"When Amanda, the gorgeous wife of start-up millionaire Zach Grayson, is discovered dead at the bottom of the stairs in her stately Brooklyn brownstone, her husband is immediately fingered as the primary suspect. Zach calls Lizzie, his law school classmate, hoping their shared history will convince her to come to his aid. A former U.S. Attorney with no violent crime experience, Lizzie reluctantly agrees to represent him, though the two haven't seen...

How the forgotten case of murder while sleepwalking changed history

After creeping out of bed on a frigid January night in 1832, teenage farmhand Abraham Prescott took up an ax and thrashed his sleeping employers to the brink of death. He later explained that he'd attacked Sally and Chauncey Cochran in his sleep. The Cochrans eventually recovered but—to the astonishment of their neighbors—kept Prescott on, somehow accepting

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"Amos Decker witnesses a murder just outside FBI headquarters. A man shoots a woman execution-style on a crowded sidewalk, then turns the gun on himself. Even with Decker's extraordinary powers of observation and deduction, the killing is baffling. Decker and his team can find absolutely no connection between the shooter--a family man with a successful consulting business--and his victim, a schoolteacher. Nor is there a hint of any possible motive...

In 1981, at the age of eighteen, John N. Huffington was found guilty of a double homicide in Harford County, Maryland. He was given two death sentences plus 21 years in what became known as the Memorial Day Murders. Maintaining his innocence from day one, John spent 32 years, 2 months, and 28 days in the Maryland Prison System, the first 10 years of his sentence were on death row. John's conviction was tainted with flimsy, unsubstantiated science...

Since it was first published in English, in 1946, Albert Camus's extraordinary first novel, The Stranger (L'Etranger), has had a profound impact on millions of American readers. Through this story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched Algerian beach, Camus was exploring what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd." Now, in an illuminating new American translation (the only English version...

Fifty-five-year-old Dr. Harold "Fred" Shipman has a noble dedication to his profession, winning the trust of his patients with ingratiating charm and an old-school bedside manner. In fact, he even made house calls-but his unsuspecting patients has no idea of the evil that lurked behind the friendly facade of the kindly doctor... After thirty years of practice, Dr. Shipman's true nature was finally exposed-that of a calculating killer who delivered...

Janeen Snyder was only fourteen when she moved in with Michael Thornton, his wife, and teenage daughter. Michael was a successful entrepreneur and family man with eight beauty salons and a six-figure income-but two years later, he gave it all up to run away with Janeen. At last, on the road with his new young lover, Michael could indulge his darkest, wildest obsessions ... They worked together as a team, luring girls into their twisted world of violence,...

Se cumplen treinta años de la tragedia de Waco, Texas, que culminó el 19 de abril de 1993 tras cincuenta y un días de asedio policial. Ese día, el complejo de Mount Carmel, donde se habían atrincherado los más de cien fieles seguidores de la secta de la Rama Davidiana armados hasta los dientes, acabó pasto de las llamas, y setenta y seis davidianos perdieron la vida, entre ellos veinte niños y el temible líder del culto, Vernon Howell, rebautizado...

A fascinating look into dimensions of murder that are often overlooked and undeveloped. Spree killing, in particular, is a crime that researchers have vacillated over in the past two decades or so, most notably when the FBI's 2005 consortium on Serial Homicide seemed to walk back from the concept because of the implications of the term "cooling off period." The author draws the reader into consideration of such classifications, both the spree killer...

Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She's even started to feel like she knows them. "Jess and Jason," she calls them. Their life -- as she sees it -- is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost. And then she sees something shocking. It's only a...