Manhunt for the most elusive burglar to prowl the Town of Palm Beach. He evaded law enforcement officers on a nightly basis. It was though he was, “The Invisible Man.” After committing some sixty {60} burglaries, he was finally apprehended. The story and investigation involved the Palm Beach Police Detectives, the F.B.I., and last but not least a patrol officer by the name of Joe Hawk who had a major role in the apprehension and identification of the elusive burglar. This was a two-prong investigation, one by the detectives, and the F.B.I., and the other by the Burglary Strike Force. In the end it all came together to apprehend a man that stole over twenty-five {25} million dollars in jewelry. The investigation led the detectives and the F.B.I. through six counties, and four states seizing jewelry and arresting fences along the way.

When a pregnant judge is abducted, a PI follows her trail into the Florida Everglades in this novel by “the master of the high-stakes thriller” (Michael Connelly). US district judge Diane Manchester has looked across the courtroom into the eyes of evil before. But today, as she presides over the extradition hearing of a notorious Colombian drug lord, she is also eight months pregnant. Her chair is uncomfortable, her robe is constrictive, and her due date is fast approaching. If she shows a single sign of weakness, Diane risks jeopardizing the biggest trial of her career and setting a vicious murderer free. In seconds, her situation takes a harrowing turn for the worse. Walking to her favorite lunch spot, Diane is grabbed off the street, thrown into the back of a white van, blindfolded, and threatened with death. She has no idea who her kidnappers are or what they want. Maintaining a strict code of silence, they refuse to give her even the smallest glimmer of hope. But Diane’s captors have overlooked a crucial detail: Her husband, Billy, is the employer and best friend of Max Freeman, Philadelphia cop turned South Florida private investigator. Tossing off the rule of law, Freeman sets out to determine which of a rogues’ gallery of suspects took Diane—and to save her and her unborn child before it’s too late. From the author of the Edgar Award winner The Blue Edge of Midnight, whose “descriptions of Florida’s backwaters put him right up there with James W. Hall and Randy Wayne White” (Chicago Tribune), this is a mystery with “the kind of clock-driven suspense seen in the best of Harlan Coben” (Booklist).

Atlanta magazine’s editorial mission is to engage our community through provocative writing, authoritative reporting, and superlative design that illuminate the people, the issues, the trends, and the events that define our city. The magazine informs, challenges, and entertains our readers each month while helping them make intelligent choices, not only about what they do and where they go, but what they think about matters of importance to the community and the region. Atlanta magazine’s editorial mission is to engage our community through provocative writing, authoritative reporting, and superlative design that illuminate the people, the issues, the trends, and the events that define our city. The magazine informs, challenges, and entertains our readers each month while helping them make intelligent choices, not only about what they do and where they go, but what they think about matters of importance to the community and the region.

In 1968, during Albert Lepard’s fifth escape from a life sentence at Parchman Penitentiary, he kidnapped Lovejoy Boteler, then eighteen years old, from his family’s farm in Grenada, Mississippi. Three decades later, still beset by half-buried memories of that time, Boteler began researching his kidnapper’s nefarious, sordid life to discover how and why this terrifying abduction occurred. Crooked Snake: The Life and Crimes of Albert Lepard is the true story of Lepard, sentenced to life in Parchman for the murder of seventy-four-year-old Mary Young in 1959. During the course of his sentence, Lepard escaped from prison six times in fourteen years. In Crooked Snake, Boteler pieces together the story of this cold-blooded murderer's life using both historical records and personal interviews—over seventy in all—with ex-convicts who gravitated to and ran with Lepard, the family members who fed and sheltered the fugitive during his escapes, the law officers who hunted him, and the regular folks who were victimized in his terrible wake. Throughout Crooked Snake, Boteler reveals his kidnapper’s hardscrabble childhood and tracks his whereabouts before his incarceration and during his jailbreaks. Lepard’s escapes take him to Florida, Michigan, Kansas, California, and Mexico. Crooked Snake captures a slice of history and a landscape that is fast disappearing. These vignettes describe Mississippi’s countryside and spirit, ranging from sharecropper family gatherings in Attala County’s Seneasha Valley to the twenty-thousand-acre Parchman farm and its borderlands teeming with alligator, panther, bear, and wild boar.

Introduction to Criminal Justice: Practice and Process, Second Edition uses a proven problem-based learning approach to enhance the critical thinking and analytic skills of students. Best-selling authors Kenneth J. Peak and Pamela M. Everett explain the importance of criminal justice and show students how key trends, emerging issues, historical background, and practical lessons apply to their future careers. Students learn core topics—policing, corrections, criminal behavior, criminal law, and courts—as well as special topics such as ethics, juvenile justice, terrorism, and the changing war on drugs, while learning how to solve problems they are likely to face as criminal justice practitioners. Packed with new examples and drawing on the authors’ years of experience in the field, this student-friendly book offers a palpable, real-world flavor typically missing in other texts for the course.