Crime Reader

More than two dozen gripping tales of murder, kidnapping, robbery, and much more from the Reader’s Digest archives. For more than 90 years, Reader’s Digest has been telling the amazing true stories of real-life thrillers, unsolved mysteries, and tales of cold-blooded murder—and of the regular folks caught up in these harrowing situations. Now we’ve pulled together a collection of more than two dozen of these gripping narratives, including: A woman’s account of being taken hostage by a convenience store robber True crime writer Ann Rule’s encounter with Ted Bundy before she knew he was a killer The case of the man who rigged the lottery The inside story of how Al Capone was finally arrested for tax evasion The unlikely tale of a widower father who enlisted his teenage son and daughter to help rob banks These modern classics are for crime aficionados and novices alike, tantalizing enough to hold your attention yet brisk enough to be your best beach or book club read. Enjoy the ride with an airplane bomber, an identity thief, and a Bonnie-and-Clyde team living on borrowed time. (Enjoy even more their comeuppance.)

?Basia Spalek has compiled an excellent reader about a much researched and highly sensitive subject. Crucially, she contextualises ethnicity and crime within broadly defined social and intellectual contexts, avoiding the limitation of all too frequently repeated research based solely on statistical measures and policy evaluations.? Simon Holdaway, Professor of Criminology and Sociology, Sheffield University Issues in relation to race and ethnicity have generated substantial and ever-growing interest from, and within, a multitude of academic, research and policy contexts. This book brings together important material in race and ethnic studies and provides different ways of thinking about race and ethnicity in relation to crime and the criminal justice system. Ethnicity and Crime: A Reader consists of a collection of works that capture the main themes that arise from within this vast area of work. It is divided into five sections: ?Race and crime?, racial discrimination and criminal justice The racialisation of crime: Social, political and cultural contexts Race, ethnicity and victimisation Self and discipline reflexivity: Ethnic identities and crime Ethnic identities, institutional reflexivity and crime Each section contains recurring and overlapping themes and includes many different ways of thinking about race and ethnicity in relation to crime. It spans theoretical approaches that might be labelled as positivist, critical race analyses, left realist approaches, feminist, as well as post-modern perspectives. This is the first title in the new series Readings in Criminology and Criminal Justice and follows the series format of thematic sections, together with an editor's introduction to the complete volume and an introduction to each section.

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In the same vein as the first book in the series, True Crime, Volume 2, includes more than two dozen gripping tales of murder, kidnapping, robbery, and much more from the Reader’s Digest archives. For more than 90 years, Reader’s Digest has been telling the amazing true stories of real-life thrillers, unsolved mysteries, and tales of cold-blooded murder—and of the regular folks caught up in these harrowing situations. Now we’ve pulled together a collection of more than two dozen of these gripping narratives, including: The tale of the bank heist pulled off by a gang of old geezers The bizarre story of Robert Durst, a real-estate heir accused of three grisly murders The case of the 1849 murder at Harvard involving a professor The harrowing account of parents who saved their daughter from a serial killer The history of the original Ponzi scheme The stories in True Crime, Volume 2, are for crime aficionados and novices alike, tantalizing enough to hold your attention yet brisk enough to be your best beach or book club read. Enjoy the ride with a carjacker, a wife killer, and modern-day pirates living on borrowed time. (Enjoy even more how they get their just deserts.)

This engaging and timely collection gathers together for the first time key and classic readings in the ever-expanding area of crime and media. Comprizing a carefully distilled selection of the most important contributions to the field, Crime and Media: A Reader tackles a wide range of issues including: understanding media; researching media; crime, newsworthiness and news; crime, entertainment and creativity; effects, influence and moral panic; and cybercrime, surveillance and risk. Specially devized introductory and linking sections contextualize each reading and evaluate its contribution to the field, both individually and in relation to competing approaches and debates. This book provides a single source around which criminology, media and cultural studies modules can be structured, an invaluable revision and consultation guide for students, and an extremely useful resource for scholars writing and researching across a wide range of relevant fields. Accessible yet challenging, and packed with additional pedagogical devices, Crime and Media: A Reader will be an invaluable resource for students and academics studying crime, media, culture, surveillance and control.

From Anthony Award-winning writer Alex Segura comes Secret Identity, a rollicking literary mystery set in the world of comic books. It’s 1975 and the comic book industry is struggling, but Carmen Valdez doesn’t care. She’s an assistant at Triumph Comics, which doesn’t have the creative zeal of Marvel nor the buttoned-up efficiency of DC, but it doesn’t matter. Carmen is tantalizingly close to fulfilling her dream of writing a superhero book. That dream is nearly a reality when one of the Triumph writers enlists her help to create a new character, which they call “The Lethal Lynx,” Triumph's first female hero. But her colleague is acting strangely and asking to keep her involvement a secret. And then he’s found dead, with all of their scripts turned into the publisher without her name. Carmen is desperate to piece together what happened to him, to hang on to her piece of the Lynx, which turns out to be a runaway hit. But that’s complicated by a surprise visitor from her home in Miami, a tenacious cop who is piecing everything together too quickly for Carmen, and the tangled web of secrets and resentments among the passionate eccentrics who write comics for a living. Alex Segura uses his expertise as a comics creator as well as his unabashed love of noir fiction to create a truly one-of-a-kind novel--hard-edged and bright-eyed, gritty and dangerous, and utterly absorbing.

National Book Award Finalist • Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities--with the help of amphetamines, arsenic, and radioisotopes. Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset. As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.

With this publication the editors offer the first comprehensive text designed to assist, facilitate and guide interested researchers in how to engage in comparative criminological/criminal justice research. The editors have collected a series of nine articles which serve to illustrate examples to facilitate the reader in how to conduct such research. Each of the articles is accompanied with a series of questions and useful web-links to further assist the reader and/or student.