A 12-year-old boy cowers in his closet while a lunatic killer slaughters his family . . . a nursing student unwittingly opens her home to the serial killer on her front porch . . . an 11-year-old girl drifts alone at sea on a flimsy cork raft for almost four days after a mass murderer kills her vacationing family aboard a chartered yacht . . . a brave firefighter suddenly finds himself in the crosshairs of a racist sniper almost nine stories above the ground . . . And, astonishingly, they all survived. From Howard Unruh’s 1949 shooting rampage through a quiet New Jersey neighborhood to Louisiana serial killer Derrick Todd Lee’s reign of terror in 2002, the corpses piled up and few lived to tell the horror. Now, award-winning journalist Ron Franscell explores the wounded hearts and minds of the ordinary people these monsters couldn’t kill. His mesmerizing accounts crackle with gritty details that put the reader in the midst of the carnage—and offer a front-row seat on the complex, painful process of surviving the rest of their haunted lives. In intimate, gripping prose, Franscell takes the reader on a pulse-pounding dash through the murky intersection of pure evil and the potency of the human spirit. This journey into the darkest corners of the American crime-scape is a penetrating work of literary journalism by a writer hailed as one of the most powerful new voices in true crime.

In the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter, greedy self-ordained minister, Reverend Harry Powell, portrayed by Robert Mitchum, kills women and terrorizes children. The hackneyed expression that truth is stranger than fiction, in this case, is not hyperbole. On a small farm in Quiet Dell, eight miles southeast of Clarksburg, West Virginia, two middle-aged women and three children were starved and murdered in the summer of 1931. The five bodies recovered were only intended to be a beginning. Others were scheduled for the abattoir. Meet Harry Powers, also known as Bluebeard, Mail Order Romeo/Don Juan, Slaughterhouse Harry, Human Tarantula, and Love Racketeer, one of the most enigmatic and until now, unstudied, sociopaths of the 20th century.

A Simon & Schuster eBook. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every reader.

Helen Hawthorne's latest gig is working in Miguel Angel's Fort Lauderdale hair salon, where a trim can cost as much as a car payment and a blowout can wipe you out. But when a famous husband of one of the salon's clients is murdered at their wedding reception, things get a little hairy...

In a series of death row interviews done shortly before his execution, infamous serial killer Ted Bundy gave a third-person "confession" of his many murders. This definitive book on Bundy was recently made into a Netflix documentary. What goes on in the mind of a serial killer? Drawn from more than 150 hours of exclusive tape-recorded interviews with the handsome, charismastic Bundy, whose grisly killing spree left at least 30 young women dead across seven states between 1974 and 1978, this chilling exposé provides a shocking self-portrait of one of the most savage sex murderers in history. Speaking eerily in the third person, Bundy reveals appalling details about his crimes, discloses how he attracted his victims, explains how he methodically disguised his acts, and recounts his two daring jailbreaks. Bundy also offers his thoughts on other infamous serial killers, including John Wayne Gacy and Son of Sam.

A true account of life and death on the front lines of the drug wars follows the adventures of a DEA officer as he risks death to take on Columbian drug lords. Reprint. K.

Full of "can't look away" moments, Dear Killer is a psychological thriller perfect for fans of gritty realistic fiction such as Dan Wells's I Am Not a Serial Killer and Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why, as well as television's Dexter. Rule One—Nothing is right, nothing is wrong. Kit looks like your average seventeen-year-old high school student, but she has a secret—she's London's notorious "Perfect Killer." She chooses who to murder based on letters left in a secret mailbox, and she's good—no, perfect—at what she does. Her moral nihilism—the fact that she doesn't believe in right and wrong—makes being a serial killer a whole lot easier . . . until she breaks her own rules by befriending someone she's supposed to murder, as well as the detective in charge of the Perfect Killer case. As New York Times bestselling author of the Gone series Michael Grant says, Dear Killer is "shocking, mesmerizing, and very smart."