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Books > Fiction > True stories > Crime
A searing account of corruption, racism and mismanagement inside
Britain's most famous police force Barely a week goes by without
the Metropolitan Police Service being plunged into a new crisis.
Demoralised and depleted in numbers, Scotland Yard is a shadow of
its former self. Spanning the three decades from the infamous
Stephen Lawrence case to the shocking murder of Sarah Everard,
Broken Yard charts the Met's fall from a position of unparalleled
power to the troubled and discredited organisation we see today,
barely trusted by its Westminster masters and struggling to perform
its most basic function: the protection of the public. The result
is a devastating picture of a world-famous police force riven with
corruption, misogyny and rank incompetence. As a top investigative
reporter at the Sunday Times and The Independent, Tom Harper
covered Scotland Yard for fifteen years, beginning not long after
the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent
Brazilian killed by Met Police officers after being mistaken for a
terror suspect in 2005. Since then, reporting on Scotland Yard has
been akin to witnessing a slow-motion car crash. Using thousands of
intelligence files, witness statements and court transcripts
provided by police sources, as well as first-hand testimony, Harper
explains how London's world-famous police force got itself into
this sorry mess - and how it might get itself out of it.
Maud West ran her detective agency in London for more than thirty years, having starting sleuthing on behalf of society’s finest in 1905. Her exploits grabbed headlines throughout the world but, beneath the public persona, she was forced to hide vital aspects of her own identity in order to thrive in a class-obsessed and male-dominated world. And – as Susannah Stapleton reveals – she was a most unreliable witness to her own life.
Who was Maud? And what was the reality of being a female private detective in the Golden Age of Crime?
Interweaving tales from Maud West’s own ‘casebook’ with social history and extensive original research, Stapleton investigates the stories Maud West told about herself in a quest to uncover the truth.
With walk-on parts by Dr Crippen and Dorothy L. Sayers, Parisian gangsters and Continental blackmailers, The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective is a portrait of a woman ahead of her time and a deliciously salacious glimpse into the underbelly of ‘good society’ during the first half of the twentieth century.
"There's a rush to it, an elevation of the senses. . . . It's a
sweet feeling, one I'll never get tired of, not on my twentieth
heist, or my fiftieth, or my hundredth."
Once a promising young rock musician, the son of a decorated
policeman, Myles Connor became one of Boston's most notorious
criminals--a legendary art thief with irresistible charm and a
genius IQ whose approach to his chosen profession mixed brilliant
tactical planning with stunning bravado, brazen disguises,
audaciously elaborate con jobs, and even the broad-daylight
grab-and-dash. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Smithsonian Institution, Boston's Museum of Fine Art . . .no museum
was off-limits. The fact that he was in jail at the time of the
largest art theft in American history--the still-unsolved robbery
of the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum--has not stopped the FBI
from considering him a prime suspect. Optioned for film by the
Oscar-winning screenwriter and director William Monahan (The
Departed), The Art of the Heist is Connor's story--part confession,
part thrill ride, and impossible to put down.
The area known as Dogtown--an isolated colonial ruin and
surrounding 3,000-acre woodland in seaside Gloucester,
Massachusetts--has long exerted a powerful influence over artists,
writers, eccentrics, and nature lovers. But its history is also
woven through with tales of witches, supernatural sightings,
pirates, former slaves, drifters, and the many dogs Revolutionary
War widows kept for protection and for which the area was named. In
1984, a brutal murder took place there: a mentally disturbed local
outcast crushed the skull of a beloved schoolteacher as she walked
in the woods. In this award-winning debut, Elyssa East evocatively
interlaces the story of the grisly murder with the strange, dark
history of this wilderness ghost town and explores the possibility
that certain landscapes wield their own unique power. Winner of the
2010 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award in nonfiction and named a
Must-Read Book by the Massachusetts Book Awards, "Dogtown "takes
readers into an unforgettable place brimming with tragedy,
eccentricity, and fascinating lore, and examines the idea that some
places can inspire both good and evil, poetry and murder.
A full and frank account of a unique case and one of the most
notorious in our criminal history. The detail comes from the
personal knowledge and recollections of one who was closely
involved in the prosecution of the accused, Gordon Park, who was
eventually convicted of the crime nearly thirty years after its
commission. The author is a former solicitor and Crown Advocate who
prosecuted cases in the criminal courts for more than thirty-five
years.
Mike Pressler walked into the bottomfloor meeting room of the
Murray Building and, as he had done hundreds of times over a
sixteen-year career at Duke University, prepared to address his
men's lacrosse team. Forty-six players sat in theater-style chairs,
all eyes riveted forward.
It was 4:35 P.M. on Wednesday, April 5, 2006. The program's
darkest hour had arrived in an unexpected and explosive
announcement.
Pressler, a three-time ACC Coach of the Year, informed his team
that its season was canceled and he had "resigned," effective
immediately. While his words reverberated off the walls, hysteria
erupted. Players cried, confused over a course of events that had
spun wildly out of control. What began as an off-campus team party
with two hired strippers had accelerated into a rape investigation
-- one that exposed prosecutorial misconduct, shoddy police work,
an administration's rush to judgment, and the media's disregard for
the facts -- dividing both a prestigious university and the city of
Durham.
Wiping away tears, Pressler demonstrated the steely resolve that
helped him win more than two hundred games. For the next thirty
minutes, Pressler put his personal situation aside and encouraged
his players to stick together. He also made a bold promise: "One
day, we will get a chance to tell the world the truth. One day."
This is that day.
Pressler, who has not done an interview since the saga began, has
handed his private diary from those three weeks to New York Times
bestselling author Don Yaeger, exposing vivid details, including
the day Pressler was fired, when the coach asked Athletic Director
Joe Alleva why the school "wasn't willing to wait for the truth" to
come out. "It's not about the truth anymore," Alleva said to the
coach in a signature moment that said it all. In addition to
Pressler, Yaeger interviewed more than seventy-five key figures
intimately involved in the case. The result is a tale that defies
logic.
"It is tough to be one of fifty people who believed a story when
fifty million people believed something else," Pressler said. "This
wasn't about the truth to many of the others involved. My story is
all about the truth."
Investigative reporter Brian Deer exposes a conspiracy of fraud and
betrayal behind attacks on a mainstay of medicine: vaccinations.
2021 IPPY Book Award Winner (Gold) in Health/Medicine/Nutrition,
Recipient of the Eric Hoffer Award for Nonfiction in the Culture
Category. From San Francisco to Shanghai, from Vancouver to Venice,
controversy over vaccines is erupting around the globe. Fear is
spreading. Banished diseases have returned. And a militant
"anti-vax" movement has surfaced to campaign against children's
shots. But why? In The Doctor Who Fooled the World, award-winning
investigative reporter Brian Deer exposes the truth behind the
crisis. Writing with the page-turning tension of a detective story,
he unmasks the players and unearths the facts. Where it began. Who
was responsible. How they pulled it off. Who paid. At the heart of
this dark narrative is the rise of the so-called "father of the
anti-vaccine movement": a British-born doctor, Andrew Wakefield.
Banned from medicine, thanks to Deer's discoveries, he fled to the
United States to pursue his ambitions, and now claims to be winning
a "war." In an epic investigation spread across fifteen years, Deer
battles medical secrecy and insider cover-ups, smear campaigns and
gagging lawsuits, to uncover rigged research and moneymaking
schemes, the heartbreaking plight of families struggling with
disability, and the scientific scandal of our time.
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