Book picks similar to
Beyond Blame: Child Abuse Tragedies Revisited by Peter Reder
true-crime
child-abuse
crime
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The Cartel
Stephen Breen - 2017
However, Christy Kinahan will never be fêted in the financial press. For his business - drugs, guns, money-laundering, murder - also makes him Ireland's leading criminal.While Kinahan kept a low profile as he grew his empire, by the time his crime cartel shot to public attention in 2010 it was known to European police forces for over a decade. In that year police raided members' homes and premises in Spain, Ireland the UK. By then Kinahan and his sons Daniel and Christopher Jr were already among the richest men in Europe, with an estimated joint worth of €750m.However, events in February 2016 made Kinahan a household name. A daring and deadly gun attack in a suburban Dublin hotel - an attack targeting Daniel Kinahan (who escaped) - stunned the public and exposed the depth of enmity between the Kinahans and the family and associates of the veteran Dublin criminal, Gerry Hutch. Despite an intense garda crack-down on the gangsters' activities, the body count continues to rise.The Cartel gives behind-the-scenes story of that initial Spanish-led raid on the Kinahans. The authors have had exclusive access to the wiretaps that tracked the cartel for two years and talked to key officers who investigated them. They expose the criminal clan's aims and actions - in members' own words - and reveal the surprising truths behind how they built their empire.And The Cartel brings the story bang up-to-date to explain the origins of and fall-out from the feud with the Hutches, one of the most violent and vicious Ireland has ever known - and one that could be the undoing of the Kinahans.The authors' combined depth of knowledge - Stephen Breen has been a crime correspondent for over 15 years and in addition to writing about crime for over a decade, Owen Conlon is a fluent Spanish speaker - has culminated in a detailed and gripping account of double-crossing, vengeance and murder.
Eye of the Beholder
Lowell Cauffiel - 1994
A detailed exploration into the murder of TV anchorwoman Diane Newton King in 1991 describes how her husband was convicted of the crime a year later only after playing mind games with the police and leading them on several wild goose chases.
Afraid to Tell
Heidi Harding - 2017
After years of fear and isolation, Heidi knew she had to go to the police. For a long time, Chloe resented Heidi for forcing her to disclose what had happened when she wasn’t ready, while their brother, Tom, couldn’t understand how he had so misjudged his father, and at first he didn’t believe their tale. The truth threatened to destroy them all. This is the very honest story of three siblings, and how a man they trusted threatened to tear their family apart.
Frozen Tears: The Fort Leonard Wood MP Murders
J.B. King - 2019
Only one survived. This true crime book is written by Missouri State Highway Patrol Trooper J.B. King, the first law enforcement officer on the scene. He recounts the events from the moment of the crime until the conviction of Military Police Game Warden Johnny Lee Thornton.
Cass
Cass Pennant - 2000
One of the hardest men in Britain, he lives his life on the edge of the law, giving respect where respect is due and dishing out terrible retribution upon anyone who dares to cross him. In this stunning autobiography he tells the amazing stories of how he once saved the life of World Boxing Champion Frank Bruno when skinheads were attacking him with knives; and how he was shot three times in the chest in a South London nightclub but still kept on fighting. A true legend in his own lifetime.
Death Comes Knocking: Policing Roy Grace's Brighton
Graham Bartlett - 2016
His friend Graham Bartlett was a long-serving detective in the city once described as Britain's 'crime capital'. Together, in Death Comes Knocking, they have written a gripping account of the city's most challenging cases, taking the reader from crime scenes and incident rooms to the morgue, and introducing some of the real-life detectives who inspired Peter James's characters. Whether it's the murder of a dodgy nightclub owner and his family in Sussex's worst non-terrorist mass murder or the race to find the abductor of a young girl, tracking down the antique trade's most notorious 'knocker boys' or nailing an audacious ring of forgers, hunting for a cold-blooded killer who executed a surfer or catching a pair who kidnapped a businessman, leaving him severely beaten, to die on a hillside, the authors skilfully evoke the dangerous inside story of policing, the personal toll it takes and the dedication of those who risk their lives to keep the public safe.
Dance for your Daddy: The True Story of a Brutal East End Childhood
Katherine Shellduck - 2005
I had been looking for sweets. I put my hand in the bag and felt a sticky liquid on my fingers, then I looked at it. A red smear. Then I looked in the bag: bloody knives and clothes. It didn't feel good. What did it mean? I don't know. There are no answers; I daren't ask the questions'Growing up in poverty in London's East End, Kathy was eight years old when her father forced her mother into prostitution. When their mother fled, leaving Kathy and her sisters behind, the girls stuck fiercely together while being passed from children's homes to boarding schools. Then, on a rare trip home, Kathy looked out the window to see a man firing four shots into a Rolls-Royce. It took several seconds for her to realise the victim was her mother's lover, and the gunman was her father.Kathy began her haunting memoir when, as an adult, she travelled back to London, to find out who her gangster father really was. A compelling memoir of an extraordinary childhood, Dance for your Daddy is a true story of the effects on one family of poverty and affluence, violence and love.
Precious Angels: A True Story of Two Slain Children and a Mother Convicted of Murder
Barbara Davis - 1999
But the subsequent investigation revealed a darker truth -- the murder of two innocent children by their own mother. Through meticulous research and exclusive sources, "Precious Angels" presents the complete story of this shocking crime.
Underbelly: True Crime Stories
John Silvester - 1997
This book delves into the crimes that police have to deal with day after day. Murderers, hitmen, kidnappers, and drug dealers all feature in this collection of true crime stories. Take the drug dealer who walked out of a restaurant bragging that he's killed a man—unaware that his fellow diner was an undercover policeman. Or the young mother, whose death was written off as suicide, but which subsequent investigation proved to be something much more sinister.
Under Siege
Belinda Neil - 2014
She loved her roles as a homicide investigator and hostage negotiator with the NSW police force, but she never knew what her work day might bring. She might be investigating a crime scene; talking a suicidal woman down from a cliff; or trying to convince a deranged man not to slit the throat of his wife and children.As a negotiator, Belinda often found herself on cliff edges, waiting in doorways or out amongst the elements, persuading the murderous and suicidal to drop their weapons, stop terrorising their families, step back from the ledge.Belinda was so physically slight she needed help lifting on her ballistics vest, but her team never doubted her physical or mental courage. She was put forward for a bravery award and promoted to inspector but every time she stepped into a negotiation, her life was in danger, and over time the horrors she saw and her punishing schedule began to take their toll. After years of broken sleep, traumatic crime scenes and death, a series of disastrous events one weekend brought everything to a head.The next morning when she awoke, Belinda found she was shaking so badly she could not get out of bed. Unsure what was happening to her, she sought counselling but one day, shortly after, she saw the name of an old hostage-taking adversary in the paper; he had killed his ex-girlfriend. It was too much and as the continued stress took its toll, Belinda found herself contemplating jumping off a cliff in the Moreton Bay National Park. She had even written the suicide note.Under Siege shows us the remarkable job homicide investigators and hostage negotiators perform, and their endurance and courage in impossible circumstances. More than that, this courageous memoir reveals how the daily trauma and stress affected Belinda's roles as wife and mother, how she fought against the terrifying post-traumatic stress disorder that resulted to come back from a very dark place.'Her extraordinary journey juggling the roles of police negotiator, homicide investigator, wife and mother shines a light on this little-understood limb of law enforcement.' Mark Whittaker, Fairfax newspapers
Family Secrets: The scandalous history of an extraordinary family
Derek Malcolm - 2017
The secret, though, that surrounded my parents’ unhappy life together, was divulged to me by accident . . .’ Hidden under some papers in his father’s bureau, the sixteen-year-old Derek Malcolm finds a book by the famous criminologist Edgar Lustgarten called The Judges and the Damned. Browsing through the Contents pages Derek reads, ‘Mr Justice McCardie tries Lieutenant Malcolm – page 33.’ But there is no page 33. The whole chapter has been ripped out of the book. Slowly but surely, the shocking truth emerges: that Derek’s father, shot his wife’s lover and was acquitted at a famous trial at the Old Bailey. The trial was unique in British legal history as the first case of a crime passionel, where a guilty man is set free, on the grounds of self-defence. Husband and wife lived together unhappily ever after, raising Derek in their wake. Then, in a dramatic twist, following his father’s death, Derek receives an open postcard from his Aunt Phyllis, informing him that his real father is the Italian Ambassador to London . . . By turns laconic and affectionate, Derek Malcolm has written a richly evocative memoir of a family sinking into hopeless disrepair. Derek Malcolm was chief film critic of the Guardian for thirty years and still writes for the paper. Educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford, he became first a steeplechase rider and then an actor after leaving university. He worked as a journalist in the sixties, first in Cheltenham and then with the Guardian where he was a features sub-editor and writer, racing correspondent and finally film critic. He directed the London Film Festival for a spell in the 80s and is now President of both the International Film Critics Association and the British Federation of Film Societies. He lives with his wife Sarah Gristwood in London and Kent and has published two books – one on Robert Mitchum and another on his favourite 100 films. He is a frequent broadcaster on radio and television and a veteran of film festival juries all over the world.
Sudden Fury
Leslie Walker - 1989
One of the couple's three adopted children, he was shy and emotionally undemonstrative. His background and the circumstances leading to murder are the thrust of this searching study by Baltimore Evening Sun reporter Walker, less a true-crime re-creation than the story of a tortured being. Larry was given up by his birth mother when he was two and shunted from family to family, none of them willing to cope with his increasing insecurity and alienation. At age six, he was adopted by Bob and Kay Swartz, a model church-going Catholic couple but severe and demanding of their children, the father's temper sometimes growing into physical abuse.
Stay With Me, Rhys: The heartbreaking story of Rhys Jones, by his mother. As seen on ITV’s new documentary Police Tapes
Mel Jones - 2018
‘Please stay with me. I love you.’
There was still no expression in his eyes. I was talking and talking to him, desperate to let him know I was there, but there was no flicker in his face. In hindsight, it was like he’d already gone.
It's a Wednesday evening in Liverpool in the summer holidays, and Melanie is expecting her Everton-mad eleven-year-old son back from football practice very soon. She turns on Coronation Street and sets about stripping the wallpaper off the walls in the lounge, which is long-overdue a makeover. Suddenly she receives a frantic knock at the door. Rhys has been shot on his way home.From that fateful day when Melanie cradled her child as he lay dying, repeating to him ‘Stay with Me, Rhys’, to the day in court when his killers were finally sent down, this is a story of a family in trauma, of a community united behind them and of how a notorious local gang who terrorised the neighbourhood was brought to justice.In 2017, more than 7 million people watched the drama unfold in the highly-acclaimed ITV series Little Boy Blue. And now Melanie Jones tells the family's unbelievable story for the first time.Melanie, her husband Steve and Rhys’s brother Owen have been through unimaginable pain. The grief doesn’t go away, but the strength they’ve found within it is an inspiration.
Judas Pig
Horace Silver - 2004
But he becomes increasingly haunted by childhood ghosts and by the ever-growing influence of Danny, his psychopathic partner in crime. Billy finds himself starting to look beyond the violence and the scams, slowly descending into a drug-fuelled netherworld that affects his judgment and his perceptions. He is finally tipped over the edge when Danny commits an act even Billy cannot stomach. And that's when things really start to go wrong. This explosive first novel from a reformed career criminal comes with authenticity stamped throughout.
True Crime Stories Volume 12: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology)
Jack Rosewood - 2019
These twelve cases cover 100 years of crime history over several different countries, demonstrating once more that serious crime is a phenomenon that knows no boundaries. One of the major themes of this volume is crimes against the most vulnerable people in our society, including the elderly and the young. You will read about a case in Indiana where a twelve-year-old girl was brutally tortured and murdered, not by a deranged pedophile or a career criminal, but by girls her own age who let their undeveloped minds and peer pressure get out of hand. The bizarre case of a serial killer who targeted elderly women in Australia is also profiled, demonstrating that not only are killers driven by diverse motives, many of which will be impossible for most of us to understand, but also that not all serial killer victims are society’s “throw aways.” You will also read about two contestants for the “worst parent of all-time award.” These two separate cases involved men, who instead of protecting and caring for their children, ultimately played major roles in the horrible, painful deaths of their children. Educate yourself on the world of true crime and learn that not everything is always as it seems. Follow the criminal investigations as detectives from around the world broke some of the most baffling true crime cases of the last 100 years.