Entering the ring are some of America's greatest mystery writers challenging boxing, one of the world's oldest sports. Readers are provided front row seats as heavyweight authors provide knock-out combinations for your reading pleasure. While each story stands alone as a masterful mystery, the combination of such fine writing against the backdrop of the shadowy violent world of boxing leads to a greater appreciation of both crafts.

From New York Times bestselling author Alex Tresniowski comes a “compelling” (The Guardian) and “riveting” (The New York Times Book Review) true-crime thriller recounting the 1910 murder of ten-year-old Marie Smith, the dawn of modern criminal detection, and the launch of the NAACP. In the tranquil seaside town of Asbury Park, New Jersey, ten-year-old schoolgirl Marie Smith is brutally murdered. Small town officials, unable to find the culprit, call upon the young manager of a New York detective agency for help. It is the detective’s first murder case, and now, the specifics of the investigation and daring sting operation that caught the killer is captured in all its rich detail for the first time. Occurring exactly halfway between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the formal beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in 1954, the brutal murder and its highly-covered investigation sits at the historic intersection of sweeping national forces—religious extremism, class struggle, the infancy of criminal forensics, and America’s Jim Crow racial violence. History and true crime collide in this “compelling and timely” (Vanity Fair) murder mystery featuring characters as complex and colorful as those found in the best psychological thrillers—the unconventional truth-seeking detective Ray Schindler; the sinister pedophile Frank Heidemann; the ambitious Asbury Park Sheriff Clarence Hetrick; the mysterious “sting artist,” Carl Neumeister; the indomitable crusader Ida Wells; and the victim, Marie Smith, who represented all the innocent and vulnerable children living in turn-of-the-century America. “Brisk and cinematic” (The Wall Street Journal), The Rope is an important piece of history that gives a voice to the voiceless and resurrects a long-forgotten true crime story that speaks to the very divisions tearing at the nation’s fabric today.

In this hard-hitting collection of powerful and moving tales, F.X. Toole breathes life into vivid, compelling characters who radiate the fierce intensity of the worlds they inhabit: An aging cut man with an incorrigible sweet tooth Fearless Maggie Fitzgerald and her quest to become a champion boxer Señora Cabrera who makes low-fat refried beans to keep a local fighter in top form

Dr. James Verraday is a professor of forensic psychology specializing in eyewitness recall and criminal profiling. He's a brilliant original thinker with a passion for social justice and a very antagonistic relationship with authority, especially the police force. So when Detective Constance Maclean appears in Verraday's lecture hall at the end of one of his classes, he bristles. But the body of a young woman has just been found in a cranberry bog south of Seattle, and Maclean is convinced that this murder is tied to an earlier killing. The Seattle police already have a suspect in custody for that case, but Maclean suspects the lead detective is knowingly putting away an innocent man to boost his numbers and quiet his critics. Verraday reluctantly agrees to use his skills as a profiler to help out with the investigation—if only to satisfy his own conviction that law enforcement is riddled with corruption. They form an unlikely alliance and soon find themselves tied up in a deadly game to find a serial killer whose wealth and influence make him almost untouchable.

"[Ron Lyle's] life was a remarkable one and the story of it worth re-telling, which makes the book's new edition thoroughly welcome. Off The Ropes is absolutely recommended reading."--Gary Lucken, Boxing Monthly "Nobody ever hit me that hard. No question. I 'll remember that punch on my deathbed. A great puncher, a great guy."--Earnie Shavers

Duffy Dombrowski is not the average social worker. When not counseling sex addicts and drug users, hes hanging out with his quirky friends or fighting ex-Olympians in the boxing ring. But at least he cares about the clients hes trying to help.

Rubin Carter and John Artis Had Been Knocked Down... But what prosecutors who built a highly questionable case against the famous middleweight boxer and his teenage acquaintance in the 1966 Lafayette Bar and Grille triple murders in Paterson, New Jersey, did not count on was a young investigator from the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender who was willing to devote his free time, talent and energies to picking apart the case built on "eyewitnesses" who likely saw nothing they had claimed to see and racial prejudice against two African-American defendants. As Fred W. Hogan tracked down the "eyewitnesses" and got them to admit their statements to police were lies, the world began to pay attention to the case, with Bob Dylan writing a famous song about "The Hurricane" and boxing luminaries like Muhammad Ali, "Sugar Ray" Robinson and others holding fund-raisers and speaking out against the injustice done to Carter and Artis. Ultimately, they would be freed, and Carter, Artis and Hogan would make exposing other wrongful convictions a life's work and passion.