Showing results by publisher "University Press Audiobooks" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

In literature and film, the spy chief is an all-knowing, all-powerful figure who masterfully moves spies into action like pieces on a chessboard. How close to reality is that depiction, and what does it really take to be an effective leader in the world of intelligence? This first volume of Spy Chiefs broadens and deepens our understanding of the role of intelligence leaders in foreign affairs and national security in the US and UK from the early 1940s to the present.

At first glance, the 1932 Easter morning murder of Salvatore "Sam" Antonio had all the trademarks of a gang-related murder. But when William H. Flubacher of the New York State Police began questioning the victim’s wife, Anna Antonio, the vague details she offered, coupled with her utter lack of shock or grief upon hearing of her husband’s brutal murder, convinced Flubacher that something was amiss. Soon, as James M. Greiner tells us in this absorbing audiobook, Anna was accused of hiring two drug dealers, Vincent Saetta and Sam Feraci, to kill her husband.

On a cool Pensacola night in January 1991, just a few minutes before midnight, three teenagers pulled up to the Trout Auto Parts store. Patrick Bonifay, his body coursing with adrenaline, entered the store clad in a ski mask carrying a loaded gun, intent on carrying out a poorly laid plan. Little did he know that it was his life - as well as the lives of his companions - that was about to be forever changed. Bonifay, Clifford Barth, and Eddie Fordham were hired to kill Daniel Wells by Robin Archer, who blamed Wells for losing his job nine months prior.

Nameless Indignities is an intriguing account of a historical true crime with more twists and turns than a roller coaster ride. If you are fascinated by history relating to crime, law, medicine, psychology, hysteria, rape, journalism, or genealogy, then this Victorian mystery is for you. The story will hold you in its grip from beginning to end with multiple suspects, a lynch mob, perjury and bribery, a failed kidnapping attempt, broken family ties, cover-ups, financial devastation, and at least two suicides.

They have no witnesses. They have no case. With this blunt observation, Mariann Colby, an attractive, church-going mother and housewife in Shaker Heights, Ohio, bet a defense psychiatrist that she would not be convicted of murder. A lack of witnesses was not the only problem that would confront the State of Ohio in 1966, which would seek to prosecute her for shooting to death Cremer Young Jr., her son’s nine-year-old playmate.

When the winter ice melted in April 1850, residents of Saco, Maine, made a gruesome discovery: the body of a young girl submerged in a stream. Thanks to evidence left at the scene, a local physician was arrested and tried for the death of Mary Bean, the name given to the unidentified young girl; the cause of death was failed abortion. Garnering extensive newspaper coverage, the trial revealed many secrets: a poorly trained doctor, connections to an unsolved murder in New Hampshire, and the true identity of "Mary Bean" - a young Canadian mill worker named Berengera Caswell, missing since the previous winter. The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories examines the series of events that led Caswell to become Mary Bean and the intense curiosity and anxiety stimulated by this heavily watched trial.

Jack the Ripper was probably the first serial killer to appear in a large metropolis at a time when the general populace was literate and the press was a force for social change. The press was also partly responsible for creating many myths surrounding the Ripper. Robin Odell's Ripperology is the first study to present a sequential history of literary investigations of Jack the Ripper's crimes and to address the seven principal phases of Ripper speculations....

During the late 1880's, the Cornett-Whitley gang rose on the Texas scene with a daring train robbery at McNeil Station, only miles from the capital of Texas. In the frenzy that followed the robbery, the media castigated both lawmen and government officials, at times lauded the outlaws, and indulged in trial by media. Fans of the Old West and true crime stories will appreciate this sordid tale of outlawry and the lawmen who put a stop to it. Those who study the media and “fake news” will appreciate the parallels from the 1880's to today.

Told in alternating sections and rapidly paced, this audiobook is true crime at its best - gripping, pulpy, and full of sharp historical tidbits. True crime fans, history buffs, and those interested in local lore will delight in this chilling tale of two ruthless killers.

The short, bloody career of "Bronco Bill" Walters and his gang captures the devil-may-care violence of the Wild West. In this detailed narrative of the gang's crime spree in territorial New Mexico and Arizona, two experts in outlaw history offer a gunshot-by-gunshot account of how some especially dangerous outlaws plied their trade in 1898.

As the Klondike gold rush peaked in spring 1898, adventurers and gamblers rubbed shoulders with town-builders and gold-panners in Skagway, Alaska. The flow of riches lured confidence men, too - among them Jefferson Randolph "Soapy" Smith (1860 - 98), who with an entourage of "bunco-men" conned and robbed the stampeders. Soapy, though, a common enough criminal, would go down in legend as the Robin Hood of Alaska, the "uncrowned king of Skagway", remembered for his charm and generosity, even for calming a lynch mob.

Most familiar with the Wild West know Wyatt Earp, Virgil Earp, and Morgan Earp for the famous shootout on the streets of Tombstone, Arizona. But few know the later years of the close-knit Earp family, which revolved around patriarch Nicholas Earp, and their last push at a major monetary coup in Los Angeles.

From the depths of German and American archives comes a story one soldier never wanted told. The first volunteer killed defending Robert E. Lee’s position in battle was really a German assassin. After fleeing to the United States to escape prosecution for murder, the assassin enlisted in a German company of the Pennsylvania Volunteers in the Mexican-American War and died defending Lee’s battery at the Siege of Veracruz in 1847.

According to the Elliot Ness myth, which has been widely disseminated through books, television shows, and movies, Ness and the Untouchables defeated Al Capone by marshaling superior firepower. In Scarface Al and the Crime Crusaders, Dennis Hoffman presents a fresh new perspective on the downfall of Al Capone.

In 1875, an Irish-born Baltimore policeman, Patrick McDonald, entered the home of Daniel Brown, an African American laborer, and clubbed and shot Brown, who died within an hour. In similar cases at the time, authorities routinely exonerated Maryland law enforcement officers who killed African Americans, usually without serious inquiry. But in this case, Baltimore’s White community chose a different path. A coroner’s jury declined to attribute the killing to accident or self-defense, the state’s attorney indicted McDonald and brought him to trial, and a jury convicted McDonald.

On March 14, 1912, Hillsville, Virginia, native Floyd Allen (1856–1913) was convicted of three criminal charges: assault, maiming, and the rescue of prisoners in custody. What had begun as a scuffle between Allen's nephews over a young woman ended with him being charged as the guilty party after he allegedly hit a deputy in the head with a pistol.

Justice is blind, they say, but perhaps not to beauty. In supposedly dispassionate courts of law, attractive women have long avoided punishment, based largely on their looks, for cold-blooded crimes. The Beauty Defense: Femmes Fatales on Trial gathers the true stories of some of the most infamous femmes fatales in criminal history, collected by attorney and true crime historian Laura James.

In Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs, Arellano closely examines such narratives as well as the work of western historian and archivist Hubert Howe Bancroft, who was sympathetic to them and that of Ida B. Wells, who wrote in fierce opposition to lynching. Tracing the creation, maintenance, and circulation of dominant, alternative, and oppositional vigilante stories from the 19th century frontier through the Jim Crow South, she casts new light on the role of narrative in creating a knowable past.

As the city of Windsor, Ontario, celebrated the end of World War II and the return of its troops with parades and public revelry, the industrial city in the south of Canada was shaken by a series of brutal stabbings. The failure of the police to catch the murderer, a "blood lusting maniac" as the local newspaper described him, the turbulence of the times, and the seemingly random nature of the killings plunged the city into a panic.

As a true crime book, Tracks to Murder is witty and informative and enriches these classic American murder cases by placing them within their original settings. Goodman also plays them against their locations as they are today, resulting in a series of character sketches both contemporary and historical. As a travel book, it presents the seasoned reflections of a cultivated English writer on American manners and morals observed during his serendipitous transcontinental journey.