Never before had a medium possessed such power to influence. Yet Hollywood’s glittering ascendency was threatened by a string of headline-grabbing tragedies—including the murder of William Desmond Taylor, the popular president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, a legendary crime that has remained unsolved until now.In a fiendishly involving narrative, bestselling Hollywood chronicler William J. Mann draws on a rich host of sources, including recently released FBI files, to unpack the story of the enigmatic Taylor and the diverse cast that surrounded him—including three beautiful, ambitious actresses; a grasping stage mother; a devoted valet; and a gang of two-bit thugs, any of whom might have fired the fatal bullet. And overseeing this entire landscape of intrigue was Adolph Zukor, the brilliant and ruthless founder of Paramount, locked in a struggle for control of the industry and desperate to conceal the truth about the crime. Along the way, Mann brings to life Los Angeles in the Roaring Twenties: a sparkling yet schizophrenic town filled with party girls, drug dealers, religious zealots, newly-minted legends and starlets already past their prime—a dangerous place where the powerful could still run afoul of the desperate.A true story recreated with the suspense of a novel, Tinseltown is the work of a storyteller at the peak of his powers—and the solution to a crime that has stumped detectives and historians for nearly a century.

    Make them listen to it two more times. Get them to explain why they never bothered with it before. Then ask them to review it.What began as a simple whim quickly grew in popularity, and now Ruth and Martin’s Album Club has featured some remarkable guests: Ian Rankin on Madonna’s Madonna. Chris Addison on Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. Brian Koppelman on The Smiths’ Meat is Murder. JK Rowling on the Violent Femmes’ Violent Femmes. Bonnie Greer on The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Martin Carr on Paul McCartney’s Ram. Brian Bilston on Neil Young’s Harvest. Anita Rani on The Strokes’ Is This It. Richard Osman on Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure. And many, many more.Each entry features an introduction to each album by blog creator Martin Fitzgerald. What follows are delightful, humorous and insightful contributions from each guest as they have an album forced upon them and – for better or worse – they discover some of the world’s favourite music.Ruth and Martin’s Album Club is a compilation of some of the blog’s greatest hits as well as some exclusive material that has never appeared anywhere before. Throughout, we get an insight into why some people opt out of some music, and what happens when you force them to opt in.

    Glensheen's Daughter is the story of Marjorie Congdon, the adopted daughter of heiress Elisabeth Congdon, and the brutal murders at Glensheen, one of America's great mansions.

    It details Randy Jurgensen's determined effort to bring to justice the murderer of Patrolman Phillip Cardillo, who was shot and killed inside Harlem's Mosque #7 in 1972, in the midst of an allout assault on the NYPD from the Black Liberation Army. The New York of this era was a place not unlike the Wild West, in which cops and criminals shot it out on a daily basis.Despite the mayhem on the streets and the Machiavellian corridors of Mayor Lindsay's City Hall, Detective Jurgensen singlehandedly took on the Black Liberation Army, the Nation of Islam, NYPD brass, and City Hall, capturing Cardillo's killer, Lewis 17X Dupree. He broke the case with an unlikely accomplice, Foster 2X Thomas, a member of the Nation of Islam who became Jurgensen's witness. The relationship they formed during the time before trial gave each of the two men a greater perspective of the two sides in the street war and changed them forever. In the end, Jurgensen had to settle for a conviction on other charges, and Dupree served a number of years. The murder case is still officially unsolved. In 2006 the NYPD reopened the case, and it is once again an active investigation with full media attention.The book has received acclaim from current New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, as well as former Commissioner William Bratton.

    He died in HMP Maghaberry, Northern Ireland, in January 2016, aged sixty-eight, unmourned, and entirely unrepentant of his repellent crimes.These bald facts, horrific as they are, do not begin to scratch the surface of the truth about Robert Black, a Scottish-born serial killer who undoubtedly committed further murders for which he was never tried, both in this country and on the Continent. In this ground-breaking account, Robert Giles, who has spent years tracing the killer’s movements and sifting through all the evidence, including transcripts of the trials, convincingly argues that Black was an habitual serial killer over many years, and quite certainly responsible for more than the four child murders for which he was convicted.Co-written with Chris Clark, a former police intelligence officer whose tireless work into the Yorkshire Ripper produced convincing new evidence of other murders that went unnoticed or unrecorded, The Face of Evil shows once and for all that Robert Black was a serial killer whose crimes went far beyond what is generally believed. In doing so, it paints a portrait of human cruelty at its worst.

    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.

    The gloves are off as best-selling author RD Reynolds and his co-author Blade Braxton pull no punches in looking at some of wrestling’s biggest mistakes, most comical mishaps and most egotistical performers. Among the lists included in this cornucopia of wrestling nonsense are: • Sights Wrestling Fans Should Never Be Forced To See Again! • The Greatest Mullets in the History of the Game! • Porn Stars Who Moonlighted in Wrestling! • The Proof that DX is really, REALLY Gay! • The Greatest Mugshots — Featuring Your Favourite Wrestlers! • The Pieces of Definitive Evidence that WCW May Have Been Run By Nazis! • Pro Wrestling’s Stupidest Hometowns! • The Things That Vince McMahon Always Wants to Talk About (Half of Which Involve His Genitalia)! Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the book’s craptastic main event: the 25 Worst Gimmicks of All Time. Irreverent, off-kilter, and certain to be offensive to all, The WrestleCrap Book of Lists! is pro wrestling’s very worst of the worst!

    An elaborately staged fake crime gang, run by a ‘Mr Big’, that lured Brett Cowan in with the promise of a hefty payout. It was the stuff of a TV crime series rather than an Australian police operation. The Sting reveals extraordinary new detail and a shocking insight into one of the country's most evil killers, and the operation that brought him down.Go behind the scenes in one of Australia’s most sensational undercover busts, including never-before-heard detail of the covert investigation, including how Cowan was slowly brainwashed into believing ‘Mr Big’.Read what Cowan’s family think of their black sheep.

    On the morning of New Year's Day 2003, Rachel Moran left her family’s home for a quick stop at her apartment and feed her new kittens. After not hearing from Rachel for some time, a search for her began. It was two weeks before her belongings were fished out of a nearby drain and another two weeks before her body was discovered. At some stage during that twenty minute walk, she had been abducted near her apartment and raped and murdered. This heartbreaking account details the family grief and mourning, the extensive search for the killer, and the trail that followed.

    She is a horse-mad girl strongly attracted to the idea of farming, Aubrey is the son of a farm manager without land or money. But with limited knowledge, much enthusiasm and the challenge of raising their young family, anything can happen. This is the true story of a shepherding life; where icy nights are spent searching for lost sheep, the lambing sheds are filled with the first cries of newborns, and idyllic summers are spent in the show ring. Amusing, poignant and beautifully detailed, this is a book about how dreams can grow from small beginnings into breeding prize-winning Texel sheep in the Cotswolds. Sue and Aubrey Andrews are internationally renowned breeders of pedigree Texels. Perfect for fans of The Yorkshire Shepherdess and The Shepherd's Life.