Child Crimes

What possesses a mum to kidnap her own child? That's what Maggie asks herself when she's asked to foster 13-year-old Saskia, the subject of a bitter custody battle between her parents. When Saskia's mum Rosa fears the courts are going to favour her ex-husband, James, she takes matters into her own hands. With Rosa facing criminal charges, and Saskia refusing to live with her dad, her future looks uncertain. Will Maggie be able to step in and discover the bombshell that will tear this family apart?

When Natalie Benyon’s 18-month-old daughter, Ella, disappears from a housing estate, the police and local community act quickly to organise a search. Given the age of the child, once the local area is scoured, DI Winter Meadows draws the frightening conclusion that Ella has been abducted. The attention of the police focuses on the family itself: the lifestyle of the mother, the boyfriend, the raucous party they had the night before Ella’s disappearance.

Eight true crime stories of murder and mayhem. In my first audiobook as a true crime author I've started with a few of the stories that have haunted me for some time. Some of these stories are unbelievable in their brutality while others are astounding in the stupidity of the killers. This collection of stories are from all around the globe and have no common thread between them other than that they are both thought provoking and disturbing. The stories included in this anthology are dark and creepy and will leave you with a new understanding of just how fragile the human mind can be.

Someone is preying upon the street children of Regency London. They seem to think no one will notice when urchins go missing—and even if they are noticed, who will care? Daniel needs to do something about the missing children. But with recent revelations about his past and an unexpected, somewhat unwelcome inheritance to deal with, this is a terrible time to dive back into the seedy underbelly of the crime world. Nevertheless, he's still a Bow Street runner, and his partner Lady Juliette is sensitive to the plight of these wayward youngsters.

Jack Reacher has no place to go, and all the time in the world to get there. A remote railroad stop on the prairie with the curious name of Mother's Rest seems perfect for an aimless one-day stopover. He expects to find a lonely pioneer tombstone in a sea of nearly-ripe wheat. Instead there is a woman waiting for a missing colleague, a cryptic note about two hundred deaths, and a small town full of silent, watchful people.

Oskar's school teacher raises the alarm. Oskar's mother is abroad, and he has been left in the care of friends, but has been arriving in school hungry, unkempt and with bruises on his arms, legs and body. Experienced foster carer Cathy Glass is asked to look after him, but as the weeks pass, her concerns deepen. Oskar is far too quiet for a child of six and is clearly scared of something or someone.

On a cold morning a cyclist finds the brutally-slaughtered body of a woman in her car, on a remote lane leading to the long-abandoned Irish village of Kelly’s Forge. But when Detective Finnegan Beck arrives from the nearby town of Cross Beg to investigate he notices there’s a baby’s seat in the back of the car. A bottle of baby’s milk lying in the footwell. And no child. Little Róisín isn’t the first child to go missing from that same remote location though. There was another baby girl, taken more than 50 years before, who was never found.

From the summer of 1979 through the spring of 1981, Atlanta, Georgia, was held under siege by a serial killer, and dozens of victims started to appear. The series of murders, which became known as the “Atlanta Child Murders case”, gripped the city of Atlanta with fear and shocked the nation because most of the victims were children. In this true-crime audiobook, you will hear about how the Atlanta Child Murders case put a city under siege and how a task force of law-enforcement officers from several different agencies eventually captured the killer.

Alex Rider's life changed forever with the silent pull of a trigger. When Ian Rider died at the hands of the assassin Yassen Gregorovich, Alex, ready or not, was thrust into the world of international espionage - the world's only teenage spy. Alex vowed revenge against Yassen and the two have battled ever since. Yet, years ago, it was none other than Alex's own father who trained and mentored Yassen, turning him into the killer he would eventually become. What makes us choose evil?

Security and safety challenges rank among the most pressing issues of human society of all times. There are numerous books and video courses about self-defense that cover various scenarios from hand to hand combat to fire arms. All these courses teach how to survive violent attack and offer wide variety of techniques and approaches to the problem of self-defense. Best way of self-defense is when attack never happens. While practicing martial arts and tactical shooting is certainly good, actual fighting is the last resort and it represents only 2% of complete self-defense strategy. ...

Gerrardsville, Colorado. One tragic event. Two witnesses. Two conflicting accounts. One witness sees a woman throw herself in front of a bus—clearly suicide. The other witness is Jack Reacher. And he sees what really happened—a man in grey hoodie and jeans, swift and silent as a shadow, pushed the victim to her death, before grabbing her bag and sauntering away. Reacher follows the killer on foot, not knowing that this was no random act of violence. It is part of something much bigger.

Canyon Sacrifice brings the rugged western landscape, the mysterious past of the ancient Anasazi Indians, and the Southwest's ongoing cultural fissures vividly to life. A deadly struggle against murderous kidnappers in Grand Canyon National Park forces archaeologist Chuck Bender to face up to his past as he realizes every parent's worst nightmare: a missing child.

Award-winning investigative journalist and contributing Wired editor Scott Carney leads listeners on a breathtaking journey through the macabre underworld of the global body bazaar, where organs, bones, and even live people are bought and sold on The Red Market. The Red Market sheds a blazing new light on the disturbing, billion-dollar business of trading in human body parts, bodies, and child trafficking, raising issues and exposing corruptions almost too bizarre and shocking to imagine.

By the time she was in her teens, Diamond had lived dozens of lives and lies, but as she grew older, love and trust turned to fear and violence, and her family—the only people she had in the world—began to unravel. She started to realize that her life itself might be a big con, and the people she loved, the most dangerous of all. With no way out and her identity burned so often that she had no proof she even existed, all that was left was a girl from nowhere.

It came in a plain brown wrapper, no return address: an audiocassette of a soul-lacerating scream, followed by an enigmatic, haunting message delivered in a childlike voice: "Bad love. Bad love. Don't give me the bad love." For psychologist-detective Dr. Alex Delaware, the chant, repeated over and over like a twisted nursery rhyme, is the first intimation that he is about to enter a living nightmare. If Alex fails to decipher the twisted logic of the stalker's mind games, he will be the next to die.

This account describes how a 28-year-old from Watford, Nick Leeson, plunged Barings Bank into ruin. In 1994, Leeson seemed to be making the company millions of pounds a week, but he explains how the cover-up of a colleague's small error led to the crash of Britain's oldest merchant bank.

Professor Edwin McGorgol, the famous crime detecting sandpiper, is on vacation at the luxurious Guano Island Hotel with his friend, George Hockney, a sweet though dimwitted seagull, when the hotel is struck by a crime wave. A cat burglar is stealing the jewels of the hotel's guests, and the only bird with the guts and the smarts to stop him is Professor McGorgol.

When Ruben and Jed find a dead body on the Rhode Island shore, they are certain it has something to do with smuggling liquor. It's the 1920s, Prohibition and bootlegging is in full swing, and almost everyone in the shore community is involved. Suddenly, the boys find themselves involved as well: didn't the dead man have something on him, and didn't they take it? It isn't long before Ruben is actually on the legendary Black Duck itself, caught in a war between two ferocious prohibition gangs.

March 1997. A woman has her throat cut behind a bar in Carter Crossing, Mississippi. Just down the road is a big army base.Is the murderer a local guy - or is he a soldier?Jack Reacher, still a major in the military police, is sent in undercover. The county sheriff is a former U.S. Marine - and a stunningly beautiful woman. Her investigation is going nowhere. Is the Pentagon stonewalling her? Or doesn't she really want to find the killer? The adrenaline-pumping, high-voltage action in The Affair is set just six months before the opening of Killing Floor....

A Modern British Detective Novel In the murky world where children are bought and sold, what happens to the ones left on the shelf. This is just one of the questions that Detective Inspector Mike Deverson has to answer when he is called on to investigate a grisly double murder. The further he delves into the murdered couple lives the more he finds that nothing is as it seems. It looks like someone is playing games. Can he get to the truth and stop the murderer before they can strike again?