"One September afternoon in 1999, teenagers Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan Lang are walking home from school when they discover a boy lying in a field, bloody and unconscious. Thanks to their intervention, the boy's life is saved. In the aftermath, all three siblings are irrevocably changed. Matthew, the oldest, becomes obsessed with tracking down the assailant, secretly searching the local town with the victim's brother. Zoe wanders the streets of Oxford,...

"Haven't we all wanted to pretend everything's perfectly fine? Jane Campbell avoids confrontation at all costs. Given the choice, she'll always let her husband, Leon--a bestselling thriller author--fight their battles. She'd prefer to focus on the good things in life: precious days with her two young children, a steady and loving marriage, their mischievously playful cat Bonita, and her fulfilling job as a creative writing teacher. In Jane's eyes,...

A provocative examination of the psychology behind recent mass killings in the United States argues that a socialized desensitization towards violence contributes to the events leading to such mass shootings as the Aurora theater incident.

"Urban violence is one of the most divisive and allegedly intractable issues of our time. But as Harvard scholar Thomas Abt shows in Bleeding Out, we actually possess all the tools necessary to stem violence in our cities. Coupling the latest social science with firsthand experience as a crime-fighter, Abt proposes a relentless focus on violence itself -- not drugs, gangs, or guns. Because violence is "sticky," clustering among small groups of people...

"Instead of presents this Christmas, a true crime podcaster is opening up a cold case... Madeline Martin has built a life for herself as the young owner of a thriving business, The Next Chapter Bookshop, despite her tragic childhood and now needing to care for her infirm father. When Harley Granger, a failed novelist turned true crime podcaster, drifts into her shop in the days before Christmas, he seems intent on digging up events that Madeline would...

"Norco '80 tells the story of how five heavily armed young men--led by an apocalyptic born-again Christian--attempted a bank robbery that turned into one of the most violent criminal events in U.S. history, forever changing the face of American law enforcement. Part action thriller and part courtroom drama, Norco '80 transports the reader back to the Southern California of the 1970s, an era of predatory evangelical gurus, doomsday predictions, megachurches,...

"Before the 1960s, the distinction between violent and nonviolent crime played hardly any role in the law. Since then, the number of crimes deemed violent has skyrocketed. David Alan Sklansky shows how shifting and inconsistent legal definitions of violence have fueled mass incarceration, protected abusive police, and undermined criminal justice"--

"From an award-winning Mother Jones editor comes the inside story of the decades-long search for identifiable profiles and warning signs of mass shooters, by way of the specialized teams of psychologists, cops, and ordinary citizens working to predict and prevent violence in America--a fearless, in-depth, and ultimately redemptive account of an epidemic that desperately needs solving"--

That night, Samantha Jones was doing what she always did: just trying to get by. Left to make her own way on the mean streets of East St. Louis, the pretty twenty-three-year-old single mother supported herself and her son as best she could by repo-ing cars. When she hooked her junker of a tow truck up to the BMW she'd been sent to haul in, the last thing she expected was to find a beaten, bloody man in the trunk--or to be catapulted into a terrifying...