Murder Without Motive

A police procedural, a meditation on suffering and an exploration into the human condition.

A handful of characters, brought together when an unidentifiable tramp is shot at dusk on a street corner, form the nucleus of a web of blackmail and deceit.

A complex, poignant exploration of racial attitudes in America, as illumined by the case of Edmund Perry. Perry, a seventeen-year-old black honors student from Harlem, was fatally shot by a young white plainclothes policeman in 1985 in an alleged mugging attempt. Perry had recently graduated from Philips Exeter Academy and was to attend Stanford University that fall. The shooting and the subsequent case, in which Edmund's elder brother Jonah, an undergraduate at Cornell University, was accused, tried, and found not guilty, drew national headlines and was the subject of heated debate among black and white communities alike. Using interviews with Perry's parents, friends, and former teachers in Harlem and at Exeter, journalist Robert Sam Anson has written a compelling account of a boy caught between two worlds and a profound portrait of the state of race in America.

The body of a woman is discovered lying in a ditch on the outskirts of Ormskirk. Enquiries reveal a link with her ex husband. The absence of sexual assault or robbery seems to indicate a domestic dispute which has escalated out of control. A second murder takes place and chief detective inspector Sam Deakin now has to decide whether this is a copycat killing or whether a serial killer is on the loose. Sam and his sergeant Harry Jones are faced with a race against time to catch a killer who seems able to kill and disappear without trace or motive.

The true story of the night innocence and evil crossed paths. On a summer night in 2000, Amy Shute and Jason Burgeson were set upon by five predatory youths outside a Providence, Rhode Island, club. It began as a twisted joyride for the young kidnappers. It ended in cold-blooded murder-and a town's relentless fight for justice.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Don’t miss the excerpt of Jonathan Kellerman’s The Murderer’s Daughter in the back of the book! Jonathan Kellerman writes razor-sharp novels that cut to the quick. Now comes Motive, which pits psychologist Alex Delaware and homicide cop Milo Sturgis against a vicious criminal mind—the kind only Kellerman can bring to chilling life. Even having hundreds of closed cases to his credit can’t keep LAPD police lieutenant Milo Sturgis from agonizing over the crimes that don’t get solved—and the victims who go without justice. Victims like Katherine Hennepin, a young woman strangled and stabbed in her home. A single suspect with a solid alibi leads to a dead end—one even Alex Delaware’s expert insight can’t explain. The only thing to do is move on to the next murder case—because there’s always a next one. This time the victim is Ursula Corey: a successful, attractive divorcée who’s been gunned down—not a robbery but an execution, a crime that smacks of simple, savage revenge. And along with that theoretical motive come two strong contenders for the role of perp: the dead woman’s business partner/ex-husband and her divorce lawyer/secret lover. But just as Alex and Milo think they’re zeroing in on the most likely suspect, a bizarre new clue stirs up eerie echoes of the unsolved Hennepin murder. And the discovery of yet another crime scene bearing the same taunting signature raises the specter of a serial killer on a mission, whose twisted method is exceeded only by his manipulative and cunning madness. Praise for Motive “Jonathan Kellerman has mastered the art of lean, evocative prose [in] a series that grows stronger with each volume.”—New York Journal of Books “One of [Kellerman’s] best works to date . . . Motive is wonderfully made, equally well-driven by plot and character, and shouldn’t be missed.”—Bookreporter “[Motive] will even keep genre veterans guessing. . . . The twists are both shocking and logical, and the byplay between the leads entertaining.”—Publishers Weekly Praise for Jonathan Kellerman “Jonathan Kellerman’s psychology skills and dark imagination are a potent literary mix.”—Los Angeles Times “A master of the psychological thriller.”—People “The combination of Alex Delaware [and] Detective Milo Sturgis . . . makes for the most original whodunit duo since Watson and Holmes.”—Forbes

Two pieces of news sent Tony West to France to investigate them in spite of a lifelong distaste for tiresome and unpleasant matters. One was the fact that his brother Peter had been murdered in Paris. The other was his nomination as sole heir to the large estate, though he had scarcely seen his brother for years. A beautiful artist, former friend of Peter, the tracing of some missing money left behind by the Germans during the Occupation, and the discovery of the murderer led Tony West down some strange and fascinating paths that changed his whole life.

Here is an absorbing story of the mysterious life and death of an expatriate Englishman, plus a very well done backdrop picturing Paris and a French village.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote—also available are Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Voices, Other Rooms (in one volume), Portraits and Observations, and The Complete Stories Truman Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood, created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965. The intensively researched, atmospheric narrative of the lives of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and of the two men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who brutally killed them on the night of November 15, 1959, is the seminal work of the “new journalism.” Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. “I thought he was a very nice gentleman,” he says of Herb Clutter. “Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers’ flight, Capote’s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events.