Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri


Martin McDonagh - 2018
    When his second-in-command, Officer Dixon, a mother's boy with a penchant for violence, gets involved, the battle between Mildred and Ebbing's law enforcement threatens to engulf the town.Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a darkly comedic drama from Martin McDonagh.The film won Best Drama Motion Picture - Drama and Best Screenplay at the Golden Globes 2018.

Goodfellas: Screenplay


Nicholas Pileggi - 1990
    Young Henry dreams that one day he too might be a professional 'wiseguy' - a 'goodfella'. His wishes come true with remarkable speed once he teams up with renowned hoodlum Jimmy Conway and his alarmingly psychotic pal Tommy DeVito. Henry embarks on an everyday life of crime which takes him from rags to gaudy riches, in and out of the federal penitentiary and under the unwelcome spotlight of the FBI. As the 1970s turn sour Henry finds himself at the sharp end of the cocaine trade, increasingly adrift from his extended mobster 'family' and forced to make a tough decision about his future . . .The film that re-established Martin Scorsese's eminence among American directors after years of professional difficulties, GoodFellas is a tour de force which lays bare the crude and venal motives which drive a happy band of thieves and murderers.

Letting Go: A true story of murder, loss and survival by Rachel Nickell’s son


Alex Hanscombe - 2014
    A coming-of-age story that begins with a tragedy but ends in optimism, forgiveness and peace.On a beautiful July morning in 1992, just three weeks before his third birthday, Alex Hanscombe and his young mother, Rachel Nickell, went walking on Wimbledon Common. Life was never the same again. Shortly after ten o’clock that morning, Alex was discovered by the side of his mother’s body – she had been assaulted, stabbed forty-nine times in a frenzied attack, and left dead. Alex was the only witness to the attack.Letting Go is Alex’s heartbreaking account of that morning, the aftermath, and the devastating effect on his father, the extended family and the wider community. Alex tells the story of the resulting media storm, the legal cases following and the peace and understanding that he has now found, as a young man. In telling his story, and the truth, this is the last stage of Alex’s incredible journey to letting go.

At the End of the Road


Grant Jerkins - 2011
    A red dirt road on a sweltering day. A car loses control, flips through the air. A woman crawls out, bloody and battered, staggers toward the boy on the bike, the one she swerved to avoid. But he runs away...Kyle is ten in the summer of 1976, and his world is all about secrets-secrets hidden in the maze of cornfields, in caves, in the embers of scorched earth, behind creaking doors and down basement stairs...and in the darkest of hearts.But there's a policewoman at the front door. The Paralyzed Man watches him from a neighboring porch. And no matter which way Kyle turns, no place seems safe anymore...

Stone City


Mitchell Smith - 1990
    A series of killings prompts officials to coerce Bauman to track down the killer. His quest takes readers into the web of corruption that is inherent in a big state prison.

The Bottoms


Joe R. Lansdale - 2000
    In 1933, the year that forms the centerpiece of the narrative, Harry is 11 years old and living with his mother, father, and younger sister on a farm outside of Marvel Creek, Texas, near the Sabine River bottoms. Harry's world changes forever when he discovers the corpse of a young black woman tied to a tree in the forest near his home. The woman, who is eventually identified as a local prostitute, has been murdered, molested, and sexually mutilated. She is also, as Harry will soon discover, the first in a series of similar corpses, all of them the victims of a new, unprecedented sort of monster: a traveling serial killer.From his privileged position as the son of constable (and farmer and part-time barber) Jacob Collins, Harry watches as the distinctly amateur investigation unfolds. As more bodies -- not all of them "colored" -- surface, the mood of the local residents darkens. Racial tensions -- never far from the surface, even in the best of times -- gradually kindle. When circumstantial evidence implicates an ancient, innocent black man named Mose, the Ku Klux Klan mobilizes, initiating a chilling, graphically described lynching that will occupy a permanent place in Harry Collins's memories. With Mose dead and the threat to local white women presumably put to rest, the residents of Marvel Creek resume their normal lives, only to find that the actual killer remains at large and continues to threaten the safety and stability of the town.Lansdale uses this protracted murder investigation to open up a window on an insular, poverty-stricken, racially divided community. With humor, precision, and great narrative economy, he evokes the society of Marvel Creek in all its alternating tawdriness and nobility, offering us a varied, absolutely convincing portrait of a world that has receded into history. At the same time, he offers us a richly detailed re-creation of the vibrant, dangerous physical landscapes that were part of that world and have since been buried under the concrete and cement of the industrialized juggernaut of the late 20th century. In Lansdale's hands, the gritty realities of Depression-era Texas are as authentic -- and memorable -- as anything in recent American fiction.

Let The Right One In


Jack Thorne - 2013
    She doesn’t go to school and never leaves the flat by day. Sensing in each other a kindred spirit, the two become devoted friends. What Oskar doesn’t know is that Eli has been a teenager for a very long time…Jack Thorne's adaptation of Let The Right One In premiered in June 2013 at the Dundee Rep Theatre in a production by the National Theatre of Scotland, before transferring to London's Royal Court Theatre in November 2013.

in the company of men


Neil LaBute - 1997
    The story of two white-collar managers, Chad and Howard, who maliciously plot to jointly romance the lonely, deaf, beautiful office temp Christine before simultaneously dumping her, is cool and compelling in its depiction of the worst sorts of emotional abuse. What begins as a cat-and-mouse game of one-upmanship quickly escalates into full-scale psychological warfare. Only too late does this 'frat boy' prank reveal itself as deadly serious, with a struggle between the two men at the heart of the battle. The woman is only a means to an end, a pawn easily captured and tossed aside in a dark, wicked duel for corporate ascension.

The Devil All the Time


Donald Ray Pollock - 2011
    There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrifi­cial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial kill­ers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.

Psycho


Robert Bloch - 1959
    Exhausted, lost, and at the end of her rope, she was eager for a hot shower and a bed for the night. Her room was musty but clean and the plumbing worked. Norman Bates, the manager, seemed nice, if a little odd.

Girl Trouble


Holly Goddard Jones - 2009
    A lonely woman reflects on her failed marriage and the single act of violence, years buried, that brought about its destruction. In these eight beautifully written, achingly poignant, and occasionally heartbreaking stories, the fine line between right and wrong, good and bad, love and violence is walked over and over again.In "Good Girl," a depressed widower is forced to decide between the love of a good woman and the love of his own deeply flawed son. In another part of town and another time, thirteen-year-old Ellen, the central figure of "Theory of Realty," is discovering the menaces of being "at that age": too old for the dolls of her girlhood, too young to understand the weaknesses of the adults who surround her. The linked stories "Parts" and "Proof of God" offer distinct but equally correct versions of a brutal crime--one from the perspective of the victim's mother, one from the killer's.

D-City Chronicles: Aja and Ro


Annitia L. Jackson - 2018
    She has lost her family, boyfriends, and her peace of mind. She has given up on a happily ever after because everyone she loves has either died or been threatened because of her. When she decides to come out of hiding due to unexpected circumstances, she meets a man just as broken as her. The attraction is undeniable but will her demons come to kill the new love that is developing. Twenty- five year old Roland "Ro" Symir Casey deals in death. His whole world is killing, money, and revenge. He is cold- hearted and doesn't care about anybody but his family, his brother Raymond, his father Rodney, and his best friend Ace. He has no room in his heart for love or so he thought. That changes when he collides with Aja, Ace's little sister. When he's asked to protect her he finds his cold heart thawing. The problem is he has a situation with Tyesha and an even darker enemy. His anger. "Unknown" She has always been mine and no one can have her but me. Many have tried and failed it cost them their lives. She is my angel and I will do anything to keep her.............

Winter's Bone


Daniel Woodrell - 2006
    Her father has skipped bail on charges that he ran a crystal meth lab, and the Dollys will lose their house if he doesn't show up for his next court date.Ree's father has disappeared before. The Dolly clan has worked the shadowy side of the law for generations, and arrests (and attempts to avoid them) are part of life in Rathlin Valley. But the house is all they have, and Ree's father would never forfeit it to the bond company unless something awful happened. With two young brothers depending on her and a mother who's entered a kind of second childhood, Ree knows she has to bring her father back, dead or alive, or else see her family turned out into the unforgiving cold.Sixteen-year-old Ree, who has grown up in the harsh poverty of the Ozarks, learns quickly that asking questions of the rough Dolly clan can be a fatal mistake. She perseveres past obstacles of every kind and finally confronts the top figures in the family's hierarchy.Along the way to a shocking revelation, Ree discovers unexpected depths in herself and in a family network that protects its own at any cost.

The Killer Inside Me


Jim Thompson - 1952
    A deputy sheriff, Lou's known to the small-time criminals, the real-estate entrepreneurs, and all of his coworkers--the low-lifes, the big-timers, and everyone in-between--as the nicest guy around. He may not be the brightest or the most interesting man in town, but nevertheless, he's the kind of officer you're happy to have keeping your streets safe. The sort of man you might even wish your daughter would end up with someday.But behind the platitudes and glad-handing lurks a monster the likes of which few have seen. An urge that has already claimed multiple lives, and cost Lou his brother Mike, a self-sacrificing construction worker who fell to his death on the job in what was anything but an accident. A murder that Lou is determined to avenge--and if innocent people have to die in the process, well, that's perfectly all right with him.In The Killer Inside Me, Thompson goes where few novelists have dared to go, giving us a pitch-black glimpse into the mind of the American Serial Killer years before Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, and Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho, in the novel that will forever be known as the master performance of one of the greatest crime novelists of all time.

My Darkest Prayer


S.A. Cosby - 2019
    A former Marine and Sheriff's deputy, Nathan has built a reputation in his small Southern town as a man who can help when all other avenues have been exhausted. When a local minister with grandiose ambitions is found dead, Nathan is approached by his parishioners who feel the local police are dragging their feet with the investigation. What starts out as an easy payday soon descends into a maze of mayhem filled with wannabe gangsters, vicious crime lords, porn stars, crooked police officers and a particularly treacherous preacher and his mysterious wife. Nathan must use all his varied skills and some of his wit to navigate the murky waters of small town corruption even as dark secrets of his own threaten to come to the surface.