Report For Murder Common Murder

The first novel in the Lindsay Gordon series – a gripping and thrilling page-turner, starring a self-proclaimed ‘cynical socialist lesbian feminist journalist’ – from the number one bestseller Val McDermid.

In one volume, the first two mysteries featuring a journalist who investigates murder, from the Diamond Dagger winner known as “Britain’s Queen of Crime” (The Times). From the Edgar Award-nominated author of the DCI Karen Pirie series, this two-in-one volume includes: Report for Murder Self-proclaimed cynical socialist-lesbian-feminist and freelance journalist Lindsay Gordon is strapped for cash. Why else would she agree to cover a fund-raising gala at a girls’ public school? But when the star attraction is found garroted with her own cello string moments before she is due on stage, Lindsay finds herself investigating a vicious murder. “A timeless mystery, well-plotted with crisp dialogue and solid characterization.”―Orlando Sun-Sentinel Common Murder When her former lover is accused of murder—at a women’s peace protest, no less—Lindsay must bring all of her expertise as an investigative reporter into play—and uncovers a truth even she can scarcely believe. “McDermid’s snappy, often comic prose keeps the story humming.”―Publishers Weekly

The second novel in the Lindsay Gordon series – a gripping psychological thriller – from No.1 bestseller Val McDermid. When her former lover is accused of murder in a women’s peace camp, Lindsay must bring all of her expertise as an investigative reporter into play.

THE MUST-READ MULTIMILLION BESTSELLING MYSTERY SERIES • Everyone is talking about A Good Girl's Guide to Murder! With shades of Serial and Making a Murderer this is the story about an investigation turned obsession, full of twists and turns and with an ending you'll never expect. Everyone in Fairview knows the story. Pretty and popular high school senior Andie Bell was murdered by her boyfriend, Sal Singh, who then killed himself. It was all anyone could talk about. And five years later, Pip sees how the tragedy still haunts her town. But she can't shake the feeling that there was more to what happened that day. She knew Sal when she was a child, and he was always so kind to her. How could he possibly have been a killer? Now a senior herself, Pip decides to reexamine the closed case for her final project, at first just to cast doubt on the original investigation. But soon she discovers a trail of dark secrets that might actually prove Sal innocent . . . and the line between past and present begins to blur. Someone in Fairview doesn't want Pip digging around for answers, and now her own life might be in danger. And don't miss the sequel, Good Girl, Bad Blood! "The perfect nail-biting mystery." —Natasha Preston, #1 New York Times bestselling author

New Orleans in the 1920s and 1930s was a deadly place. In 1925, the city’s homicide rate was six times that of New York City and twelve times that of Boston. Jeffrey S. Adler has explored every homicide recorded in New Orleans between 1925 and 1940—over two thousand in all—scouring police and autopsy reports, old interviews, and crumbling newspapers. More than simply quantifying these cases, Adler places them in larger contexts—legal, political, cultural, and demographic—and emerges with a tale of racism, urban violence, and vicious policing that has startling relevance for today. Murder in New Orleans shows that whites were convicted of homicide at far higher rates than blacks leading up to the mid-1920s. But by the end of the following decade, this pattern had reversed completely, despite an overall drop in municipal crime rates. The injustice of this sharp rise in arrests was compounded by increasingly brutal treatment of black subjects by the New Orleans police department. Adler explores other counterintuitive trends in violence, particularly how murder soared during the flush times of the Roaring Twenties, how it plummeted during the Great Depression, and how the vicious response to African American crime occurred even as such violence plunged in frequency—revealing that the city’s cycle of racial policing and punishment was connected less to actual patterns of wrongdoing than to the national enshrinement of Jim Crow. Rather than some hyperviolent outlier, this Louisiana city was a harbinger of the endemic racism at the center of today’s criminal justice state. Murder in New Orleans lays bare how decades-old crimes, and the racially motivated cruelty of the official response, have baleful resonance in the age of Black Lives Matter.

Murder by the Book? is a thorough - and thoroughly enjoyable - look at the blossoming genre of the feminist crime novel in Britain and the United States. Sally Munt asks why the form has proved so attractive as a vehicle for oppositional politics; whether the pleasures of detective fiction can be truly transgressive; and when exactly it was that the dyke detective appeared as the new super-hero for today. Along the way Munt poses some critical questions about the relations between fiction and activism, politics and representations, the writer and the reader. This will be an enticing book both for addicts of the genre and for teachers and their students.