Great news! Kent State University Press books have won two 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY).
Congratulations to George R. Dekle Sr. for winning the Silver Award for Six Capsules: The Gilded Age Murder of Helen Potts in the US Northeast Best Regional Non-Fiction category and Jason Prufer who won the Gold Award for Small Town, Big Music: The Outsized […]
Upon receiving a telegram that reads, “First National Bank robbed, please come, or send at once” from Thomas Locke in Somerset, Michigan, Pinkerton sets off to investigate the crime. After journeying to the quaint town in a blizzard, the detective learns that $65,000 of treasury bonds, notes, and cash had disappeared from the bank’s vault overnight. Only one man knew the combination: the bank’s cashier, Mr. Norton. When Pinkerton’s subsequent examination of the crime scene reveals no signs of forced entry, it starts to look like Mr. Norton committed the crime.
Captain J. N. Sumner from Springfield, Massachusetts, hires Pinkerton to help solve a crime involving his sisters and the deed to a family farm. His younger sister Annie falls under the charms of a married man, Mr. Pattmore, who promises to marry Annie once his wife and her brother are out of the way. Captain Sumner possesses an opal ring with a stone that appears to foretell events. After suddenly falling violently ill, he becomes convinced his sister is trying to poison him to get his fortune and, more importantly, his ring.
Pinkerton travels to Atkinson, Mississippi, to investigate the murder of bank teller George Gordon and the theft of more than $130,000 in the City Bank of Atkinson. Atkinson appears at first to be no more than a quiet town of shopkeepers, laborers, and businessmen. But dark secrets lurk beneath the town’s Southern facade, and Pinkerton wastes no time in discovering them. Traveling under the guise of a cotton speculator, Pinkerton makes inquiries into the crime without drawing suspicion.
Ever wonder what makes a femme fatale? Find that out and more in Crime Reads’ extended excerpt from The Beauty Defense: Femmes Fatales on Trial by Laura James.
“Classical literature is filled with infectious damsels and dead heroes. ‘The betrayal of a king or hero by his mistress is, in short, a story both old and popular,’ […]
Bigamy & Bloodshed is one of 7 true-crime books newly recommended by NYT critic Marilyn Stasio for your “escapist” reading enjoyment!
“What’s worse, murder or immorality? To American sensibilities in the 1880s, immorality was apparently the greater evil. Or so it seems from Larry E. Wood’s entertaining Bigamy & Bloodshed: The Scandal of Emma Molloy and the […]
In the summer of 1885, ex-convict George Graham bigamously married Cora Lee, foster daughter of nationally known temperance revivalist Emma Molloy, and the three took up residence together on the Molloy farm near Springfield, Missouri. When the body of Graham’s first wife, Sarah, was found at the bottom of an abandoned well on the farm early the next year, Graham was charged with murder, and Cora and Emma were implicated as accessories. As Larry E. Wood notes, this sensational story made headlines across the country and threatened Mrs. Molloy’s career as a prominent evangelist and temperance revivalist.
At first glance, the 1932 Easter morning murder of Salvatore “Sam” Antonio had all the trademarks of a gang-related murder. Shot five times, stabbed a dozen more, Antonio was left for dead. His body was rolled into a culvert south of Albany, New York. It was only by chance that the mortally wounded Antonio was discovered and brought to the hospital. He died in the emergency room without ever naming his assailant.
Kudos from Strand Magazine on Virginia McConnell’s latest book The Bell of Bedford Avenue: The Sensational Brooks-Burns Murder in Turn-of-the-Century New York.
“Ultimately, McConnell does a splendid job of re-creating early twentieth-century New York City and provides the reader with a compelling look at the lives of adolescents with a taste for mayhem and destruction. The […]
Kirkus Reviews The Insanity Defense and the Mad Murderess of Shaker Heights Examining the Trial of Mariann Colby by William L. Tabac
“Did Colby get away with murder? You be the judge. Recommended.”
Read the review
