True Historical

True Crime Stories You Won't Believe-Omnibus Edition s brings together three critically acclaimed volumes—Books One, Two, and Three—into a single, unflinching collection of true crime stories that dig deeper than most. From forgotten killers and overlooked trials to psychological profiles and courtroom spectacles, this is a journey through the darkest corners of criminal history. Written by forensic psychologist and author Romeo Vitelli, Ph.D., this omnibus offers a sweeping look at real-life crimes that defy easy explanation. These aren’t just tales of murder—they are explorations ...

Matilda Koontz cherishes her life as a wife and mother on a Missouri farm, but her hardworking husband wants to claim free farmland in the Pacific Northwest. When he suggests selling the farm to trek two thousand miles across the Oregon Trail, she balks. But in the spring of 1847, Matilda and Nicholas Koontz and their sons embark on a grueling journey westward. Fresh graves testify to dangers of disease, accidents, starvation, and a multitude of hazards threatening her family and her beloved’s dream.

At seventeen, he was thrown into the deadliest front of World War II. In 1942, a young German soldier was sent to the Eastern Front—into the icy Caucasus Mountains. Surrounded by cold, fear, and despair, he faced horrors that no teenager should ever endure. Wounded three times, every day could have been his last. More than eighty years later, his memories come to light—a raw and unfiltered testimony of survival, fear, and resilience—also available as an unabridged audiobook on Audible and Spotify. Inside this powerful World War II memoir, you will discover: • Survival against all ...

America’s Most Notorious Insane Asylums: The Dark History of the 10 Most Horrifying Psychiatric Institutions in U.S. History is a gripping and eye-opening journey into the darkest corners of American mental health care. From crumbling Kirkbride buildings to mass graves, this book exposes the brutal conditions, forgotten patients, and shocking practices that defined psychiatric institutions across the United States. With chilling detail and historical accuracy, this comprehensive guide explores ten of the most infamous insane asylums—including Willowbrook State School, Danvers State ...

The American West was never just a man’s world. In The Forgotten Frontier, bestselling author Richard Fleischman uncovers the extraordinary lives of women who braved the harsh realities of the 19th-century American frontier. Through vivid, deeply researched storytelling, this powerful volume gives voice to the women who crossed mountains, deserts, and boundaries—both physical and social. From midwives who delivered babies on dirt floors to widows who defended their homes with rifles in hand, these women lived at the intersection of grit, grief, resilience, and resolve. Some followed ...

Based on the remarkable true story of Irish convict John Graham, WHITE SPIRIT is an epic historical adventure set in 19th Century Australia. After escaping from the notorious Moreton Bay Penal Settlement, Graham finds refuge with the Kabi, a tribe of Aborigines who eventually accept him as one of their own. Attempts to recapture Graham are orchestrated by a variety of contrasting characters working for the all-pervasive British Empire. They include Moreton Bay's tyrannical, opium-addicted commandant Lord Cheetham, the dashing yet warlike Lieutenant Hogan, native tracker Barega and the penal...

INTO THE AMERICAS (A novel based on a true story) is a gritty, real-life adventure based on one of history’s greatest survival stories. It was inspired by the diary entries of young English blacksmith John Jewitt during his time aboard the brigantine The Boston and also during his sojourn at Nootka Sound, on North America's western seaboard, from 1802 to 1805. Written by father-and-son writing team Lance & James Morcan (authors of The World Duology and The Orphan Trilogy), INTO THE AMERICAS is a tale of two vastly different cultures – Indigenous North American and European civilization ...

She was four steps from the gate when the dog crossed the road. Ravensbrück, 5 March 1945. Two thousand women are stood on a road for three hours and walked past a bored man who looks at each of them for a second and a half and says one of two words. Left, and you go back to the block. Right, and nobody sees you again. Nina Farkas is sent right. And then seventy kilos of Great Dane comes ninety metres across that road, stops dead in front of her, and will not move. She lives. Nobody can say why. And it will take her fifty-one years to forgive it. — Budapest, 1944. Nina is twenty-two, a ...

Beneath the surface of every city, behind the locked doors of grand hotels, within the quiet walls of old houses — something lingers. This hauntingly elegant collection of true ghost stories is drawn from eyewitness accounts, historical records, and folklore. Each chapter invites you into a real place where history refuses to die — from the bloodstained stones of the Tower of London to the snow-lit halls of the Stanley Hotel, the whispering tunnels beneath Paris, and the dark heart of Yorkshire’s Black Monk of Pontefract. Told in a lyrical, literary Gothic style, these narratives move...

One family's search for freedom became a legacy that would shape generations. In 1845, Johann and Mary Struss face an impossible choice. Remain in Germany and watch their dreams slowly disappear... or leave everything they have ever known for an uncertain future in the Republic of Texas. With only faith, determination, and the hope of a better life for their children, they board an overcrowded sailing ship bound for America. But the Atlantic Ocean is unforgiving. Violent storms, disease, heartbreak, and danger test every passenger long before they ever see land. The voyage is only the ...

"Evil is an element. Like iron. Like carbon. It does not appear from nowhere. It was always there, in the first place." Budapest. Winter 1944. The Arrow Cross has taken the streets. Escaping Budapest follows one Jewish family through the final, terrifying months of World War II in Hungary, a city where a neighbor's knock can mean death and a stranger's hand can mean life. Miriam, István, and their seventeen-year-old daughter Magda are separated across a dying city in which human nature, freed of all restraint, has gone in every direction at once. Each of them will face a moment that no ...

Step into the darkest corners of history in 21 Gripping True Crime Stories of Brutal Murders and Infamous Killers from the 16th Century. What murder was solved when a corpse began to bleed at the touch of its killer? Which teenager changed the course of French history with two murders and a single gunshot? What serial murderer met his end beneath the executioner's wheel in a German town? And what poisoner committed a crime so horrifying that King Henry VIII changed English law simply to devise a more terrible death for him? The answers lie within these pages. Journey into the violent heart ...

ONE WOMAN. ONE MISSION. ONE DEADLY SECRET. The race is on! An unputdownable espionage thriller about NOOR INAYAT KHAN: an Indian princess turned Allied spy during WWII. A secret so deadly, no one is safe. PRINCESS OF SPIES will grip you to the very end. ★★★★★ ´If you loved The Nightingale or The Alice Network, you won’t put this down.´ ★★★★★ ´Over the course of these pages you will suffer, you will be shocked by the horror and anguish; but you will also discover an ode to the struggle against tyranny, to faith in something that lasts beyond death, and to love.´ —...

Always Greener is an exquisite portrait of Kate Grenville's complex, conflicted grandmother, who she feared as a child and only in adulthood came to understand. Born in rural Australia, Dolly Russell becomes a successful businessperson, mother and troubled wife. Then came the depression, bankruptcy and World War I. Yet, in a way, those disasters freed her. They allowed her to use her intelligence and ambition to make a space for herself in a man’s world.

A rousing tale of espionage and unsung valor, this is the captivating true story of Vera Atkins, Great Britain's spymistress from the age of 25. With her fierce intelligence, blunt manner, personal courage, and exceptional informants, Vera ran countless missions throughout the 1930s. After rising to the leadership echelon in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a covert intelligence agency formed by Winston Churchill, she became head of a clandestine army in World War II.

Have you ever wanted to pull up the curtain and look at what the US Army was really like during the Vietnam War? From enlistment through Basic, Officer, and Flight training, veteran pilot Richard Guay will take you on a journey many have never witnessed… Sit with Richard in the cockpit of the venerable UH-1 Huey helicopter as he maneuvers the sky to accomplish missions, protect his troops, and put to the test his years of training to stop the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia. Through a journey from steamy jungles to war-torn skies over battlefields, Richard’s raw and informative ...

"She could not hear the world. She learned to read it." For readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Librarian of Auschwitz, and The Nightingale. Berlin, October 1942. Seventeen-year-old Leah Adler has been deaf since the day she was born. In a quiet flat above her father's tailor shop, she has learned to listen with her hands, her cheekbones, the bones behind her eyes — to read a world that has never spoken to her. Then a brick comes through the front window. Then comes the yellow star. Then comes the knock at the door at half past five in the morning. When the cattle car opens at the ...

Four years. One promise. A song that would not stay hidden. Munich, 1940. When a government questionnaire arrives asking about her younger sister's mind, nineteen-year-old Grete Hoffmann understands at once what it really is: the first page of a death sentence. Lena is fifteen, gentle, incapable of lying — and, in the eyes of the Reich, unworthy of life. Grete makes her sister a promise at their mother's deathbed: I will be the world for her. She has no idea what that promise will cost. When their father's underground printing press is discovered, the whole family is swept into Dachau —...

Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize 2025 The knock on the door changed everything. Until then, we were happy; we knew who we were. ‘You’ve got the wrong person,’ I told him. ‘My wife is gentle and kind. She wouldn’t hurt a fly.’ In 1939, when she was just nineteen years old...

In a gay nightclub in Orlando on June 12, 2016, the shooter, Omar Mateen, murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others. The attack was the deadliest act of violence against the LGBTQ+ community in US history and the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11. But there’s a story you haven’t heard. The FBI had a secret history with the shooter and his father. To obscure that history, the FBI pushed a false story that the media dutifully carried—that the attacker was a secretly gay Islamist extremist who had chosen to target Pulse and planned the attack for weeks.