My Brother The Killer

In this remarkable memoir, a harrowing true story of family, violence, guilt and atonement, a journalist reflects on his own journey to come to terms with his brother’s terrible crimes—and to find justice for the young girl he killed. In the gritty docklands of south-east England, Alix Sharkey and his younger siblings grew up in awe of their charismatic yet violent father, a vicious alcoholic. Yet it was Alix’s kid brother Stuart—button-cute and fearless—who defended his siblings at home, at school and on the streets. Their fraternal bond was deep and powerful until Alix moved away from their rough hometown. Stuart remained—and slid into a furtive life of sexual violence against teenage girls, punctuated by prison time. Having started out inseparable, their paths diverged radically. Alix became a journalist, cosmopolitan and bilingual, working for upmarket media in London, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. Today, Stuart remains incarcerated in Britain’s most notorious high security prison, awaiting imminent parole. Twenty years ago, he was convicted of the kidnap and murder of his 15-year old niece Danielle, daughter of his wife’s brother. Despite his conviction, a lost appeal, and repeated pleas by her parents, Stuart has steadfastly refused to reveal the location of his victim’s remains, condemning the girl’s parents to two decades of unresolved grief. How do two brothers choose such different paths? Could anything have prevented Stuart from becoming a killer? What factors contributed to his fall? What does Alix owe to Stuart—the fiercely protective kid brother—and what does he owe to the truth? With the clock ticking, can he convince Stuart to do the right thing and give the victim’s family the closure and peace they’ve sought for so long? Or will Stuart walk free, unrepentant and defiant? In this piercing and unforgettable memoir, laced with bleak irony and heartrending honesty, Alix tackles these questions and confronts a harsh reality: that the younger brother he once adored not only deceived their own family for decades, but destroyed another with his truly heinous crime.

‘A hugely impressive achievement.’ – Hadley Freeman, author of House of Glass

Oliver Barnett is found murdered in his office. The investigation into his death reveals a man that his younger brother, Simon, does not recognize a callous blackmailer. But was this the reason for his brutal demise? Simon sets out to clear his brother's name, and to demonstrate the innocence of the woman he once loved. Agatha Christie chose His Brother's Killer as winner of the Collins' Crime Club Detective Novel Competition in 1961. A hugely underrated and unjustly neglected writer, D.M. Devine (1920-80) wrote 13 crime fiction novels in all. All of his books are well written and plotted, qualities prized by the Queen of Crime herself, who remained a fan of Devine's throughout his writing career."

Malachi Jackson has a choice. He can go to college and get a good education, or he can join the neighborhood gang. If he joins the gang, he can make some quick money, but there are consequences for joining a gang. He ends up seeing his life come to full term through the eyes of a mortician who gets to bury a lot of the neighborhood gang members and those caught up in the senseless killings that result from being in a gang. Will Malachi be his brothers keeper or his brothers killer? The ending will shock you!

An “intimate” account of a double murder by a man once suspected as being the Golden State Killer (O, the Oprah Magazine,“20 Best True Crime Books”). In 1978, two tortured corpses—hooded, bound, and weighted down with engine parts—were found in the sea off Guatemala. Junior doctor Chris Farmer and his girlfriend, Peta Frampton, were still clinging to life when they were thrown from the yacht they’d been crewing. Here is the gripping account of how Chris’s family worked alongside police, the FBI, and Interpol to gather evidence against the boat’s Californian skipper, Silas Duane Boston. Almost four decades later, in 2015, Chris’s sister, Penny, used Facebook to track down Boston. Following the detailed, haunting testimony of his own two sons—who also implicated their father in a string of other killings—Boston was finally arrested and charged with two counts of maritime murder. A story of homicide on the high seas, Dead in the Water is also a tale of a family’s fortitude and diligence in tracking down a monster. “A real-life page turner more intriguing than anything on Netflix.”—Mail on Sunday “A heartbreaking tale of familial love and a sister’s hunt for justice. There are numerous twists and turns which would be disturbing if they were woven between the pages of a novel let alone as part of a true story.”—The Tattooed Book

“An intense snapshot of the chain reaction caused by pulling a trigger.” —Booklist (starred review) “Astonishing.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A tour de force.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A Newbery Honor Book A Coretta Scott King Honor Book A Printz Honor Book A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner for Young Adult Literature Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Winner of the Walter Dean Myers Award An Edgar Award Winner for Best Young Adult Fiction Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner An Entertainment Weekly Best YA Book of 2017 A Vulture Best YA Book of 2017 A Buzzfeed Best YA Book of 2017 An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds’s electrifying novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds—the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother. A cannon. A strap. A piece. A biscuit. A burner. A heater. A chopper. A gat. A hammer A tool for RULE Or, you can call it a gun. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he’s after. Or does he? As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buck’s in the elevator? Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. Will doesn’t know her, but she knew him. Knew. When they were eight. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES. And so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A story that might never know an END…if Will gets off that elevator. Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds.

In the vein of The Boondock Saints and Chinatown comes this true crime memoir of brotherly love and vengeance In 2003, Christopher Walsh was found stuffed in a trash barrel in a storage locker in Van Nuys, California. After the dilatory murder investigation took seven months to file charges, and years to go to trial, Dennis Walsh knew it was up to him to keep his little brother's murder from becoming a cold case. The only son of a large Irish-American family to stay on the straight and narrow, Dennis found his family's dubious background paired with his law degree placed him in the unique position to finish the job the cops couldn't. Fencing with the police and the DA's office, Dennis spent years slinking between his life as a stand-up lawyer and hitting the streets to try and convince the dopers, thieves, prostitutes, porn stars, and jail birds that populated Christopher's world to come forward and cooperate with the police. Yet he walked a fine line with his harsh tactics; prosecutors continuously told him he was jeopardizing not only the case, but his life. Staying on the right side of the law to hunt down these murderers put every part of Dennis to the test and it wasn't long before the brother who went clean knew he'd have to get his hands dirty. But 100 arrests later, the murderers are in jail for life. With the gravity of a Scorsese film, this classic yet gritty tale transcends the true crime genre. Nobody Walks is the harrowing story of a family, brothers, and the true meaning of justice.

When seventeen-year-old Lane becomes involved in the search for a serial killer active in the Washington, D.C. area, she worries that her life-long fascination with such murderers has a very real and terrible cause.