Tracking down a mass murderer is a constant plot line in films, television, and literature. But these stories are so often based on real life. In certain circumstances, however, real life goes a step beyond what we could imagine happening in fiction. Sometimes, the actions of a serial killer can seem so extreme and strange, their motivations so twisted and evil, that we struggle to comprehend exactly how they fit into the modern world. In the case of Keith Hunter Jesperson, the truth behind his murder spree is more horrific than anything dreamt up by Hollywood’s best screenwriters. After a disturbing childhood left the giant of a man riddled with emotional and psychological scars, Jesperson travelled across Canada and spent time strangling and killing women whom he met along the way. While he was only convicted of eights murders, his own boasts suggest that total could have reached as high as 160. As a truck driver, he had the perfect cover story for travelling from town to town without having to put down roots. Often leaving an unsuspecting family at home, he was out in the wilderness committing heinous acts without anyone from the authorities coming close to suspecting his guilt. Jesperson, annoyed by the lack of attention he was receiving, began to leave messages to the public. Scrawled onto the walls of truck stop bathrooms, he signed each confession with a happy, smiley face. This led the media to christening him the Happy Face Killer. It was decades before the investigators came close to catching the killer, so read on to discover just how Keith Hunter Jesperson managed to get away with numerous horrific murders. This is the story of the Happy Face Killer. Scroll back up and grab your copy now!

    The twisted true story of murderous madman Hayward Bissell, who led a bloody rampage down an Alabama highway - with the mutilated body of his pregnant girlfriend at his side.

    His detractors claim he's a racist, a loose cannon--and worse. In 43 years with the L.A.P.D., he's been involved with cases from Patty Hearst to the Hillside Strangler, the Watts Riots to the Black Panthers, the Robert Kennedy assassination to the video-taped beating of Rodney King. Now Gates tells all. 16-page photo insert.

    The shots stopped as they came to our table and set their weapons on the top. My heart was pounding. Our legs were sticking out the back of the table because it was impossible to conceal our whole bodies with three of us curled under it. I began to pray, and at the very moment I began my prayer, I felt an instant rush of peace. His Holy Spirit told me, "You are not going to die, but you have to endure this. Just hold on."(Amber Huntington)Retelling the terrifying experiences of Columbine High School students five years ago-one of those her own-Liz Carlston describes the journey three students made from the horrific hours when the shots rang out to the peace they have now found in life. These three who experienced Columbine firsthand share with readers how important it is to keep hope and happiness even during uncertain times, and that somehow Heaven will help us surmount overwhelming challenges.

    Dave Courtney - the original behind Vinnie Jones's character in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels - tells all in his no-holds-barred bestselling autobiography.From the streets of southeast London to bare-knuckle fights; from the funeral of Ronnie Kray to drug-deals turned sour in Holland - Dave Courtney's story is like no one else's.

    

    Presidents have been murdered at the hands of an assassin. In each case the assassinations changed the course of American history.But most historians have overlooked or downplayed the many threats modern presidents have faced, and survived. Author Mel Ayton sets the record straight in his new book Hunting the President: Threats, Plots and Assassination Attempts—From FDR to Obama, telling the sensational story of largely forgotten—or never-before revealed—malicious attempts to slay America’s leaders.Supported by court records, newspaper archives, government reports, FBI files, and transcripts of interviews from presidential libraries, Hunting the President reveals: How an armed, would-be assassin stalked President Roosevelt and spent ten days waiting across the street from the White House for his chance to shoot himHow the Secret Service foiled a plot by a Cuban immigrant who told coworkers he was going to shoot LBJ from a window overlooking the president’s motorcade routeHow a deranged man broke into Reagan’s California home and attempted to strangle the former president before he was subdued by Secret Service agents.In early 1992 a mentally deranged man stalking Bush turned up at the wrong presidential venue for his planned assassination attemptThe relationships presidents held with their protectors and the effect it had on the Secret Service’s missionHunting the President opens the vault of stories about how many of our recent Presidents have come within a hair’s breadth of assassination, leaving America’s fate in the balance. Most of these stories have remained buried—until now. Includes glossy photo signature of historic pictures and documents

    Don’t ask her to forgive and forget.When Kim was just 22, her older brother, Ron Goldman, was brutally killed by O.J. Simpson. Ron and Kim were very close, and her devastation was compounded by the shocking not guilty verdict that allowed a smirking Simpson to leave as a free man.It wasn’t Kim’s first trauma. Her parents divorced when she was young, and she and Ron were raised by their father. Her mother kidnapped her, telling her that her father didn’t love her any more. When she was 14, she was almost blinded from severe battery acid burns on her face during an automobile accident, requiring three reconstructive surgeries.But none of these early traumas compared to the loss of her brother, the painful knowledge that his killer was free, and fact that she could not even grieve privately—her grief was made painfully public. Counseled by friends, strangers, and even Oprah to “find closure,” Kim chose a different route. She chose to fight.Repeatedly, Kim and her family pursued Simpson by every legal means. Foiled over and over again, they ultimately achieved a small measure of justice.Kim’s story is one of tragedy, but also of humanity and, often, comedy. Living life as one of America’s most famous “victims” isn’t always easy, especially as a single mother in the dating market. She often had bizarre first date experiences, with one man even breaking down into tears and inconsolable with grief after realizing who she was.Ultimately Kim’s story is that of an ordinary person thrown into extraordinary circumstances at a very young age, and who had the courage—despite the discouragement of so many—to ignore the conventional wisdom and never give up her fight for justice.

    14, 1975, eight daring thieves ransacked 148 massive safe-deposit boxes at a secret bank used by organized crime, La Cosa Nostra, and its associates in Providence, R.I. The crooks fled with duffle bags crammed full of cash, gold, silver, stamps, coins, jewels and high-end jewelry. The true value of the loot has always been kept secret, partly because it was ill-gotten to begin with, and partly because there was plenty of incentive to keep its true worth out of the limelight. It's one thing for authorities to admit they didn't find a trace of goods worth from $3 million to $4 million, and entirely another when what was at stake was more accurately valued at about $30 million, the equivalent of $120 million today. It was the biggest single payday in the criminal history of the Northeast. Nobody came close, not the infamous James "Whitey" Bulger, not John "The Dapper Don" Gotti, not even the Brinks or Wells Fargo robbers. The heist was bold enough and big enough to rock the underworld to its core, and it left La Cosa Nostra in the region awash in turmoil that still reverberates more than forty years later. Last Good Heist is the inside story of the robbery and its aftermath.

    Kennedy was murdered, was a blood-red carpet installed in the Oval Office? If Abraham Lincoln never slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, where did he sleep?Why was one president nearly killed in the White House on inauguration day—and another secretly sworn in? What really happened in the Situation Room on September 11, 2001?History leaps off the page in this “riveting,” “fast-moving” and “highly entertaining” book on the presidency and White House in Under This Roof, from award-winning White House-based journalist Paul Brandus. Reporting from the West Wing briefing room since 2008, Brandus—the most followed White House journalist on Twitter (@WestWingReport)—weaves together stories of the presidents, their families, the events of their time—and an oft-ignored major character, the White House itself.From George Washington—who selected the winning design for the White House—to the current occupant, Barack Obama—the story of the White House is the story of America itself, Brandus writes. You’ll walk with John Adams through the still-unfinished mansion, and watch Thomas Jefferson plot to buy the Louisiana Territory Feel the fear and panic as British invaders approach the mansion in 1814—and Dolley Madison frantically saves a painting of Washington Gaze out the window with Abraham Lincoln as Confederate flags flutter in the breeze on the other side of the Potomac Be in the room as one president is secretly sworn in, and another gambles away the White House china in a card gameStand by the presidential bed as one First Lady—covering up her husband’s illness from the nation—secretly makes decisions on his behalf Learn how telephones, movies, radio, TV changed the presidency—and the nation itselfThrough triumph and tragedy, boom and bust, secrets and scandals, Brandus takes you to the presidential bedroom, movie theater, Situation Room, Oval Office and more. Under This Roof is a “sensuous account of the history of both the home of the President, and the men and women who designed, inhabited, and decorated it. Paul Brandus captivates with surprising, gloriously raw observations.”

    His epitaph, which he composed, reads, "Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia." Jefferson's tombstone does not bear a word of his political accomplishment - forty years as an officeholder, Virginia assemblyman, Continental congressman, ambassador to France, secretary of state, vice president, and president of the United States. He felt that these were honors the people had given him, and he wanted no credit for them. But the three accomplishments chiseled into the "coarse stone" he specified for his monument were his gifts to the people of the United States. They sum up Jefferson's vision of a nation of free people with the education and culture to preserve and enjoy their freedom. Here is his story.

    Over the course of seven months in 1988, eleven women disappeared off the streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts, a gloomy, drug-addled coastal town that was once the whaling capital of the world. Nine turned up dead. Two were never found. And the perpetrator remains unknown to this day.   How could such a thing happen? How, in what was once one of America’s richest cities, could the authorities let their most vulnerable citizens down this badly? As Carlton Smith, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his coverage of the Green River Killer case, demonstrates in this riveting account, it was the inability of police officers and politicians alike to set aside their personal agendas that let a psychopath off the hook.   In Killing Season, Smith takes readers into a close-knit community of working-class men and women, an underworld of prostitution and drug abuse, and the halls of New England law enforcement to tell the story of an epic failure of justice.

    What makes Bill Clinton tick?William Jefferson Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States is undoubtedly the greatest American enigma of our age -- a dark horse that captured the White House, fell from grace and was resurrected as an elder statesman whose popularity rises and falls based on the day’s sound bytes.  John Gartner's In Search of Bill Clinton unravels the mystery at the heart of Clinton’s complex nature and why so many people fall under his spell.  He tells the story we all thought we knew, from the fresh viewpoint of a psychologist, as he questions the well-crafted Clinton life story.  Gartner, a therapist with an expertise in treating individuals with hypomanic temperaments, saw in Clinton the energy, creativity and charisma that leads a hypomanic individual to success as well as the problems with impulse control and judgment, which frequently result in disastrous decision-making.  He knew, though, that if he wanted to find the real Bill Clinton he couldn’t rely on armchair psychology to provide the answer.  He knew he had to travel to Arkansas and around the world to talk with those who knew Clinton and his family intimately. With his boots on the ground, Gartner uncovers long-held secrets about Clinton's mother, the ambitious and seductive Virginia Kelley, her wild life in Hot Springs and the ghostly specter of his biological father, Bill Blythe, to uncover the truth surrounding Clinton’s rumor-filled birth.  He considers the abusive influence of Clinton's alcoholic stepfather, Roger Clinton, to understand the repeated public abuse he invited both by challenging a hostile Republican Congress and engaging in the clandestine affair with Monica Lewinsky that led to his downfall.  Of course, there is no marriage more dissected than that of the Clintons, both in the White House and on the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign trail.  Instead of going down familiar paths, Gartner looks at that relationship with a new focus and clearly sees, in Hillary’s molding of Clinton into a more disciplined politician, the figure of Bill Clinton’s stern grandmother, Edith Cassidy, the woman who set limits on him at an early age.   Gartner brings Clinton’s story up to date as he travels to Ireland, the scene of one of Clinton’s greatest diplomatic triumphs, and to Africa, where his work with AIDS victims is unmatched, to understand Clinton’s current humanitarian persona and to find out why he is beloved in so much of the world while still scorned by many at home.   John Gartner’s exhaustive trip around the globe provides the richest portrait of Clinton yet, a man who is one of our national obsessions.  In Search of Bill Clinton is a surprising and compelling book about a man we all thought we knew.

    When Youngwolfe recants his confession, saying he was forced to confess by the authorities, his city condemns him, except for one man—public defender and Creek Indian Elliott Howe. Recognizing in Youngwolfe the life that could have been his if not for a few lucky breaks, Howe risks his career to defend Youngwolfe against the powerful county attorney’s office. Forgotten today, the sensational story of the murder, investigation, and trial made headlines nationwide.Oklahoma’s Atticus is a tale of two cities—oil-rich downtown Tulsa and the dirt-poor slums of north Tulsa; of two newspapers—each taking different sides in the trial; and of two men both born poor Native Americans, but whose lives took drastically different paths. Hunter Howe Cates explores his grandfather’s story, both a true-crime murder mystery and a legal thriller. Oklahoma’s Atticus is full of colorful characters, from the seventy-two-year-old mystic who correctly predicted where the body was buried, to the Kansas City police sergeant who founded one of America’s most advanced forensics labs and pioneered the use of lie detector evidence, to the ambitious assistant county attorney who would rise to become the future governor of Oklahoma. At the same time, it is a story that explores issues that still divide our nation: police brutality and corruption; the effects of poverty, inequality, and racism in criminal justice; the power of the media to drive and shape public opinion; and the primacy of the presumption of innocence. Oklahoma’s Atticus is an inspiring true underdog story of unity, courage, and justice that invites readers to confront their own preconceived notions of guilt and innocence.

    In 1981, he was the agent standing next to Ronald Reagan when John Hinckley, Jr., stepped out of the crowd, intent on killing the president. In the Secret Service is an adrenaline-filled ride through the life of the agent who saved Ronald Reagan's life. Jerry spent much of his life as a silent eyewitness to history, with a gun at his fingertips. What motivates a man who is ready at a moment's notice to step into the path of a bullet? In In the Secret Service, you'll also follow Jerry's inner journey. That journey led him from the halls of the powerful to the streets of the poor in Washington, D.C., to the mountain passes of war-torn El Salvador to help orphans.You won't want to miss this insider's perspective on the Secret Service and a look into the heart of a man who was--and is--ready to sacrifice himself for another. At times heart-pounding, at times heartrending, this richly textured memoir of a Secret Service Agent will first move you to the edge of your seat, then to the depths of your soul.