True Crime Fiction

After his retirement from the Marine Corps in the early 1930s, General Smedley D. Butler embarked on a national lecture tour, where he gave his speech about how commercial interests benefit from war. The speech was well received and he wrote an expanded version of it, which was published as War Is A Racket. The work was published by Reader's Digest as a condensed book supplement, which added to its popularity.

The Snakehead is a panoramic tale of international intrigue and a dramatic portrait of the underground economy in which America's 12 million illegal immigrants live. Based on hundreds of interviews, Patrick Radden Keefe's sweeping narrative tells the story not only of Sister Ping, but of the gangland gunslingers who worked for her, the immigration and law enforcement officials who pursued her, and the generation of penniless immigrants who risked death and braved a 17,000 mile odyssey so that they could realize their own version of the American dream.

MediMiracle Corporation manufactures Sophrosyne, a miracle cure for opiate addiction. Ellison Ricard, a research analyst for the company, claims to have uncovered data that proves Black users of Sophrosyne experience fatal side effects far more often than people of other races. When Ricard confronts MediMiracle’s charismatic founder and CEO, Peyton Burke, a violent confrontation ensues. The wheelchair-bound Ricard—a Black man who had been severely injured years earlier—is fired that very day.

Occupied Warsaw, Summer 1940: Witold Pilecki, a Polish underground operative, accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands interned at a new concentration camp, report on Nazi crimes, raise a secret army, and stage an uprising. The name of the camp - Auschwitz. Over the next two and half years, and under the cruelest of conditions, Pilecki's underground sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazi officers, and gathered evidence of terrifying abuse and mass murder.

In the midst of one of the worst winters Chicago has seen in years, the body of missing teenager Ella Reynolds is discovered under the surface of a frozen lake. She’s been missing for three weeks...the lake froze over three months ago. Detective Sam Porter and his team are brought in to investigate, but it’s not long before another girl goes missing. The press believes the serial killer Anson Bishop has struck again, but Porter knows differently. The deaths are too different. There’s a new killer on the loose.

Nathan Heller is Chicago’s most celebrated private detective, hobnobbing with Hugh Hefner, getting written up in Life magazine, enjoying the fruits of a long career that began in a one-room office and now is a coast-to-coast agency. When he does a small favor for a friend - who handles PR for the Teamsters - Heller runs into an old West Side mob crony, a small-time hustler named Jack Ruby. And when that friend is found dead, warning signals start to flash. Suddenly Jimmy Hoffa wants to talk to Nate...and so does Hoffa’s arch enemy, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

Pip Fitz-Amobi is haunted by the way her last investigation ended. Soon she’ll be leaving for Cambridge University, but then another case finds her...and this time it’s all about Pip. Pip is used to online death threats, but there’s one that catches her eye, someone who keeps asking: who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? And it’s not just online. Pip has a stalker who knows where she lives. The police refuse to act, and then Pip finds connections between her stalker and a local serial killer.

Between 1993 and 1998, eight women went missing from an area around Dublin that became known as the ‘Vanishing Triangle’. Was there a link? Speculation abounded. There were whispers of a serial killer, responsible for some, if not all, of these cases. But nobody was ever brought to justice. Twenty years later, the brutal murder of Jastine Valdez disturbs crime novelist Claire McGowan into action.

A pause-resisting and harrowing crime thriller featuring a brilliant and tortured FBI agent, the Harley Cole series is a riveting mystery, packed with non-stop action, suspense, twists and turns, revelations, and driven by a breakneck pace that will keep you listening late into the night.

While tracking down his tormentor, the author encounters an improbable cast of characters that includes an elocution teacher with ill-fitting dentures, a gang of faux-royal swindlers, a crime investigator with "paper in his blood", and a monocled grand master of the Knights of Malta. Yet for all its global exoticism and comic exuberance, Kurzweil's riveting account is, at its core, a heartfelt and suspenseful narrative about the "parallel lives" of a victim and his abuser.

When a billionaire heiress is brutally murdered in the glamorous streets of Monaco, seasoned detective Alexandre Moreau is thrust into a deadly web of secrets, power, and betrayal. As he unravels the truth behind her assassination, he uncovers a sinister conspiracy reaching into the highest echelons of wealth and influence. But the deeper he digs, the more dangerous the game becomes. With powerful enemies closing in, Moreau must race against time to expose the mastermind before he becomes the next target. Inspired by a true story, Murder of a Monaco Billionaire is a gripping thriller of ...

The night Jack Smyth ran into flames in a desperate attempt to save his wife from their burning home, he was, tragically, too late - but hailed a hero. Until it emerged that Kate was dead long before the fire began. Suspicion has stalked him ever since. After all, there's no smoke without fire. A year on, he's signed a book deal. He wants to tell his side of the story, to prove his own innocence in print. He just needs someone to help him write it. Emily has never ghostwritten anything before, but she knows what it’s like to live with a guilty secret.

This book is for listeners of true crime podcasts and audiences of both fiction and true-crime nonfiction. It's the true story of first-generation Irish-American nurse Jane Toppan, born as Honora Kelley. Jane Toppan was absolutely a monster, but she did not start out that way. When Jane was a young child, her father abandoned her and her sister to the Boston Female Asylum. From there, Jane was indentured to a wealthy family who changed her name, never adopted her, and wrote her out of the will.

WHEN WIZARDS WAR Deep in the woods lives a wizard called the Professor. In the depths of the Depression, the residents of Fester, Pennsylvania call on “powwowers” such as the Professor to heal ailments, tell fortunes . . . and exact revenge. When an upstart powwower threatens to horn in on the Professor’s business, he starts making plans for his own revenge. The sinister forces he sets in motion spiral out of control, and soon threaten to consume the leading citizens of the town.

When Ella Watson, a woman of wealth and status, is brutally stabbed to death in broad daylight, it sends a shockwave through the Lake District community. Later that day, Keira Bradley meets the same fate. But whereas Ella’s murder is a tragedy, Keira’s death on the notorious Beacon Estate is just another statistic in a dangerous place.

"Reporters love murders," Calvin Trillin writes in the introduction to Killings. "In a pinch, what the lawyers call 'wrongful death' will do, particularly if it's sudden." Killings, first published in 1984 and expanded for this edition, shows Trillin to be such a reporter, drawn time after time to tales of sudden death. But Trillin is attracted less by violence or police procedure than by the way the fabric of people's lives is suddenly exposed when someone comes to an untimely end.

After her mother's untimely death, Clara Schwartz became distant, withdrawn. Her father, a renowned DNA researcher, lived in a farmhouse outside Leesburg, Virginia, where in December 2001 he was fatally stabbed by what seemed to be a ninja-style sword. Police arrested Kyle Hulbert, a troubled teen - and aspiring vampire. Kyle was Clara's friend, one of a circle obsessed with role-playing games.

After Evan’s latest case ends in disaster, he’s at the end of his tether — until fate throws him headlong into Linda Clayton's desperate world and a long-dead investigation that everybody wants to stay that way. But Evan never does what everybody wants, and he vows to find answers for her that he can’t find for himself. As the suspense ratchets up, he’s caught in a desperate fight for his life with a stone-cold killer who will stop at nothing to protect his secrets....

Beginning in June, 1962, the Boston area was terrorized for 18 months by an elusive serial killer who sexually assaulted and then strangled a succession of women. Boasting that he was the killer and that he had raped an additional 2,000 victims, Albert DeSalvo's horrific story became the subject of a best-selling book and a major Hollywood movie. But it was all a monstrous hoax: DeSalvo was not the Boston Strangler.

In the small city of Binghamton in upstate New York, 23-year-old Veronica Taft, a single mother with four small children, all under the age of five, was convicted of murder and manslaughter for the brutal murder of her two-year-old son Lyric. She was sentenced to 25-years-to-life in state prison, with her surviving children taken away and placed in foster care.