True Mass

“Its theme is political fanaticism, with which it deals severely and brilliantly.” —New Yorker The famous bestseller with “concise insight into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement” (Wall Street Journal) by the legendary San Francisco longshoreman. A...

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.

A New York Times bestseller! The gripping story of Whitey Bulger, the mobster turned FBI informant responsible for the worst crime spree Boston has ever seen. “A powerhouse of a book. Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill ... write like veteran novelists, weaving scene after jaw-dropping scene into a...

Action packed and laced with dark humor, Reapers is an exciting tale of survival and redemption from the New York Times bestselling author of The Pariah. Implantation was supposed to be the savior of humanity. Enhancing brain function and skills for millions, it transformed the world … until...

In the blood-soaked pages of 35 True Crimes That Shocked the 18th Century, readers are plunged into a world where cruelty, terror, mass murder, and mayhem reign supreme. This gripping collection of historical true crime stories uncovers the darkest episodes of the 18th century, a time when pirates ruled the seas, tyrants held kingdoms with iron fists, and superstition blurred into horrors beyond imagination. These are the stories history books often ignore: raw, unfiltered accounts of humanity at its darkest. From brutal public executions to the massacre of entire villages and tribes, each ...

Step into the chaotic, boozy underbelly of 18th-century London, where gin was as cheap as water, twice as dangerous, and flowing through every cobblestone alley. Drunk London Gin Craze is a fast-paced, highly entertaining deep dive into one of the most bizarre and tumultuous public health panics in British history. Clocking in as a quick, punchy two-hour read, this book strips away the dusty textbook veneer to reveal the wild, messy, and shockingly relatable reality of mass addiction in the 1720s. Discover how a government-backed economic scheme to boost agriculture and spite French brandy ...

A self-educated man, Eric Hoffer was most likely born in 1898. He wrote in his spare time after doing shifts on the San Francisco docks, where he continued to work, even after becoming a successful author. Hoffer began writing The True Believer in the 1940s, as Nazism and fascism spread across Europe. Most analysts who were trying to work out how these movements became so powerful focused on their leaders and the ideas they trumpeted.

She was seventy years old. She stood accused of witchcraft. And when her accusers began screaming and writhing in agony, she laughed. On May 2, 1692, Susannah North Martin stood before the magistrates of Salem, Massachusetts, charged with tormenting her neighbors through supernatural means. When asked what she thought of the accusations, she replied with these unforgettable words: “Well, I may at such folly.” Less than three months later, she was hanged. More than three centuries afterward, her descendant, award-winning author Stephen Hawley Martin, decided to reopen her case. What ...

The Only Man Who Walked Both Sides and Lived to Tell the Tale. In the bloody 1990s, the Boston underworld was a powder keg. On one side: the Patriarca Crime Family. On the other: the infamous Winter Hill Gang. In the middle stood Mark Silverman. Rogue Mobster is the raw, firsthand account of a man who got inside the Italian mafia and Winter Hill Gang Mark Silverman was the ultimate earner—the man who could bridge two warring families because he was too valuable to lose.—he navigated the treacherous divide between the Italian Mafia and the Irish Mob during their most violent era. While ...

A sexual sadist, his pleasure was torture and murder. His first victims were a teenage couple, stalked and shot dead on a lover’s lane. After another slaying, he sent his first mocking note to authorities, promising he would kill again. The official tally of his victims was six. He claimed...

The unbelievable true story of an escape tunnel under the Berlin Wall—the people who built it, the spy who betrayed it, and the media event it inspired. “I couldn’t put [Tunnel 29] down. An absolutely incredible book.” —Ryan Holiday, #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling coauthor of The...

On July 4, 2022, a shooter climbed onto a rooftop in Highland Park, Illinois, and opened fire on a Fourth of July parade below, killing seven people and wounding dozens more. Prosecutors charged Robert “Bobby” Crimo III with the mass shooting. But this attack was part of something even more insidious. Bobby had created an elaborate game—complete with cryptic videos, a book of numbers, and an eerie online presence—designed to seed a conspiracy theory about the massacre.

How does a five-foot two ex con with bad teeth and a guitar he can barely play walk out of a federal prison and, within two years, command a desert cult of teenage women willing to murder a pregnant film star on his orders? Charles Manson should never have happened. By any sane measure, he was an unremarkable career criminal. Seventeen years served before his thirty fourth birthday. Barely literate. Unable to hold a job, a marriage, or a recording deal. Yet by August 1969 his name was on every front page in America, his swastika carved forehead was the face of a generation's nightmare, and ...

The Black Death was one of the deadliest disasters in human history. It was also one of the strangest. In STRANGE BUT TRUE: THE WEIRD HISTORY OF THE BLACK DEATH, Guy Wann takes readers inside a medieval world suddenly overwhelmed by plague carts, mass graves, frightened cities, desperate doctors, bizarre cures, flagellant processions, quarantine ships, wild rumors, and one microscopic bacterium nobody knew existed. Follow the plague from Central Eurasia and the Black Sea to Sicily, Florence, Avignon, London, Cairo, Damascus, Constantinople, and beyond. Meet physicians blaming bad air and ...

What makes ordinary people surrender everything to dangerous leaders? Why do intelligent followers remain loyal even when abuse, manipulation, and fear become impossible to ignore? And why do cults continue emerging in the modern world despite decades of public warnings and infamous tragedies? Dangerous Cult Leaders explores the chilling true stories behind some of history’s most manipulative and destructive movements. From apocalyptic prophets and extremist communes to modern online influence networks and psychological control systems, this gripping nonfiction book examines how ...

Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr. was only fourteen when he first became entangled with serial rapist and murderer Dean Corll in 1971. Fellow Houston, Texas, teenager David Brooks had already been ensnared by the charming older man, bribed with cash to help lure boys to Corll's home. Corll baited Henley with the same deal he'd given Brooks: $200 for each boy they could bring him.

Thirty-six tales of bloodshed and terror, police investigation, and the background of each and every killer await you, with each subject varying from serial killers to mass murderers, ruthless monsters to seemingly harmless members of the community in this collection.

The scandal. The genius. The murder that shocked America. Frank Lloyd Wright was more than the mind behind America's most iconic buildings—he was a man whose turbulent private life captivated a nation. The famous architect's stormy marriage to Kitty Wright and his infamous affair with another...

From the bestselling authors of Black Mass comes the definitive biography of Whitey Bulger, the most brutal and sadistic crime boss since Al Capone. Drawing on a trove of sealed files and previously classified material, Whitey digs deep into the mind of James J. “Whitey” Bulger, the crime...

Locked In is a revelatory investigation into the root causes of mass incarceration by one of the most exciting scholars in the country. Having spent 15 years studying the data on imprisonment, John Pfaff takes apart the reigning consensus created by Michelle Alexander and other reformers, revealing that the most widely accepted explanations - the failed War on Drugs, draconian sentencing laws, an increasing reliance on private prisons - tell us much less than we think.