Book picks similar to
Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science by Ronald R. Thomas
nonfiction
history
forensic-science
crime
The Longman Anthology of Detective Fiction
Deane Mansfield-KelleyArthur Conan Doyle - 2004
KEY TOPICS: Information about the genre of detective fiction. Collection of award winning stories. Information about award winning authors.MARKET: Those interested in detective fiction.
Women Who Kill: True Crime Stories Of Killer Women, Serial Killers And Psychopathic Women Who Kill For Pleasure
Brody Clayton - 2015
Read on your PC, Mac, smart phone, tablet or Kindle device. When male serial killers are on the loose they tend to make headlines, for example Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Men like these are infamous for the terror that they inflicted in the general population. Many of these men are diagnosed as psychopaths. The reasons for them going down the paths that they chose are analysed and studied and read about. There was a time however that all such crimes were always automatically linked to a man. A general perception was quite common; that there is no such thing as women serial killers and psychopaths. In fact, women killers can sometimes be more lethal, and the murders that they have committed can be just as cold and calculated as a man's. When women and men turn to murder and crime, they leave a wake of disappearances and blood in their path, a path that may be discovered after years have passed. Now, be it male or female, analysts have sat them down and assessed their mental progress. Things have changed over the decades. Their crimes are weighed in the same scales as their male counterparts, and now they can't hide themselves by claiming to be absolutely innocent. Here Is A Preview Of What You'll Learn...
Women Who Kill – Delphine La Laurie and Her House of Horrors
Women Who Kill – Elizabeth Bathory – The Blood Countess
Women Who Kill – Nannie Doss – Nancy Hazel – The Husband Killer
Women Who Kill – Nannie Doss – The Second Husband
Women Who Kill – Nannie Doss – The Third Victim
Women Who Kill – Nannie Doss – Four Husbands in a Row
Women Who Kill – Nannie Doss – Last Man Standing
Much, much more!
Download your copy today! Take action today and download this book for a limited time discount of only $2.99! If you're intrigued by the women killers of our time then download this book now! Tags: women who kill, women killers, killer women, true crime, true murder stories, murder mysteries, cold cases true crime, murders solved, killer families, unsolved murders, crimes, true crime stories,
Written in Blood: A History of Forensic Detection
Colin Wilson - 1989
a Roman doctor named Antistius performed the first autopsy recorded in history—on the corpse of murder victim Julius Caesar. However, not until the nineteenth century did the systematic application of scientific knowledge to crime detection seriously begin, so that the tiniest scrap of evidence might yield astonishing results—like the single horsehair that betrayed the sex murderer in New York's 1936 Nancy Titterton case. In this massive and compelling history of forensic detection, the internationally recognized criminologist Colin Wilson charts the progress of criminalistics from the first attempts at detecting arsenic to the development of an impressive array of such modern techniques as ballistic analysis, blood typing, voice printing, textile analysis, psychological profiling, and genetic fingerprinting. Wilson also explores the alarmingly modern phenomenon of serial sex crime with a discussion of notorious cases that includes Jack the Ripper, Lucie Berlin, Mary Phagan, the Black Dahlia, Charles Manson, and Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper. Wilson shows how the continual sophistication of forensic detection and the introduction of computerized information retrieval has increasingly stacked the odds against the sex killer. Whatever the case, Written in Blood never fails to enlighten and intrigue.
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
Kate Summerscale - 2008
In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land.At the time, the detective was a relatively new invention; there were only eight detectives in all of England and rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking, as Kate Summerscale relates in her scintillating new book, that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher. Whicher quickly believed the unbelievable—that someone within the family was responsible for the murder of young Saville Kent. Without sufficient evidence or a confession, though, his case was circumstantial and he returned to London a broken man. Though he would be vindicated five years later, the real legacy of Jonathan Whicher lives on in fiction: the tough, quirky, knowing, and all-seeing detective that we know and love today…from the cryptic Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a provocative work of nonfiction that reads like a Victorian thriller, and in it Kate Summerscale has fashioned a brilliant, multilayered narrative that is as cleverly constructed as it is beautifully written.
Blood Secrets: A Forensic Expert Reveals How Blood Spatter Tells the Crime Scene's Story
Rod Englert - 2010
He spent years studying and testing how blood behaves, pioneering a vital new tool that is now a part of any criminal investigation. In Blood Secrets he demonstrates how detectives and forensic experts use blood-spatter analysis to solve real cases.
How can the police tell what type of murder weapon was used when the body is missing and all that's left is a trace of gore? How can they tell if a victim was moved, or which person in a room fired the fatal shot? Englert lays out what he's learned on a variety of intriguing cases, from puzzling murders in tiny, remote towns to the highest-profile celebrity trials--including O. J. Simpson, Robert Blake, and many others.
Filled with fascinating details of forensic science and real-life CSI stories, Blood Secrets shows the techniques and tools used to decipher blood spatter's code.
Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
Sam Quinones - 2015
Communities where heroin had never been seen before—from Charlotte, NC and Huntington, WVA, to Salt Lake City and Portland, OR—were overrun with it. Local police and residents were stunned. How could heroin, long considered a drug found only in the dense, urban environments along the East Coast, and trafficked into the United States by enormous Colombian drug cartels, be so incredibly ubiquitous in the American heartland? Who was bringing it here, and perhaps more importantly, why were so many townspeople suddenly eager for the comparatively cheap high it offered?With the same dramatic drive of El Narco and Methland, Sam Quinones weaves together two classic tales of American capitalism: The stories of young men in Mexico, independent of the drug cartels, in search of their own American Dream via the fast and enormous profits of trafficking cheap black-tar heroin to America’s rural and suburban addicts; and that of Purdue Pharma in Stamford, Connecticut, determined to corner the market on pain with its new and expensive miracle drug, Oxycontin; extremely addictive in its own right. Quinones illuminates just how these two stories fit together as cause and effect: hooked on costly Oxycontin, American addicts were lured to much cheaper black tar heroin and its powerful and dangerous long-lasting high. Embroiled alongside the suppliers and buyers are DEA agents, local, small-town sheriffs, and the US attorney from eastern Virginia whose case against Purdue Pharma and Oxycontin made him an enemy of the Bush-era Justice Department, ultimately stalling and destroying his career in public service.Dreamland is a scathing and incendiary account of drug culture and addiction spreading to every part of the American landscape.
L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City
John Buntin - 2009
Los Angeles has legends. Midcentury Los Angeles. A city sold to the world as "the white spot of America," a land of sunshine and orange groves, wholesome Midwestern values and Hollywood stars, protected by the world’s most famous police force, the Dragnet-era LAPD. Behind this public image lies a hidden world of "pleasure girls" and crooked cops, ruthless newspaper tycoons, corrupt politicians, and East Coast gangsters on the make. Into this underworld came two men–one L.A.’s most notorious gangster, the other its most famous police chief–each prepared to battle the other for the soul of the city. Former street thug turned featherweight boxer Mickey Cohen left the ring for the rackets, first as mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel’s enforcer, then as his protégé. A fastidious dresser and unrepentant killer, the diminutive Cohen was Hollywood’s favorite gangster–and L.A.’s preeminent underworld boss. Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, and Sammy Davis Jr. palled around with him; TV journalist Mike Wallace wanted his stories; evangelist Billy Graham sought his soul. William H. Parker was the proud son of a pioneering law-enforcement family from the fabled frontier town of Deadwood. As a rookie patrolman in the Roaring Twenties, he discovered that L.A. was ruled by a shadowy "Combination"–a triumvirate of tycoons, politicians, and underworld figures where alliances were shifting, loyalties uncertain, and politics were practiced with shotguns and dynamite. Parker’s life mission became to topple it–and to create a police force that would never answer to elected officials again. These two men, one morally unflinching, the other unflinchingly immoral, would soon come head-to-head in a struggle to control the city–a struggle that echoes unforgettably through the fiction of Raymond Chandler and movies such as The Big Sleep, Chinatown, and L.A. Confidential. For more than three decades, from Prohibition through the Watts Riots, the battle between the underworld and the police played out amid the nightclubs of the Sunset Strip and the mansions of Beverly Hills, from the gritty streets of Boyle Heights to the manicured lawns of Brentwood, intersecting in the process with the agendas and ambitions of J. Edgar Hoover, Robert F. Kennedy, and Malcolm X. The outcome of this decades-long entanglement shaped modern American policing–for better and for worse–and helped create the Los Angeles we know today. A fascinating examination of Los Angeles’s underbelly, the Mob, and America’s most admired–and reviled–police department, L.A. Noir is an enlightening, entertaining, and richly detailed narrative about the city originally known as El Pueblo de Nuestra Se–ora la Reina de los Angeles, "The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels."Frank Darabont has adapted this book for a TV series, Mob City.
Death by Theory: A Tale of Mystery and Archaeological Theory
Adrian Praetzellis - 2000
A large stone Venus. Nothing unusual about it_except that it was found on an island in the Pacific Northwest. Archaeologist Hannah Green and her shovelbum nephew find themselves in a tangled web of competing interests avaricious land owners, hungry media, and a cult of goddess worshippers while investigating one of the finds of the century. In untangling the mystery of the Washington Venus, Hannah and Sean have to confront questions of archaeological evidence, of ethics, of conflicting interpretation of data, and of the very nature of archaeological truths. Helping them are a cadre of disdainful graduate students who propose various theories processualist, marxist, feminist, postmodernist to explain the bizarre events. Teach your students archaeological theory in a fashion they'll enjoy, while they solve the mystery in Adrian Praetzellis's delightful textbook-as-novel.
Criminal Shadows: Inside The Mind Of The Serial Killer
David Canter - 1992
This book looks at offender profiling that helps the police to identify and track individual criminals by the nature of their crime.
Harry Potter and the Millennials: Research Methods and the Politics of the Muggle Generation
Anthony Gierzynski - 2013
Millions of children grew up immersed in the world of the boy wizard—reading the books, dressing up in costume to attend midnight book release parties, watching the movies, even creating and competing in Quidditch tournaments. Beyond what we know of the popularity of the series, however, nothing has been published on the question of the Harry Potter effect on the politics of its young readers—now voting adults.Looking to engage his students in exploring the connections between political opinion and popular culture, Anthony Gierzynski conducted a national survey of more than 1,100 college students. Harry Potter and the Millennials tells the fascinating story of how the team designed the study and gathered results, what conclusions can and cannot be drawn about Millennial politics, and the challenges social scientists face in studying political science, sociology, and mass communication.
A Mysterious Something in the Light: The Life of Raymond Chandler
Tom Williams - 2012
Now, drawing on new interviews, previously unpublished letters, and archives, Tom Williams casts a new light on this mysterious writer, a man troubled by loneliness and desertion. It was only during middle age, after his alcoholism wrecked a lucrative career as an oilman, that Chandler seriously turned to crime fiction. And his legacy—the lonely, ambiguous world of Philip Marlowe—endures, compelling generations of crime writers. In this long-awaited biography, Tom Williams shadows one of the true literary giants of the twentieth century and considers how crime writing was raised to the level of art.
Naming Jack the Ripper
Russell Edwards - 2014
Bringing together ground-breaking forensic discoveries and gripping historical detective work, Naming Jack the Ripper constructs the first truly convincing case for identifying the world’s most notorious serial killer
Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains
Annie Cheney - 2006
Every year human corpses meant for anatomy classes, burial, or cremation find their way into the hands of a shadowy group of entrepreneurs who profit by buying and selling human remains. While the government has controls on organs and tissue meant for transplantation, these “body brokers” capitalize on the myriad other uses for dead bodies that receive no federal oversight whatsoever: commercial seminars to introduce new medical gadgetry; medical research studies and training courses; and U.S. Army land-mine explosion tests. A single corpse used for these purposes can generate up to $10,000. As journalist Annie Cheney found while reporting on this subject over the course of three years, when there’s that much money to be made with no federal regulation, there are all sorts of shady (and fascinating) characters who are willing to employ questionable practices—from deception and outright theft—to acquire, market and distribute human bodies and parts. In Michigan and New York she discovers funeral directors who buy corpses from medical schools and supply the parts to surgical equipment companies and associations of surgeons. In California, she meets a crematorium owner who sold the body parts of people he was supposed to cremate, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits. In Florida, she attends a medical conference in a luxury hotel, where fresh torsos are delivered in Igloo coolers and displayed on gurneys in a room normally used for banquets. “That torso that you’re living in right now is just flesh and bones to me. To me, it’s a product,” says the New Jersey-based broker presiding over the torsos. Tracing the origins of body brokering from the “resurrectionists” of the nineteenth century to the entrepreneurs of today, Cheney chronicles how demand for cadavers has long driven unscrupulous funeral home, crematorium and medical school personnel to treat human bodies as commodities. Gripping, often chilling, and sure to cause a reexamination of the American way of death, Body Brokers is both a captivating work of first-person reportage and a surprising inside look at a little-known aspect of the “death care” world.
The Mysterious World of Sherlock Holmes
Bruce Wexler - 2008
This unique companion is a collector's dream, allowing fans to delve into the criminal environment of foggy, gas-lit Victorian London-the world of the all-time greatest detective. The book brings to life the elements of Holmes's success, the crime scene of his day, his history in film and television, and the present-day Holmes legacy. Featured throughout are famous figures such as Holmes's faithful sidekick, Dr. Watson; his nemesis, Professor Moriarity; and Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Filled with more than 150 images-many of the works by the great original illustrators of Conan Doyle's stories-this volume presents an excellent mix of information to satisfy legions of Holmes collectors, mystery fans, and historians fascinated by a bygone era. Through detailed text and over 150 specially researched archive illustrations, the unique volume:
Documents the greatest mysteries, methods of deduction, and notorious criminals found in the Holmes canon.
Brings to startling life the Victorian London crime scene that compromised the detective's fascinating world.
Examines the various media manifestations of the stories, including their history in print and film and television adaptations.
Invites you to read the tales again with newfound insight.
Mafia Boss Sam Giancana: The Rise and Fall of a Chicago Mobster
Susan McNicoll - 2015
Born in 1908, in The Patch, Chicago, Giancana joined the Forty-Two gang of lawless juvenile punks in 1921 and quickly proved himself as a skilled 'wheel man' (or getaway driver), extortionist and vicious killer. Called up to the ranks of the Outfit, he reputedly held talks with the CIA about assassinating Fidel Castro, shared a girlfriend with John F. Kennedy and had friends in high places, including Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, Marilyn Monroe and, some say, the Kennedys, although he fell out with them.The story of Sam Giancana will overturn many of your beliefs about America during the Kennedy era. If you want to know Giancana's role in the brother's deaths, and more of the intrigue surrounding that of Marilyn Monroe, this book will fill you in on the murky lives of many shady characters who really ruled the day, both in Chicago and elsewhere.