we have is each other inside the brutal and dangerous world of the Midwest Alphas, an illegal fighting tournament that promises fame and glory for the victor. Tobias is the local favorite to win it all, but his competitors will stop at...

An hour past St. Patrick’s Day, 1990, two men dressed as Boston cops steal 13 objects worth $200m from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum near Fenway Park. Nearby, Uncle Louie, an ex-mobster turned stolen art retrieval expert, is reappropriating two paintings from a personal residence that were stolen from a museum. Both break-ins go undetected. At 8 AM, Uncle Louie receives a frantic call from his nephew Harry Bartlett, a Gardner Board member. He needs Uncle Louie’s expertise because a $20m ransom demand expires in 7 days. He hesitates to reenter the criminal world but he loves the ...

Over the course of his 27 years with the DEA, Ed Follis bought eight-balls of cocaine in a red Corvette, negotiated multimillion-dollar deals onboard private King Airs, and developed covert relationships with men who were not only international drug traffickers but - in some cases - operatives for al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Shan United Army, or the Mexican federation of cartels. Follis was, in fact, one of the driving forces behind the agency's radical shift from a limited local focus to a global arena.

In 1827, James Bowie carved his way into American history at the Sandbar Fight, and soon every fighting man of the South and West had to have a knife like his. The bowie knife could cut like a razor, chop like a cleaver, and stab like a sword, and many considered it deadlier than a pistol at close range. So great was the dread it inspired that by 1838 it was banned in several states—a ban that did little to stanch the flow of blood.Bowie's story is well known, but what of the other cutters and stabbers of his day? Gunfighters have long been celebrated, but those who fought with the bowie ...

Real rock stars do truly insane thing and invite truly insane things to happen to them: murder, drug trafficking, rape, cannibalism and the occult. We allow this behavior. We are complicit because a rock star behaving badly is what's expected. It's baked into the cake. Deep down, way down, past all of our self-righteous notions of justice and right and wrong, when it comes down to it, we want our rock stars to be bad. We know the music industry is full of demons, ones that drove Elvis Presley, Phil Spector, and Sid Vicious and that consumed the Norwegian black metal scene.

It was an explosion that reverberated across the country—and into the very heart of early-twentieth-century America. On the morning of October 1, 1910, the walls of the Los Angeles Times Building buckled as a thunderous detonation sent men, machinery, and mortar rocketing into the night air. When at last the wreckage had been sifted and the hospital triage units consulted, twenty-one people were declared dead and dozens more injured. But as it turned out, this was just a prelude to the devastation that was to come.