In the Belly of the Beast
Letters From Prison
Written by Jack Henry Abbott

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 2, 1991
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-73237-2 (0-679-73237-3)

While writing The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer received a letter from Jack Henry Abbott, a convict, in which Abbott offered to educate him in the realities of life in a maximum security prison. This book organizes Abbott's classic letters to Mailer, which evoke his infernal vision of the prison nightmare.



"Astonishing...a work... Read more >

Tokyo Vice
An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan
Written by Jake Adelstein

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 5, 2010
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-47529-9 (0-307-47529-8)

From the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police press club: a unique, firsthand, revelatory look at Japanese culture from the underbelly up.

At nineteen, Jake Adelstein went to Japan in search of peace and tranquility. What he got was a life of crime... Read more >

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Written by John Berendt

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 28, 1999
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-75152-6 (0-679-75152-1)

Shots rang out in Savannah’s grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt’s sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative... Read more >

God of the Rodeo
The Quest for Redemption in Louisiana's Angola Prison
Written by Daniel Bergner

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: October 5, 1999
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-43553-8 (0-345-43553-2)

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

God of the Rodeo, by journalist Daniel Bergner, takes readers inside a world where no writer before has ventured so deeply–the life of a maximum-security state penitentiary. Bergner first traveled to Angola State Prison in Louisiana to cover the prison’s inmate rodeo, a... Read more >

Courtroom 302
A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse
Written by Steve Bogira

Format: Trade Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 14, 2006
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-75206-6 (0-679-75206-4)

Steve Bogira’s riveting book takes us into the heart of America’s criminal justice system. Courtroom 302 is the story of one year in one courtroom in Chicago’s Cook County Criminal Courthouse, the busiest felony courthouse in the country.

We see the system through the eyes of the men and women who... Read more >

Anatomy of Injustice
A Murder Case Gone Wrong
Written by Raymond Bonner

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 8, 2013
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-94854-0 (0-307-94854-4)

From Pulitzer Prize winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row.

In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded... Read more >

Anatomy of Injustice
A Murder Case Gone Wrong
Written by Raymond Bonner

Format: Hardcover, 320 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: February 21, 2012
Price: $26.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-70021-6 (0-307-70021-6)

From Pulitzer Prize–winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row.

In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black... Read more >

The Turnaround
How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic
Written by William Bratton and Peter Knobler

Format: Hardcover, 368 pages
Publisher: Random House
On Sale: January 20, 1998
Price: $28.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-45251-5 (0-679-45251-6)

When Bill Bratton was sworn in as New York City's police commissioner in 1994, he made what many considered a bold promise: The NYPD would fight crime in every borough...and win.  It seemed foolhardy; even everybody knows you can't win the war on crime.  But Bratton delivered.  In an extraordinary twenty-seven months, serious crime... Read more >

L.A. Noir
The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City
Written by John Buntin

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Broadway
On Sale: April 6, 2010
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-35208-8 (0-307-35208-0)

L.A. Noir tells the history of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s in America's dream city, beginning when the end of Prohibition left organized crime looking for a new way to exert influence and make a living. The Mob had to contend with downtown businesses, City Hall, and, above all, the LAPD... Read more >

The Central Park Five
The Untold Story Behind One of New York City's Most Infamous Crimes
Written by Sarah Burns

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 3, 2012
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-38798-1 (0-307-38798-4)

A riveting, in-depth account of one of New York City’s most notorious crimes.

On April 20, 1989, the body of a woman is discovered in Central Park, her skull so badly smashed that nearly 80 percent of her blood has spilled onto the ground. Within days, five black and Latino teenagers... Read more >

The Central Park Five
A Chronicle of a City Wilding
Written by Sarah Burns

Format: Hardcover, 256 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: May 17, 2011
Price: $25.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-26614-9 (0-307-26614-1)

A riveting, in-depth account of one of New York City’s most notorious crimes.

On April 20, 1989, the body of a woman is discovered in Central Park, her skull so badly smashed that nearly 80 percent of her blood has spilled onto the ground. Within days, five black and Latino teenagers... Read more >

All God's Children
The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence
Written by Fox Butterfield

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 8, 2008
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-28033-6 (0-307-28033-0)

A timely reissue of Fox Butterfield’s masterpiece, All God’s Children, a searing examination of the caustic cumulative effect of racism and violence over 5 generations of black Americans.

Willie Bosket is a brilliant, violent man who began his criminal career at age five; his slaying of two subway riders at fifteen... Read more >

A Saint on Death Row
How a Forgotten Child Became a Man and Changed a World
Written by Thomas Cahill

Format: Trade Paperback, 160 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: March 9, 2010
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2646-1 (0-7679-2646-3)

Bestselling author Thomas Cahill tells the absorbing, heartbreaking tale of the hard life and tragic death of Dominique Green—wrongly accused, then executed in Huntsville, Texas—and shines a light on our racist and deeply flawed criminal justice system.

Green, an extraordinary young man from the urban ghettos of Houston, was utterly failed by... Read more >

Mafia Inc.
The Long, Bloody Reign of Canada's Sicilian Clan
Written by Andre Cedilot and Andre Noel

Format: Hardcover, 544 pages
Publisher: Random House Canada
On Sale: October 18, 2011
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-36040-3 (0-307-36040-7)

The bestselling exposé about Canada’s most infamous mafia family is finally available in English, updated to include shocking events and revelations that followed its news-making publication in Québec.

Queens, New York, 1981. When Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato and two others are found dead in a vacant lot, police fail to solve their... Read more >

Newjack
Guarding Sing Sing
Written by Ted Conover

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 12, 2001
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-72662-0 (0-375-72662-4)

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction

Ted Conover, the intrepid author of Coyotes, about the world of illegal Mexican immigrants, spent a year as a prison guard at Sing Sing. Newjack, his account of that experience, is a milestone in American journalism: a book that casts... Read more >

Contempt of Court
The Turn-of-the-Century Lynching That Launched a Hundred Years of Federalism
Written by Mark Curriden and Leroy Phillips

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: February 20, 2001
Price: $17.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-72082-3 (0-385-72082-3)

In 1906, Ed Johnson was the innocnet black man found guilty of the brutal rape of Nevada Taylor, a white woman, and sentenced to die in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Two black lawyers, not even part of the original defense, appealed to the Supreme Court for a stay of execution, and the stay... Read more >

Murder In Memoriam

Written by Didier Daeninckx
Translated by Liz Heron

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Melville International Crime
On Sale: October 16, 2012
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-61219-146-1 (1-61219-146-0)

On the evening of October 17, 1961 twenty-thousand Algerians marched in Paris in defiance of and in protest against a curfew imposed by Maurice Papon, chief of the Paris Metropolitan Police. The protesters were met with ferocious and uninhibited violence. Eleven-thousand were arrested; more than one thousand injured; as many as... Read more >

Justice
Crimes, Trials, and Punishments
Written by Dominick Dunne

Format: Trade Paperback, 448 pages
Publisher: Broadway
On Sale: May 14, 2002
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-609-80963-1 (0-609-80963-6)

For more than two decades, Vanity Fair has published Dominick Dunne’s brilliant, revelatory chronicles of the most famous crimes, trials, and punishments of our time. Here, in one volume, are Dominick Dunne’s mesmerizing tales of justice denied and justice affirmed. Whether writing of Claus von Bülow’s romp through two trials; the... Read more >

Raskols
The Gangs of Papua New Guinea
Written by Stephen Dupont
Contribution by Ben Bohane

Format: Hardcover, 144 pages
Publisher: powerHouse Books
On Sale: October 9, 2012
Price: $30.00
ISBN: 978-1-57687-601-5 (1-57687-601-2)

Papua New Guinea: A land of striking beauty, mountain ranges, lush rainforests, and some of the most spectacular coastlines on earth. A land with over eight hundred unique tribes and languages. A land where crime has gotten so out of control, personal security services are the country’s largest growth industry.

Papua New... Read more >

The Hot House
Life Inside Leavenworth Prison
Written by Pete Earley

Format: Paperback, 464 pages
Publisher: Bantam
On Sale: February 1, 1993
Price: $7.99
ISBN: 978-0-553-56023-7 (0-553-56023-9)

The most dreaded facility in the prison system because of its fierce population, Leavenworth is governed by ruthless clans competing for dominance. Here Earley unabashedly explores the characters and forces at work in Leavenworth, nicknamed 'The Hot House' for its lack of proper ventilation, and, as a result, reveals the state... Read more >

Unruly Women
The Politics of Confinement & Resistance
Written by Karlene Faith

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
On Sale: July 26, 2011
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-60980-137-3 (1-60980-137-7)

Winner of the VanCity Book Prize, Unruly Women: The Politics of Confinement & Resistance is the seminal book about women’s imprisonment that helped spark examinations around the world into the special circumstances women face in prison, as well as the sex and gender crimes that get them there.
Most women who... Read more >

Discipline & Punish
The Birth of the Prison
Written by Michel Foucault

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 25, 1995
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-75255-4 (0-679-75255-2)

Using academic works and legal documents dating back to the early 1700s, Foucault constructs a history of punishment, beginning with the spectacle of corporal punishment and public execution and ending with the institution of the modern prison.  He argues that over the course of approximately eighty years (between the torture and execution... Read more >

The Book of Spies
An Anthology of Literary Espionage
Edited by Alan Furst
Introduction by Alan Furst

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: June 8, 2004
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-75959-8 (0-375-75959-X)

An anthology of the world’s best literary espionage, selected by a contemporary master of the genre, Alan Furst.

Here is an extraordinary collection of work from some of the finest novelists of the twentieth century. Inspired by the politics of tyranny or war, each of these writers chose the base elements of... Read more >

The Mafia
History and Legend
Written by Marco Gasparini
Translated by Brian Eskenazi

Format: Hardcover, 208 pages
Publisher: Flammarion
On Sale: October 11, 2011
Price: $45.00
ISBN: 978-2-08-030150-5 (2-08-030150-0)

An illustrated history of the Mafia, focusing on this highly developed criminal organization both as a cult subject and an important social phenomenon. Movie classics like The Godfather epitomize our fascination with the underworld of the Mafia, conjuring images of cigar-smoking dons and shoot-outs in pizzerias. But behind the romantic myths... Read more >

In Defense of Women
Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate
Written by Nancy Gertner

Format: Trade Paperback, 264 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: April 17, 2012
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1148-5 (0-8070-1148-7)

From a “Human Rights Hero,” a memoir of her illustrious career litigating groundbreaking cases

In the boys’ club climate of 1975, Nancy Gertner launched her career fighting a murder charge on behalf of antiwar activist Susan Saxe, one of the few women to ever make the FBI’s Most Wanted List. What... Read more >