Mostrando resultados por Editor "John Blake" en Todas las categorías

On a summer evening in 2002, ten-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman left the house to go to buy some sweets, but they never came home. For weeks after they were declared missing, an image of these smiling young girls dressed in their matching Manchester United kit, taken just a couple of hours before they went missing, was plastered across the British press as a nationwide search began to take place. When the bodies were discovered in a ditch, the final ray of hope for their safe return was extinguished as it became clear that both girls had been murdered.

Truman evidently understood the terrifying power of atomic weaponry, but no one could have realised its full potential when he ordered the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Those military attacks, along with the disasters at the Fukashima and Chernobyl nuclear reactors, might immediately spring to mind at the mention of nuclear destruction, but the vast majority of the events recorded in this audiobook are entirely unknown to most people.

Gypsy Jane stood toe-to-toe with some of the most dangerous men in the land and won. Her blood-soaked march through the criminal ranks is a unique tale of villainy in modern Britain. In a murky world where shootings and stabbings were part of daily business, Jane never forgot her Gypsy blood and stayed loyal to a personal honour code that always gave her the edge. 'If today is the day I die, it's a good day to die,' she would tell herself in the full knowledge that every day of her violent life could well be her last.

Christopher Berry-Dee is the man who talks to serial killers. A world-renowned investigative criminologist, he has gained the trust of murderers across the world, entered their high security prisons, and discussed in detail their shocking crimes. The killers' pursuit of horror and violence is described through the unique audiotape and videotape interviews which Berry-Dee conducted, deep inside the bowels of some of the world's toughest prisons.

Horace 'Jim' Greasley was 20 years of age in the spring of 1939 when Adolf Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and latterly Poland. There had been whispers and murmurs of discontent from certain quarters, and the British government began to prepare for the inevitable war. After seven weeks training with the 2nd/5th Battalion Leicester, he found himself facing the might of the German army in a muddy field south of Cherbourg, in Northern France, with just 30 rounds of ammunition in his weapon pouch. Horace's war didn't last long. He was taken prisoner on 25th May 1940.

If you've heard any news report on the upsurge in knife crime recently, you'll have heard the words 'county lines'. From the street slang that was once known as 'going country' - it sees powerful drugs gangs supplying outside of the capital through an underworld 'emerging markets enterprise', using children as young as 12 and vulnerable men and women to do their dirty work. Teens whose bereaved relatives assume they led ordinary lives, who tell us they were 'good kids', suddenly end up stabbed to death with no seeming motive.

Welcome to an after-dark world of new money, hedonism and excess. A world of luxurious nightclubs where racketeers, gamblers and glamorous women mixed with entrepreneurs, bunny girls, politicians and policemen. Bandit Country is a gripping, atmospheric true-crime noir. It is the story of Britain's 1960s gambling boom, as the country emerged from years of hardship to embrace exotic night-life and entertainment, all supplied by the Mafia.

In the winter of 1979, aged just 27, the inmate who would come to be known as 'Charlie Bronson' was considered uncontrollable by the prison system. Certified insane, he was transferred from Parkhurst Prison to the most infamous high-security psychiatric hospital in England, Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. There he embarked on a one-man campaign to retain his sanity, and to fight against the brutality of a largely hidden regime that relied on enforced drug control.

Careers in the cocaine-trafficking business are usually short. It's not only a highly risky profession, fraught with the possibility of long jail sentences, but it can be deadly if the cartels get to you first. Not for Luis Antonio Navia. For 25 years the Cuban American smuggled hundreds of tons of white powder for the biggest cartels in Colombia and Mexico, including Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel. What made him good at his dangerous job was amassing trusted contacts, losing very few shipments of coke and maintaining a low profile. He refused to carry a weapon.

Shaneda Daly was only four when her father started grooming her. For nearly 15 years, he would go on to sexually abuse his daughter every day. The emotional and physical toll was immense and, eventually, her ex-army and prison officer father admitted to his family what he had been doing. Leaving home for only a year to get help, he was welcomed back 'a changed man'. With no choice but to accept it, Shaneda lived alongside him again only for him to try and abuse her once more.

Through the author's extensive connections within the royal household, this dynamic new biography tells the full story of how Catherine, the Princess of Wales, became the woman she is today. Kate Middleton's life's story seems like a modern-day fairy-tale. An attractive, clever, and ambitious girl from unexceptional beginnings meets and falls in love with a wealthy prince destined to be King when they are both university undergraduates. Now, with the British monarchy in transition, Catherine is Princess of Wales and is set to become Queen.

As part of Scotland Yard's undercover team, it was Peter Bleksley's job to infiltrate some of the capital's most dangerous gangs and bring them down. For ten years, he went deeper into the criminal underworld than any cop had before him. Meeting with dealers, gangland leaders and members of the IRA and the Mafia, he lived the life of the Great Pretender, constantly changing his identity to ensure his cover was never blown. Whilst undeniably thrilling work at times, it came at a heavy price.

The plea of insanity in criminal cases can be traced back at least to the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, which dates from 1755-1759 BC. It is a complicated defence, and its origins in modern law lie with the 'M'Naghten Rules' of 1843. Clearly a plea of insanity in murder cases is of critical importance when the death penalty is still applied, and even today it may still be the difference between a life sentence in a high-security prison, or an indeterminate one in a secure psychiatric hospital.

Married to Ron before his death, and a regular correspondent with Reg, Kate Kray was granted unique access to the shadowy underworld they inhabited and was entrusted with some of the darkest secrets they possessed - secrets that could never be revealed until they were both dead. Featuring exclusive letters and thoughts from the twins themselves as well as anecdotes and tributes from gangsters, actors and East End faces, Kate has produced the definitive view of the Krays.

Cassie was only 13 when her mother died of a degenerative illness, leaving her vulnerable to sexual predators in the Halifax area who had been grooming her since the age of 11. She fell through the net of the care system and reached out for friendship, only to be consumed by an escalating spiral of abuse. This harrowing and truly shocking story captures in vivid detail how gangs of men were able to ply a child with drink and drugs, then rape her and pass her around their associates with no one seemingly able to step in and prevent it.

Best-selling writer and criminologist Christopher Berry-Dee turns his attention to a new kind of victim: the wives or partners of serial murderers who remained unaware of exactly who they had fallen for until after their other half's arrest or, in some cases, conviction, for multiple murders.

For more than a century, police officers used their uniforms to control and bully criminals, which in turn led to wholesale bribery and corruption. From Victorian times up to the 1950s, this crooked atmosphere tainted the UK police image of the 'friendly Bobby'. Then came the 1960s and 1970s when the Great Train Robbery and other bigtime heists changed the rules of the 'game' forever. It was like the Wild West out there. No one knew who the good guys and who the bad guys were anymore.

Lenny McLean inspired fear in many, but respect from all, as he became a bare-knuckle fighting legend. His fame became even greater in later life, appearing in Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels just as his autobiography was reaching the top of the bestsellers chart. Lenny's untimely death from cancer in 1998 marked the beginning of the end of the old Cockney way of life and interest in his story has only increased since his passing, inspiring documentaries as well as a feature film, My Name is Lenny.

Ryan and Phil had always been inseparable. Twins born 35 minutes apart, Ryan was the protective one, constantly looking out for his younger brother. They can't remember how old they were when the abuse started, but they can remember their uncle very clearly. A frequent visitor to their home in Lincoln, he lavished their family with expensive treats. School holidays and weekends were spent visiting him, when he would often take the two little boys aside to play the games he liked. Trapped with him, day after day, year after year, the abuse continued until Ryan and Phil turned 16.

We are all too familiar with the stories of Jews who were tortured and killed in concentration camps throughout the Third Reich. But less is known about the persecution of Polish prisoners housed in Majdanek, a concentration and extermination camp on the outskirts of the city of Lublin in south-eastern Poland. The Counterfeit Countess tells this story through the lens of the efforts of one remarkable woman, herself a Jew, who passed as Polish aristocracy, became a lead official in a Polish relief organisation and an officer in the underground resistance movement known as the Polish Home Army.