Who Really Killed Claire? re-investigates the brutal yet apparently motiveless murder of 16-year-old Claire Tiltman in Greenhithe, Kent in 1993. It describes how police investigations faltered for almost 20 years until Colin Ash-Smith, due to be released from a long prison sentence for attacks on young women, was belatedly charged with this cold case murder. One of the UK’s very first cases involving ‘bad character’ evidence under a controversial new law. Expertly researched, the book revisits the crime scene, investigation, prosecution, media frenzy and questionable urgency that led to Ash-Smith’s pre-emptive arrest and conviction for murder. Meanwhile, a predatory serial killer was eliminated from the investigation despite ‘hallmarks’ making him a strong suspect. Well placed to raise doubts, ex-cold case investigator Alan Jackaman analyses the wholly circumstantial evidence and explains why he believes police became too preoccupied with the wrong man.

Early on the morning of May 6, 1840, the elderly Lord William Russell was found in his London house with his throat so deeply cut that his head was nearly severed. The crime soon had everyone, including Queen Victoria, feverishly speculating about motives and methods. But when the prime suspect claimed to have been inspired by a sensational crime novel, it sent shock waves through literary London and drew both Dickens and Thackeray into the fray. Could a novel really lead someone to kill? In Murder by the Book, Claire Harman blends a riveting true-crime whodunit with a fascinating account of the rise of the popular novel and the early battle for its soul among the most famous writers of the day.

ALICE FEENEYS NEW YORK TIMES AND INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER “Boldly plotted, tightly knotted—a provocative true-or-false thriller that deepens and darkens to its ink-black finale. Marvelous.” —AJ Finn, author of The Woman in the Window My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me: 1. I’m in a coma. 2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore. 3. Sometimes I lie. Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea. Amber doesn’t remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this brilliant psychological thriller asks: Is something really a lie if you believe it's the truth?

Murder is no laughing matter—especially when it comes to marriage. So before Luanne gets in too deep with her new flame, a dentist named Dick, she'd like her best friend to do a background check. Did Dick murder his two previous wives? That's what Arkansas bookseller and amateur sleuth Claire Malloy intends to discover... Everything Claire turns up on this would-be blue-beard keeps leading her down a slippery slope. The police are determined to prove Dick guilty of double homicide, but Claire's not so sure. Something about his story just doesn't add up. But if Dick didn't do the deed, who did? The only thing Claire knows for sure is that Luanne won't have a moment's rest until she finds out...

Records the tragic circumstances which led to one man committing a sequence of vicious sexual assaults through to the murders of Rachel Nickell and Samantha and Jazmine Bisset. It has taken Alan Jackaman over 25 years to come to terms with what he experienced, but he now tells of his part in the downfall of serial killer Robert Napper. Reveals for the first time information not until now in the public domain and tells of the author’s tenacity as a lower-ranking officer in the face of dwindling resources and sometimes disparagement by more senior investigators. A straightforward account of the solving of heinous and complex crimes, it also delves into media fascination with serious offences and shows how the press may latch on to one murder whilst ignoring another, even more horrific, one. The author was an investigator on the Bisset case from day one through to seeing that case linked to London’s Green Chain Walk rapes and the discovery that Napper also killed Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common. The book tells for the first time the behind the scenes story of how the misguided targeting of Colin Stagg and rebuffing of the Bisset team’s suspicions allowed Napper to escape justice for 15 years. The book also looks at the mind of Robert Napper, his bizarre behaviour, family history and ‘doodlings’ (some reproduced in this book) and the fact that sheer ‘chance’ allowed him to remain free for so long. By the detective who arrested Napper. Looks at the emergence of criminal profiling. Enters the mind of a psychotic killer. Shows how media ‘obsession’ can hinder justice. Contains previously unpublished material. Extract: ‘To be able to properly investigate the murders of Samantha and Jazmine it was necessary to research the sequence of Green Chain Walk rapes. At first glance the string of offences bore the classic hallmarks of a psychopath who grew ever more cunning, yet reckless, but more importantly ever more violent. Studies of this type of offender clearly show they learn as they progress in their offending…’

Burch explores the life and death of Rosebud Abigail Denovo, a 19-year-old People's Park activist who was shot and killed by an Oakland police officer on August 25, 1992. The initials of her pseudonym spelled R.A.D. for radical.

Acclaimed for his intricate, incisive, and often controversial explorations of art, literature, and society, Leo Bersani now addresses homosexuality in America. Hardly a day goes by without the media focusing an often sympathetic beam on gay life--and, with AIDS, on gay death. Gay plays on Broadway, big book awards to authors writing on gay subjects, Hollywood movies with gay themes, gay and lesbian studies at dozens of universities, openly gay columnists and even editors at national mainstream publications, political leaders speaking in favor of gay rights: it seems that straight America has finally begun to listen to homosexual America. Still, Bersani notes, not only has homophobia grown more virulent, but many gay men and lesbians themselves are reluctant to be identified as homosexuals. In Homos, he studies the historical, political, and philosophical grounds for the current distrust, within the gay community, of self-identifying moves, for the paradoxical desire to be invisibly visible. While acknowledging the dangers of any kind of group identification (if you can be singled out, you can be disciplined), Bersani argues for a bolder presentation of what it means to be gay. In their justifiable suspicion of labels, gay men and lesbians have nearly disappeared into their own sophisticated awareness of how they have been socially constructed. By downplaying their sexuality, gays risk self-immolation--they will melt into the stifling culture they had wanted to contest. In his chapters on contemporary queer theory, on Foucault and psychoanalysis, on the politics of sadomasochism, and on the image of "the gay outlaw" in works by Gide, Proust, and Genet, Bersani raises the exciting possibility that same-sex desire by its very nature can disrupt oppressive social orders. His spectacular theory of "homo-ness" will be of interest to straights as well as gays, for it designates a mode of connecting to the world embodied in, but not reducible to, a sexual preference. The gay identity Bersani advocates is more of a force--as such, rather cool to the modest goal of social tolerance for diverse lifestyles--which can lead to a massive redefining of sociality itself, and of what we might expect from human communities.