End Of Its Rope

Today, death sentences in the U.S. are as rare as lightning strikes. Brandon Garrett shows us the reasons why, and explains what the failed death penalty experiment teaches about the effect of inept lawyering, overzealous prosecution, race discrimination, wrongful convictions, and excessive punishments throughout the criminal justice system.

"Jan Redford is a bad–ass. She is also a born storyteller." —John Vaillant, author of The Tiger In this funny and gritty debut memoir, praised by Outside, Sierra, Alpinist, and more, Jan Redford grows from a reckless rock climber to a mother who fights to win back her future. As a teenager, she sets her sights on the improbable dream of climbing mountains. By age twenty, she’s a climber with a magnetic attraction to misadventures and the wrong men. Redford finally finds the love of her life, an affable Rockies climber. When he is killed in an avalanche in Alaska, a grieving Redford finds comfort in the arms of another extreme alpinist. Before long, they are married, with a baby on the way. While her husband works as a logger, Redford tackles the traditional role of wife and mother. But soon, she pursues her own dream, one that pits her against her husband. End of the Rope is Redford's telling of heart–stopping adventures, from being rescued off El Capitan to leading a group of bumbling cadets across a glacier. It is her laughter–filled memoir of friendships with women in that masculine world. Most moving, this is the story of her struggle to make her own way in the mountains and in life. To lead, not follow.

From New York Times bestselling author Alex Tresniowski comes a “compelling” (The Guardian) and “riveting” (The New York Times Book Review) true-crime thriller recounting the 1910 murder of ten-year-old Marie Smith, the dawn of modern criminal detection, and the launch of the NAACP. In the tranquil seaside town of Asbury Park, New Jersey, ten-year-old schoolgirl Marie Smith is brutally murdered. Small town officials, unable to find the culprit, call upon the young manager of a New York detective agency for help. It is the detective’s first murder case, and now, the specifics of the investigation and daring sting operation that caught the killer is captured in all its rich detail for the first time. Occurring exactly halfway between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the formal beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in 1954, the brutal murder and its highly-covered investigation sits at the historic intersection of sweeping national forces—religious extremism, class struggle, the infancy of criminal forensics, and America’s Jim Crow racial violence. History and true crime collide in this “compelling and timely” (Vanity Fair) murder mystery featuring characters as complex and colorful as those found in the best psychological thrillers—the unconventional truth-seeking detective Ray Schindler; the sinister pedophile Frank Heidemann; the ambitious Asbury Park Sheriff Clarence Hetrick; the mysterious “sting artist,” Carl Neumeister; the indomitable crusader Ida Wells; and the victim, Marie Smith, who represented all the innocent and vulnerable children living in turn-of-the-century America. “Brisk and cinematic” (The Wall Street Journal), The Rope is an important piece of history that gives a voice to the voiceless and resurrects a long-forgotten true crime story that speaks to the very divisions tearing at the nation’s fabric today.

From the best-selling author of Republic of Fear, here is a gritty and unflinching novel about Iraqi failure in the wake of the 2003 American invasion, as seen through the eyes of a Shi‘ite militiaman whose participation in the execution of Saddam Hussein changes his life in ways he could never have anticipated. When the nameless narrator stumbles upon a corpse on April 10, 2003, the day of the fall of Saddam Hussein, he finds himself swept up in the tumultuous politics of the American occupation and is taken on a journey that concludes with the discovery of what happened to his father, who disappeared into the Tyrant’s gulag in 1991. When he was a child, his questions about his father were ignored by his mother and his uncle, in whose house he was raised. Older now, he is fighting in his uncle’s Army of the Awaited One, which is leading an insurrection against the Occupier. He slowly begins to piece together clues about his father’s fate, which turns out to be intertwined with that of the mysterious corpse. But not until the last hour before the Tyrant’s execution is the narrator given the final piece of the puzzle—from Saddam Hussein himself. The Rope is both a powerful examination of the birth of sectarian politics out of a legacy of betrayal, victimhood, secrecy, and loss, and an enduring story about the haste with which identity is cobbled together and then undone. Told with fearless honesty and searing intensity, The Rope will haunt its readers long after they finish the final page.