18 books like A Descent Into Hell
Die, My Love
The day before Halloween 2004 was the last day on Earth for respected, well-liked college professor Fred Jablin. That morning, a neighbor discovered his body lying in a pool of blood in the driveway of Jablin's Virginia home. Police immediately turned their attentions to the victim's ex-wife, Piper, a petite, pretty Texas lawyer who had lost a bitter custody battle and would do anything to get…
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Final Analysis
In October 2002, Susan Polk, a housewife and mother of three, was arrested for the murder of her husband, Felix. The arrest in her sleepy northern California town kicked off what would become one of the most captivating murder trials in recent memory, as police, local attorneys, and the national media sought to unravel the complex web of events that sent this seemingly devoted housewife over the…
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Death's Shadow
Victims and survivors, angels and demons, intersect along winding roads to imperfect justice.“Bare light bulbs shone against walls painted with graffiti and dried blood, the rooms reeking of a sweet pungent odour like burnt plastic …” So writes award-winning Hamilton Spectator journalist and author Jon Wells in one of four harrowing murder stories in Death’s Shadow. Wells take readers up close…
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The blooding
Fifteen-year-old Lynda Mann's savagely raped and strangled body is found along a shady footpath near the English village of Narborough. Though a massive 150-man dragnet is launched, the case remains unsolved. Three years later the killer strikes again, raping and strangling teenager Dawn Ashforth only a stone's throw from where Lynda was so brutally murdered. But it will take four years, a…
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Greentown
Martha Moxley haunts Greenwich, Connecticut. The battered body of the pretty and popular fifteen-year-old girl was discovered on Halloween in 1975 in the exclusive Greenwich neighborhood of Belle Haven, where she lived. She had been bludgeoned to death on the front lawn of her home the night before - known in the town as "Mischief Night." In the days immediately following the murder, rumors flew.…
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Blind Faith
The Marshalls were the model family of Tom’s River, New Jersey, living the American dream of all that money could buy. Rob Marshall was the big breadwinner, king of the country club set. Maria Marshall was his stunningly beautiful wife and the perfect mom to their three great kids.
Then one night Rob, his head bloodied, reported Maria had been brutally slain. Sympathy poured in—until…
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Bringing Adam home
This is the story of an unfathomable crime that would forever embed itself into the collective American psyche and lead to sweeping legislative changes in the way that missing person cases are handled. In 1981, Adam Walsh was a healthy and bright 6 1/2 year old boy with his entire life ahead of him. On the afternoon of July 27th, Adam accompanied his mom, Revé, to the local Sears department store…
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Crimes of Passion
The very term "crimes of passion" evokes deep-seated, atavistic responses in everyone's heart. These are the crimes that are born in the emotional core of women and men who are pushed to do the unthinkable. There are never - well, hardly ever - any of the crass considerations of financial gain, no taint of reward; only release. These crimes are direct responses to betrayal, to broken hearts and…
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Deadly Angel
An astonishing true story of bizarre love and lethal obsession in America's last frontier. Mechele Hughes came to Wasilla, Alaska (pop. 4200), looking for a new life and easy money. As an exotic dancer at the Great Alaskan Bush Company in nearby Anchorage, she was soon earning thousands a night—and getting expensive gifts from admiring male clients. Three in particular fell under her spell. Each…
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A rip in Heaven
It was a headline story in the New York Times and USA Today. It was covered by Court TV and profiled on the Ricki Lake Show. Now, here is the intimate memoir of a shocking crime and its aftermath...one family's immediate and unforgettable story of what victims can suffer long after they should be safe.
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The Boston stranglers
In the only definitive book on this case, Susan Kelly investigates Albert DeSalvo's false confession to eleven murders committed in New England in the early 1960s -- and exposes the real killers.
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Redbone
Lance Herndon was at the top of his game in 1996. At age forty-one he was a self-made millionaire, the owner of Access, Inc., a successful information-systems consulting company. As a prominent member of Atlanta's young, wealthy, and powerful set, he was surrounded by black Atlanta's "beautiful people." But when he failed to show up for work one day, friends and family started to worry. Their…
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Severed
The Black Dahlia murder hit post-War Los Angeles like a bombshell . . . an impenetrable mystery—the haunting crown jewel of LAPD’s “unsolved” murders. Even before her savage death, beautiful 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, an aspiring starlet and nightclub habitué, was known as the Black Dahlia—now a magnetic icon in American pop culture, an almost mythical symbol of noir Hollywood. In this expanded…
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Judgment Ridge
This "irresistibly absorbing" true crime investigation uncovers the brutal murder of two Dartmouth professors by a pair of students in 2001 (Publishers Weekly).
On a cold night in January 2001, the idyllic community of Dartmouth College was shattered by the discovery that Half and Susanne Zantop, two of its most beloved professors, had been hacked to death in their own home. Investigators…
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The private diary of Lyle Menendez
The personal story of Lyle Menendez is based on a four-and-a-half-year intimate correspondence with the author and covers the murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez by Lyle and his brother Erik and the court trials that ended in hung juries.
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Dead Center
A city with eight million people has eight million ways to die For fifteen years, Shiya Ribowsky worked as a medicolegal investigator in New York City's medical examiner's office—the largest, most sophisticated organization of its kind in the world. Utilizing his background in medicine, he led the investigations of more than eight thousand individual deaths, becoming a key figure in some of…
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Never Enough
At thirty-nine, Nancy Kissel had it all: glamour, gusto, garishly flaunted wealth, and the royal lifestyle of the expatriate wife. Not to mention three young children and what a friend described as "the best marriage in the universe." That marriage -- to Merrill Lynch and former Goldman Sachs investment banker Robert Kissel -- ended abruptly one November night in 2003 in the bedroom of their…
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A Burial at Sea
In March 1873 aristocratic sleuth Charles Lenox undertakes a delicate espionage mission to Egypt, where five British agents have been killed, apparently by the French. But soon after Charles's ship sets sail, the captain calls on him to dust off his deductive skills when a crew member is murdered and left eviscerated on the deck.
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