A retired judge has been found brutally murdered on the outskirts of Las Vegas, complete with a macabre yet masterfully intricate tattoo on his face . . . the third seemingly random victim of the mysterious kidnapper dubbed by law enforcement as the “Tattoo Man.” The judge wasn’t the first person to have been abducted, drugged, and permanently altered with tattoos and body modification . . . but he was the first to wind up dead. At the same time, several other deceased are turning up all over Sin City with their body art mercilessly removed—and the timing would seem to suggest to those in authority that all of these crimes are somehow related. But Las Vegas’s top crime scene investigators—Catherine Willows, Ray Langston, Nick Stokes, Sara Sidle, and Greg Sanders—aren’t jumping to any conclusions, as they attempt to connect the dots by entering the secretive and tight-knit body art community—one that is intensely wary of outsiders. . . .

What happens when a reality TV series gets a true dose of reality? A staged prank for a hit scare show has gone horribly wrong with an actor now dead and production halted indefinitely. As the graveyard shift of Sin City’s best crime scene investigators—including Catherine Willows, Ray Langston, Nick Stokes, Sara Sidle, and Greg Sanders— digs deeper behind the scenes, more questions than answers pile up: Was the botched prank’s set-up simply a case of carelessness on the producers’ part resulting in a tragic accident, or did someone really orchestrate an elaborate scheme for revenge and murder?

It’s a hot, early autumn evening in the small resort town of Mount Charleston, NV, where six firefighters are battling a massive blaze that threatens expensive homes . . . a blaze that will cost them their lives. Initially, the police determine that the fire was human-started, and the state wants to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law with six counts of homicide. Now the team of Sin City’s finest criminologists, led by Catherine Willows, are assigned to work a crime scene far from the glittering lights and 24/7 spectacle of the Las Vegas Strip, and soon find much more than they bargained for. . . . Meanwhile, Ray Langston and Nick Stokes are called to a crime scene where a dog has taken a key piece of evidence—a severed human hand—under a suburban home’s crawl space. What’s even more disturbing is that it’s not the first severed hand that’s turned up lately—there have been four other incidents around Las Vegas over the past twelve months. . . .

Initially designed to accompany Mark Lanier and Stuart Henry's best-selling Essential Criminology textbook, this new reader is an up-to-date companion text perfect for all students of introductory criminology and criminological theory courses. The Essential Criminology Reader contains 30 original articles on current developments in criminological theory. Commissioned specifically for The Reader, these short essays were written by leading scholars in the field. Each chapter complements one of 13 different theoretical perspectives covered in Lanier and Henry's Essential Criminology text and contains between two and three articles from leading theorists on each perspective. Each chapter of The Reader features: a brief summary of the main ideas of the theory the ways the author's theory has been misinterpreted/distorted criticisms by others of the theory and how the author has responded a summary of the balance of the empirical findings the latest developments in their theoretical position policy implications/practice of their theory

Television Criticism presents an original treatment of television criticism with a foundational approach to the nature of criticism, an understanding of the business of television, production background in creating television style, in-depth chapters on storytelling and narrative theories and television genres, the interaction of rhetoric and cultural studies theories, representation, and postmodernism. It presents new and comprehensive guidelines for analysis and criticism, and it has a sample critique of the television program "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."

The Las Vegas team of investigators has its hands full following a free-spending night at an exclusive nightclub which leaves the chairman of the Cloud Mountain Paiute Tribe dead. Already surrounded by controversy, the victim had a message scrawled in his own blood at the scene that would indicate a crime of revenge—and members of the chairman’s inner circle aren’t talking, which leads to a vicious cycle of violence and murder.... ?

A lavish penthouse party on top of a Vegas hotel and casino plays host to a bizarre set-up to murder in which a security guard is trapped and killed in a private elevator—and the body soon vanishes . . . leading crime scene investigators Nick Stokes and Greg Sanders straight to an uncanny circus troupe with deadly connections to none other than the Russian mafia. In the meantime, Ray Langston and Catherine Willows are called to a psychiatric facility where two patients have just escaped after attacking an orderly. One of the escaped patients, an Iraq war veteran, managed to smuggle in a military-grade nerve gas, inducing realistic and shared three-dimensional illusions and hallucinations . . . and Ray and Catherine must race against time in order to find two very dangerous individuals now roaming freely on the streets of Las Vegas. . . .