Book picks similar to
Gangs II by Ross Kemp


true-crime
crime
ross-kemp
non-fiction

Dancing with Demons


Tim Watson-Munro - 2017
    As Australia's most distinguished criminal psychologist, 'Doc' Tim Watson-Munro has assessed over 30,000 'persons of interest' in some of the nation's most notorious court cases, including Hoddle Street gunman Julian Knight, corporate fraudster Alan Bond, Melbourne gangster Alphonse Gangitano and, in recent years, Australia's first terrorist convicts.But the frontline of psychology is no place for the faint-hearted. Tim's pioneering methods and proximity to evil made him front page news but also led him to a devastating personal crossroads - first wife gravely ill, second wife pregnant, best mate betraying him to the cops, $2,000-a-week drug habit spiralling out of control, brilliant career and hard-won reputation in crisis.Tim's descent into the maelstrom is a candid, funny, frightening odyssey, offering unique insight into not only the nature of addiction, but also the lives and minds of the psychopaths we share our world with.After all, when you're dancing with demons, it takes one to know one.

The Cases That Haunt Us


John E. Douglas - 2000
    Provocative. Shocking. Call them what you will...but don't call them open and shut. Did Lizzie Borden murder her own father and stepmother? Was Jack the Ripper actually the Duke of Clarence? Who killed JonBenet Ramsey?America's foremost expert on criminal profiling and twenty-five-year FBI veteran John Douglas, along with author and filmmaker Mark Olshaker, explores those tantalizing questions and more in this mesmerizing work of detection. With uniquely gripping analysis, the authors reexamine and reinterpret the accepted facts, evidence, and victimology of the most notorious murder cases in the history of crime, including the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the Zodiac Killer, and the Whitechapel murders.Utilizing techniques developed by Douglas himself, they give detailed profiles and reveal chief suspects in pursuit of what really happened in each case.The Cases That Haunt Us not only offers convincing and controversial conclusions, it deconstructs the evidence and widely held beliefs surrounding each case and rebuilds them -- with fascinating, surprising, and haunting results.

This Mum Runs


Jo Pavey - 2016
    I was a forty-year-old mother of two who had given birth eight months before. I trained on a treadmill in a cupboard by the back door and I was wearing a running vest older than most of the girls I was competing against. Was I crazy?' Jo Pavey was forty years old when she won the 10,000m at the European Championships. It was the first gold medal of her career and, astonishingly, it came within months of having her second child.The media dubbed her ‘Supermum’, but Jo’s story is in many ways the same as every mother juggling the demands of working life with a family – the sleepless nights, the endless nappy changing, the fun, the laughter and the school-run chaos. The only difference is that Jo is a full-time athlete pushing a buggy on her training runs, clocking up miles on the treadmill in a cupboard while her daughter has her lunchtime nap, and hitting the track while her children picnic on the grass.Heartwarming and uplifting, This Mum Runs follows Jo’s roundabout journey to the top and all the lessons she's learnt along the way. It is the inspiring yet everyday story of a mum that runs and a runner that mums.

Grace & Style: The Art of Pretending You Have It


Grace Helbig - 2015
    From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Grace’s Guide and the host of The Grace Helbig Show on E! comes a beautifully illustrated, tongue-in-cheek book about style that lampoons fashion and beauty guides while offering practical advice in Grace Helbig’s trademark sweet and irreverent voice.

Dead Man Running


Ross Coulthart - 2008
    For 10 years, Steve Utah was a Bandidos insider, a trusted confidante of senior bike gang members along the east coast of Australia. He arranged their security, cooked their drugs, and witnessed meetings in which overseas weapons smuggling was planned. Utah loved the wildness of the Bandido life and their contempt for the law, but as he plummeted deeper into the heart of the group, his life started to spiral out of control. He witnessed vicious beatings, helped dump corpses, and saw men executed in front of his eyes. In a desperate attempt to regain control of his life, he resorted to the unthinkable—he rolled over to the federal police and told them all he knew about the Bandidos. This shocking, unflinching, tragic story is his confession, and possibly his dying gasp, for he knows that inevitably the Bandido code will be honored and he will be silenced.

Out of My Depth


Anne Darwin - 2016
    

Silent Sisters


Joanne Lee - 2019
    But the consequences of her mother's messy lifestyle turned out to be far worse than Joanne could ever have imagined.She already knew about the baby buried in a shallow makeshift grave next to the family plot. But when Joanne came across a red plastic bin in her mother's wardrobe in 2009, she realised that the family home held an even more sinister secret.In Silent Sisters, the daughter who was falsely accused of murdering her own baby sister will tell her full story for the first time, detailing her struggle to understand her mother, to piece together the truth and to give the four babies the proper burial they deserve.

Manhunters: How We Took Down Pablo Escobar, the World's Most Wanted Criminal


Steve Murphy - 2019
    Peña In the decades they spent at the DEA, Javier Peña and Steve Murphy risked their lives hunting large and small drug traffickers. But their biggest challenge was the hunt for Pablo Escobar in Colombia. The partners, who began their careers as small-town cops, have been immortalized in Netflix's Narcos, a fictional account of their hunt for Escobar. Now, for the first time ever, they tell the real story of how they brought down the world's first narco-terrorist, the challenges they faced, and the innovative strategies they employed to successfully end the reign of terror of the world's most wanted criminal.Readers will go deep inside the inner workings of the Search Bloc, the joint Colombian-US task force that resulted in an intensive 18-month operation that tracked Escobar. Between July 1992 and December 1993, Steve and Javier lived on the edge, setting up camp in Medellin at the Carlos Holguin Military Academy. There, they lived and worked with the Colombian authorities, hunting down a man who was thought by many to be untouchable. Their firsthand experience coupled with stories from the DEA's recently de-classified files on the search for Escobar forms the beating heart of Manhunters, an epic account of how two American agents risked everything to capture the world's most wanted man.

At the Devil's Table: The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Cartel


William C. Rempel - 2011
    Rempel tells the harrowing story of former Cali cartel insider Jorge Salcedo, an ordinary man facing an extraordinary dilemma—a man forced to risk everything to escape the powerful and treacherous Cali crime syndicate. Colombia in the 1990s is a country in chaos, as a weak government battles guerrilla movements and narco-traffickers, including the notorious Pablo Escobar and his rivals in the Cali cartel. Enter Jorge Salcedo, a part-time soldier, a gifted engineer, a respected businessman and family man—and a man who despises Pablo Escobar for patriotic and deeply personal reasons. He is introduced to the godfathers of the Cali cartel, who are at war with Escobar and desperately want their foe dead. With mixed feelings, Jorge agrees to help them. Once inside, Jorge rises to become head of security for Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, principal godfather of the $7-billion-a-year Cali drug cartel. Jorge tries to turn a blind eye to the violence, corruption, and brutality that surround him, and he struggles privately to preserve his integrity even as he is drawn deeper into the web of cartel operations. Then comes an order from the godfathers that he can’t obey—but can’t refuse. Jorge realizes that his only way out is to bring down the biggest, richest crime syndicate of all time. Thus begins a heart-pumping roller-coaster ride of intensifying peril. Secretly aided by a pair of young American DEA agents, Jorge races time and cartel assassins to extract damaging evidence, help capture the fugitive godfather, and save the life of a witness targeted for murder. Through it all, death lurks a single misstep away.William C. Rempel is the only reporter with access to this story and to Jorge, who remains in hiding somewhere in the United States—even the author doesn’t know where—but has revealed his experience in gripping detail. Salcedo’s is the story of one extraordinary ordinary man forced to risk everything to end a nightmare of his own making.

Cop Out!: The End Of My Brilliant Career In The New Zealand Police


Glenn Wood - 1999
    Constable Wood was a disaster waiting to happen. He was the sort of cop who was happier helping little old ladies across the street (even when they were quite content where they were) than pursuing the perpetrators of dreadful deeds. But if he failed to strike fear into the hearts of the criminal underworld, his superiors had a real problem on their hands. Never before had they been forced to deal with such a well-meaning but accident-prone officer and they hoped, fervently, never to see his like again. From his early encounters with a less-than-impressed public, through the terrifying days of the Springbok Tour riots, to the gradual realisation that perhaps he wasn’t cut out for life on the beat, this is the hilarious story of a young cop who created a severe disturbance in the force.

The Other Side of Suffering: The Father of JonBenét Ramsey Tells the Story of His Journey from Grief to Grace


John Ramsey - 2012
    And like Job, Ramsey was destined for great affliction, as many of the most precious things in his life were cruelly taken from him.First came the death of his eldest daughter in a car accident in 1992. Then, four years later, his beloved six-year-old, JonBenét, was murdered; Ramsey was the one who discovered her body, concealed in the basement of his family's home. The case drew international media attention, and—compounding Ramsey's woe—suspicion unfairly focused on Ramsey and his wife, Patsy. Although they were ultimately cleared of any connection with the crime, Ramsey's sorrows did not end. In 2006, Patsy died, at 49, of ovarian cancer.In this remarkable book, Ramsey reveals how he was sustained by faith during the long period of spiritual darkness, and he offers hope and encouragement to others who suffer tragedy and injustice.

Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member


Sanyika Shakur - 1993
    gang the Crips. He quickly matured into one of the most formidable Crip combat soldiers, earning the name “Monster” for committing acts of brutality and violence that repulsed even his fellow gang members. When the inevitable jail term confined him to a maximum-security cell, a complete political and personal transformation followed: from Monster to Sanyika Shakur, black nationalist, member of the New Afrikan Independence Movement, and crusader against the causes of gangsterism. In a document that has been compared to The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Shakur makes palpable the despair and decay of America’s inner cities and gives eloquent voice to one aspect of the black ghetto experience today."

Cullotta: The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Las Vegas Mobster, and Government Witness (True Crime)


Dennis Griffin - 2007
    This no-holds-barred biography chronicles the life of a career criminal who started out as a thug on the streets of Chicago and became a trusted lieutenant in Tony Spilotro’s gang of organized lawbreakers in Las Vegas. Cullotta’s was a world of high-profile heists, street muscle, and information—lots of it—about many of the FBI’s most wanted. In the end, that information was his ticket out of crime, as he turned government witness and became one of a handful of mob insiders to enter the Witness Protection Program. “Frank Cullotta is the real thing,” says Nicholas Pileggi in the book’s Foreword, and in these pages, Cullotta sets the record straight on organized crime, witness protection, and life and death in mobbed-up Las Vegas.

What Lies Buried: A forensic psychologist's true stories of madness, the bad and the misunderstood


Kerry Daynes - 2021
    

Hurting Too Much: Shocking Stories from the Frontline of Child Protection


Harry Keeble - 2012
    In Broken Angels, a more experienced Harry relates a series of extraordinary cases he encountered with Ella, a young and newly qualified social worker.Together, Harry and Ella faced the violence of forced marriage, the horror of maternal incest and the cruelty of child slavery. Their investigations took them into a mosque, a drug den and a recording studio. Just as the unrelenting caseload threatened to push the inexperienced Ella over the edge, Harry uncovered one of the most shocking cases of child abuse he'd ever encountered, forcing the duo to tread new ground in the search for justice.Broken Angels reveals why working in Child Protection has never been so tough. It also shows why, despite the fact that so many courageous people are ready and willing to meet impossible challenges, we are still unable to reach all of the broken angels that so desperately need our help.