This book brings together key debates within cultural studies, media studies, criminology and sociology on the relationship between the media and crime in a postmodern society - highlighted by recent controversies on the effects of media portrayals of violence and crime on the community at large. Real-life crime, crime reconstruction and crime as entertainment are categories that are now so interdependent that the media itself is in danger of confusing the genres as it seeks to profit from their undoubted appeal. This intertextuality is a key theme in this collection. The contributors highlight and theorise the symbiosis that exists between real crime and its representations, from media moral panics, policing the crisis and representing order to the postmodern confusion of crime and spectacle, trial by media and trials on media. As recent debates have shown all too starkly, the media's neutrality in this critical area is ever more problematic. This is an invaluable introduction to new thinking in a pressing contemporary debate.

The county has a wealth of sightings from a malevolent presence, known as The Flincher, which stalks the corridors of the Former Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital at Taplow to a phantom with impeccable manners who helped a guest on with her coat in a house in Buckingham. The book reveals other strange hauntings and mysteries too. The author describes these and other chilling encounters, many of them first hand accounts, in a spine-tingling way which provides compulsive reading.

Wicked and explosive secrets are revealed in this gripping tale of vicious murders, corruption, love and friendships. Authentically set in bawdy, raucous Georgian London in 1822, Principal Bow Street Runner George Ruthven's unexpected partnership with risque tavern entertainer Billy Lilly and astrologer Will Poole draw the reader into this fast-moving, vivid, witty and compelling adventure. Daring dark arts collide with political intrigue, sexual encounters, and the most heinous conspiracy imaginable. Could Billy's sweetheart Hannah be the key to a plot that threatens death and destruction to the British government? Meticulous detective work by George Ruthven unravels and uncovers the startling truth. Together with Billy and Will, George must solve the clues of the mysterious Cato Conundrum or unthinkable consequences for the whole country will ensue. The remarkable final chase to thwart the plotters involves an astonishing twist that will astound. http://www.thecatoconundrum.com/