Scotland Yard: A History of the London Police Force's Most Infamous Murder Cases

Thunderstruck

Erik Larson · 480 pages

A true story of love, murder, and the end of the world's "great hush." In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men--Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication--whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy

The Bell Tower: The Case of Jack the Ripper Finally Solved... in San Francisco

Robert Graysmith · 552 pages

Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed

Patricia Cornwell · 387 pages

"Between August and November 1888, at least seven women were murdered in London's Whitechapel area. The gruesome nature of their deaths caused panic and fear in the East End for months, and gave rise to the sobriquet that was to become shorthand for a serial killer - Jack the Ripper.". "For over a hundred years the murders have remained among the world's greatest unsolved crimes, and a wealth o

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

Kate Summerscale · 384 pages

In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land, Jonathan Whicher of Scotland Yard. Whicher quickly believed the unbelievable--that someone within the family was

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

Simon Winchester · 265 pages

The Complete History of Jack the Ripper

Philip Sugden · 541 pages

The Complete Jack the Ripper

Donald Rumbelow · 305 pages

Discover the theories and facts surrounding the Whitechapel murders in David Rumbelow's The Complete Jack the Ripper... It is 1888 in London's Whitechapel district, where one by one a group of prostitutes are brutally murdered. Opium smoking Inspector Fred Abberline is called upon to investigate these horrific murders and through his visions track down and trap Jack the Ripper. David Rumbelow's ca

They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper

Bruce Robinson · 850 pages

A reinterpretation of the case of Jack the Ripper focuses on the "why" instead of the "who," theorizing that the residents of London society's finest homes created him as an outlet for their own hidden violent and taboo proclivities.

Mr Briggs' Hat: A Sensational Account of Britain's First Railway Murder

Kate Colquhoun · 339 pages

The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars

Paul Collins · 325 pages

On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discover a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime are turning up all over New York, but the police are baffled: There are no witnesses, no motives, no suspec

American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century

Maureen Callahan · 285 pages

The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime

Judith Flanders · 556 pages

In this exploration of murder in the nineteenth century, Judith Flanders explores some of the most gripping cases that fascinated the Victorians and gave rise to the first detective fiction. She retells the gruesome stories of many different types of murder--both famous and obscure--from the crimes (and myths) of Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper to the tragedies of the murdered Marr family in Lon

The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London

Sarah Wise · 387 pages

Describes the 1831 murder of a young vagrant and the sale of his body to a London medical college, a case that led to the arrest of his killers, "resurrection men" who acted to satisfy the demand for fresh cadavers for the study of human anatomy.

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

Hallie Rubenhold · 352 pages

The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science

Douglas Starr

This book is a riveting true crime story that vividly recounts the birth of modern forensics. At the end of the 19th century, serial murderer Joseph Vacher, known and feared as "The Killer of Little Shepherds," terrorized the French countryside. He eluded authorities for years until he ran up against prosecutor Emile Fourquet and Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne, the era's most renowned criminologist. The

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

Caroline Fraser · 480 pages

Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest

Gregg Olsen · 423 pages

In 1911 two wealthy British heiresses, Claire and Dora Williamson, came to a sanitorium in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to undergo the revolutionary "fasting treatment" of Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard. It was supposed to be a holiday for the two sisters. But within a month of arriving at what the locals called Starvation Heights, the women were emaciated shadows of their former selves, waiti

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

Casey Cep · 314 pages

The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

Harold Schechter · 426 pages

THE DEFINITIVE DOSSIER ON HISTORY'S MOST HEINOUS!Hollywood's make-believe maniacs like Jason, Freddy, and Hannibal Lecter can't hold a candle to real life monsters like John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and scores of others who have terrorized, tortured, and terminated their way across civilization throughout the ages. Now, from the much-acclaimed author of Deviant, Deranged, and Deprave

Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

Peter Vronsky · 422 pages

In Cold Blood

Truman Capote · 343 pages

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.

The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper

Maxim Jakubowski · 507 pages

The Maul and the Pear Tree

P.D. James, T.A. Critchley · 256 pages

In this riveting true crime account, acclaimed author P. D. James, the "Queen of the English mystery novel" (Newsweek) joins forces with historian T. A. Critchley to re-create the Radcliffe Highway murders, a series of vicious crimes committed in 1811 ... The scene is the London Docks near Wapping Old Stairs, a sinister neighborhood where pirates were often hanged. The first victims were two hardw

The Complete Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle · 1,132 pages

Contains: - Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Scandal in Bohemia - Red-Headed League - Case of Identity - Boscombe Valley Mystery - Five Orange Pips - Man with the Twisted Lip - Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle - Adventure of the Speckled Band - Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb - Adventure of the Noble Bachelor - Adventure of the Beryl Coronet - Adventure of the Copper Beeches - Case-B