Invisible Darkness

Perfect for fans of Making a Murderer and The People v. O. J. Simpson, Invisible Darkness is the story of one of the more bizarre cases in recent memory—killings so sensational that they prompted the Canadian government, in the interests of justice, to silence its national press and to lock foreign journalists out of the courts. To all appearances, Paul and Karla Bernardo had a fairytale marriage: beautiful working-class girl weds bright upper-middle-class guy and they buy a fashionable dream house in the suburbs. But, bored with his straight, prestigious accounting job, Paul soon went freelance as an international smuggler. He also revealed his boredom with conventional sex—enough so that, one Christmas Eve, he persuaded his wife to drug her own sister and engage in a menage a trois, during which the sister died (a bungling coroner ruled her death accidental). The couple then upped the ante, kidnapping and imprisoning several high school girls for sexual marathons, which they videotaped before savagely murdering their captives. When the girls’ bodies were found, the police were stymied (although Paul had been accused of rape and given a DNA test that vanished for two years and only recently was linked to some fifty sexual-assault cases) until Karla tried to have her husband arrested for wife beating. During questioning, she confessed to the crimes and is now serving two concurrent twelve-year sentences for manslaughter in exchange for testifying against her husband, who was jailed for life.

2014 NEW TRADE PAPERBACK EDITION - REVISED NEW LAST CHAPTER ENTITLED "ENDGAMES" "'Invisible Darkness' is a masterfully written, forensically researched, minutely detailed work of true crime. As time goes by, it should be viewed as a classic of the genre." George Elliott Clarke, Governor General Award winning poet and professor of Enblish at the University of Toronto. Paul and Karla were the perfect picture of love and youth - and they were the essence of pure evil! Invisible Darkness is not only a must read for anyone interested in law and disorder, crime and punishment: a riveting page-turner, it is the tragic story of love gone mad. Together, the Ken-and-Barbie killers kidnapped, raped and murdered three teenage schoolgirls, beginning with Karla's own sister. Expertly drawn, the book rises far above the average true crime tale, chronicling the couple's descent from love and marriage to rape and murder. It relies on voluminous research, police notebooks, medical and psychiatric records, inaccessible court documents and in-depth interviews. The author details the unbelievable series of coincidences and police and forensic lab blunders that allowed Paul and Karla to elude detection for six years. If only Bernardo's DNA had been tested when he was first questioned as a suspect in a series of brutal rapes committed in and around the Toronto suburb where he then lived, he would have been caught before he had a chance to move to a small town minutes away from Niagara Falls and marry Karla Homolka. Together they looked to be the embodiment of the American dream: Young, well to do beautiful and in love. But the front door of their quaint pink Cape Cod -style house on the shore of Lake Ontario was a Gate to Hell. It was there they drugged and raped a half-dozen teenage girls while meticulously making videotaped records of the attacks. Everything was documented including their storybook wedding; the horse and buggy ride through picturesque Niagara-on-the-Lake to their reception and sit-down dinner for a 100 at the posh Queen's Landing Hotel as well as virtually everything they did behind their closed door. In the case of 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy they not only kidnapped, tortured and raped her, they killed and dismembered her in the basement, encased the body parts in homemade cement castings and dumped them in a local reservoir. In one of those unholy coincidences, as they exchanged vows the police were dragging the lake. A year later they kidnapped Kristen French in broad daylight while she walked home from school on Easter weekend . Before they went to Karla's parents for Sunday dinner, Karla decided that Kristen had to die. Later, they dumped her naked body on the side road next to the cemetery where Leslie was buried. The storybook wedding turned into a nightmare. Finally, the Toronto police matched Bernardo's DNA to three rape victim's in Toronto. Bernardo is now rotting away in a maximum-security prison whereas Karla has remarried and has three small children. It has to read to be believed. WHAT THE REVIEWERS SAID ABOUT INVISIBLE DARKNESS: "By far the most intelligent and subversive of the Bernardo triptych." Lynn Crosbie "Williams has performed a remarkable, if unconventional, feat in the annals of true crime" Judge Lynn King "I found Invisible Darkness a superior example of a dying breed - the straight, un-hyped, literate work of true-crime." Jack Olsen, Edgar-Award winning author of SON and DOC "You may think you've heard enough but you haven't heard the half of it. It's a must read Based on court documents....as well as countless interviews with police, lawyers, psychiatrists and friends of Paul and Karla, it is well-researched and thought-provoking." Bart Johnson "This book lets it all hang out....You can't help but be drawn in by this tale of sex, death, lies and videotape...." Helen Dolik

They were two beautiful, wholesome-looking young kids, Paul working for a major accounting firm and Karla assisting at an animal health center. They were deeply in love. They were getting married in an exotic setting. They had so much in common. And indeed they did. They both liked nothing better than to kidnap their victims, assault them and then murder them. Who knew that even on their wedding day they had just killed another young girl and disposed of her body? Certainly not the police, who had been hiding the fact that a whole series of rapes had been taking place in the neighborhood in order not to alarm the local community. When they eventually came clean about what had been happening, they published an artist s impression of the Scarborough Rapist that looked exactly like Paul - they were even told repeatedly that it looked exactly like Paul - but it would take them years, and several subsequent deaths, before they took these allegations seriously. In contrast, the authorities were very quick to prosecute the author of this book, and of its sequel, Karla, charging Stephen Williams with 114 trumped-up offenses for having the temerity to point out how grossly incompetent they had been, in a nine year persecution that led to his receiving a US Human Rights award normally only bestowed on writers working under dictatorships. And yet all this happened in Canada.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER USA TODAY BESTSELLER NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER THE WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER Recommended by Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple, NPR, Slate, and Oprah Magazine #1 Library Reads Pick—October 2020 #1 Indie Next Pick—October 2020 BOOK OF THE YEAR (2020) FINALIST—Book of The Month Club A “Best Of” Book From: Oprah Mag * CNN * Amazon * Amazon Editors * NPR * Goodreads * Bustle * PopSugar * BuzzFeed * Barnes & Noble * Kirkus Reviews * Lambda Literary * Nerdette * The Nerd Daily * Polygon * Library Reads * io9 * Smart Bitches Trashy Books * LiteraryHub * Medium * BookBub * The Mary Sue * Chicago Tribune * NY Daily News * SyFy Wire * Powells.com * Bookish * Book Riot * Library Reads Voter Favorite * In the vein of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Life After Life, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is New York Times bestselling author V. E. Schwab’s genre-defying tour de force. A Life No One Will Remember. A Story You Will Never Forget. France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever—and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world. But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name. Also by V. E. Schwab Shades of Magic A Darker Shade of Magic A Gathering of Shadows A Conjuring of Light Villains Vicious Vengeful At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Invisible Darkness offers a striking interpretation of the tortured lives of the two major novelists of the Harlem Renaissance: Jean Toomer, author of Cane (1923), and Nella Larsen, author of Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Charles R. Larson examines the common belief that both writers "disappeared" after the Harlem Renaissance and died in obscurity; he dispels the misconception that they vanished into the white world and lived unproductive and unrewarding lives. In clear, jargon-free language, Larson demonstrates the opposing views that both writers had about their work v.

Humanity's ongoing quest to unlock the secrets of dark matter and dark energy Heart of Darkness describes the incredible saga of humankind's quest to unravel the deepest secrets of the universe. Over the past forty years, scientists have learned that two little-understood components—dark matter and dark energy—comprise most of the known cosmos, explain the growth of all cosmic structure, and hold the key to the universe's fate. The story of how evidence for the so-called "Lambda-Cold Dark Matter" model of cosmology has been gathered by generations of scientists throughout the world is told here by one of the pioneers of the field, Jeremiah Ostriker, and his coauthor Simon Mitton. From humankind's early attempts to comprehend Earth's place in the solar system, to astronomers' exploration of the Milky Way galaxy and the realm of the nebulae beyond, to the detection of the primordial fluctuations of energy from which all subsequent structure developed, this book explains the physics and the history of how the current model of our universe arose and has passed every test hurled at it by the skeptics. Throughout this rich story, an essential theme is emphasized: how three aspects of rational inquiry—the application of direct measurement and observation, the introduction of mathematical modeling, and the requirement that hypotheses should be testable and verifiable—guide scientific progress and underpin our modern cosmological paradigm. This monumental puzzle is far from complete, however, as scientists confront the mysteries of the ultimate causes of cosmic structure formation and the real nature and origin of dark matter and dark energy.

"People want me in max so my life will be hard but it really isn't. There are absolutely no responsibilities here. Everything is provided. We can spend the day sleeping, sun-tanning or doing whatever we want all day every day." --Karla Homolka in a letter to author Stephen Williams "Well, they say 'Never say never' and they're right," Karla wrote in her startling first letter to Stephen Williams. "Never in a million years did I think I would ever write a letter to someone from the media, let alone you who has condemned me so harshly." Thus began one of the most controversial correspondences in Canadian history. Karla picks up where Williams's first book on the case, Invisible Darkness, left her, painting her nails in her cell in solitary confinement in the gothic tower of Kingston's Prison for Women. After testifying against her ex-husband in 1995, Karla's life in prison was soon going to take a very different, dramatic turn. With a thriller's pace, Karla: A Pact with the Devil charts the inner life of the world's most notorious female prisoner. In Karla, Williams lets Karla and the other key players speak for themselves. And what they have to say will surprise, horrify and enlighten.

A cloth bag containing eight copies of the title, that may also include a folder.