Nonfiction Murders

Murder hornets are big! They are the largest hornet on Earth. Also called Asian giant hornets, these fierce insects will eat bees and wasps. Young listeners will enjoy learning all the facts about murder hornets.

Please Don't Shoot: A Shocking True Crime Story Three angry women. Three loaded handguns. And nine innocent lives caught in the crossfire. Do you think it will help to plead, "Please don't shoot"? In these chilling true crime stories, the answer is "no." One woman ends her ex-husband's new romance with a single, cold-blooded shot—right in front of their Christmas tree, with her twin daughters as horrified witnesses. Another mother guns down her own children on a quiet suburban street—a twisted act of revenge meant to punish her husband. And in a third harrowing case, a young woman ...

Police called it murder on New York’s Hudson River. She said it was a tragic accident. Should her name go down in the annals of America’s female murderers, or is she just one more victim of a fractured court system? Angelika Graswald claims she’s not a cold-blooded killer, but New York prosecutors say she purposely pulled a plug on her fiance’s kayak so he’d drown in the storm-tossed waves of the Hudson River. She Cries Alone: A Shocking True Crime Story takes you through the day Vincent Viafore died, the afternoon Angelika walked and talked with a New York State Police detective,...

They had nothing to expect from the mercy of the crown; their doom was sealed; no plea could be urged in extenuation of their crime, and they well knew that for them there was no hope in this world. When Charles Dickens wrote these tragic lines he was penning fact, not fiction. He had visited the condemned cells at the infamous prison at Newgate, where seventeen men who had been sentenced to death were awaiting news of their pleas for mercy. Two men were particularly striking: James Pratt and John Smith, who had been convicted of homosexuality.

From its inception in 1829 up to the eve of World War II, Scotland Yard: A Bloody History tells the full story of how the Yard developed and advanced modern crime-fighting techniques one infamous case at a time. Following detectives in pursuits across the sea, midnight hunts through Whitechapel and a grand manor death that inspired many a murder mystery, this enthralling book shows how the Yard helped pioneer bloodstain analysis, criminal profiling, fingerprinting, ballistics and more to 'catch their man' (or, sometimes, woman).