Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in True Crime

Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories will take you on an electrifying journey through the discovery, consumption, and trade of mind-altering substances. Since the Stone Age, drugs have been sniffed to induce sleep, mixed to cure ills, swallowed to stimulate creativity, snorted to increase sexuality, popped for the hell of it and smoked to see God. Natural or synthesized, they have been smuggled for all kinds of reasons from saving the world to becoming stinking rich.

It is fall in Philadelphia and the mutilated body of a man is found in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of the city. The victim has been viciously tortured to death. It's the work of a sadistic mind in free fall.When homicide detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano investigate, they soon realise that their crime scene is linked to the past. Eight years ago, another body was found in the same place, in the same position, killed in the same manner.

On an April night in 1989, Jo Ann Parks survived a house fire that claimed the lives of her three small children. Though the fire at first seemed a tragic accident, investigators soon reported finding evidence proving that Parks had sabotaged wiring, set several fires herself, and even barricaded her four-year-old son inside a closet to prevent his escape. Though she insisted she did nothing wrong, Jo Ann Parks received a life sentence without parole based on the power of forensic fire science that convincingly proved her guilt. Now, that evidence is being called into question....

Spanning three centuries and eight thousand nautical miles, and compiled by a direct descendant of a sailor who waged war with pirates in the early nineteenth century, The Penguin Book of Pirates takes us behind the eye patches, the peg legs, and the skull and crossbones of the Jolly Roger and into the no-man’s-land of piracy that is rife with paradoxes and plot twists.

How one reporter became an enemy of the brutal new Russia is a brilliant and haunting account of the insidious methods used by a resurgent Kremlin against its so-called "enemies" - human rights workers, western diplomats, journalists and opposition activists. It includes unpublished material from confidential US diplomatic cables, released last year by WikiLeaks, which describe Russia as a "virtual mafia state".

This memoir was recently discovered and appears to have been written in the 1920s by someone who asserts that he was Jack the Ripper. This person is James Willoughby Carnac, and this memoir was written shortly before his death. It is an account of his entire life, including a few short months in 1888 when he became the murderer known to posterity as Jack the Ripper.

Mina Smallman has lived through the unimaginable. On Saturday 6 June 2020, her daughters, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, were killed in a park by a male stranger as they celebrated Bibaa's birthday. Mina has been fighting for justice ever since - for her daughters, and for the rest of us, by challenging the toxic culture in the Metropolitan Police and calling out the wider institutional misogyny, racism and classism in Britain. Now, she tells her story for the first time.

Crafted from original interviews, Medal of Honour tells the true, heroic accounts of veterans who have been decorated for their bravery in combat. Learn about the daring actions that have earned Bronze and Silver Stars, the Distinguished Service Cross, and, the highest U.S. military decoration, the Medal of Honor. Outnumbered, under pressure, under fire, these men and women exhibited extraordinary selflessness, camaraderie, and patriotism in overseas conflicts: from World War II, Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Thursday 9th October, Michelle Hadaway's worst fears came true. After watching her daughter Karen playing in the neighbour's garden with her best friend Nicola, Michelle returned to cook dinner for her family. Unbeknownst to her, this would be the last time she would ever see Karen alive. In the following days and months, shocking details would come to light about the nature of Karen and Nicola's murders, and the case which had come to be known as 'the Babes in the Wood murders' would lead to one of the most infamous and cruellest miscarriages of justice in British history.

Kickback traces the origins of corporate bribery from the reign of the British East India Company to the methods by which it is carried out today. Traveling across four continents and interviewing police and intelligence officials, convicted criminals, business executives, and corruption experts, David Montero takes an inside look at bribery's pernicious effects. He examines its ramifications at both the individual and national levels - from the murder of a young activist in Bangladesh to a Texas billionaire's dealings with Saddam Hussein.

South Africa, 1987. Apartheid. When Leon, a white 19-year-old prison guard working on death row, commits an inexplicable act of violence, killing seven black men in a hail of bullets, the outcome of the trial - and the court's sentence - seems a foregone conclusion. Hotshot lawyer John Weber reluctantly takes on the seemingly unwinnable case. A passionate opponent of the death penalty, John discovers that young Leon worked on death row in the nation's most notorious prison, under traumatic conditions....

On January 26, 1996, Dave Schultz, Olympic gold medal winner and wrestling golden boy, was shot three times by du Pont family heir John E. du Pont at the famed Foxcatcher Farms estate in Pennsylvania. Following the murder, there was a tense standoff when du Pont barricaded himself in his home for two days before he was finally captured. Foxcatcher is gold medal winner Mark Schultz's memoir, revealing what made him and his brother champion and what brought them to Foxcatcher Farms.

Straight from the harsh streets, American Cops is a first-person account of the days and nights of America's police force.

In 2014, novelist Leslie Schwartz was sentenced to 90 days in Los Angeles County Jail for a DUI and battery of an officer. It was the most harrowing and holy experience of her life. Following a 414-day relapse into alcohol and drug addiction after more than a decade sober, Schwartz was sentenced and served her time with only six months' sobriety. The damage she inflicted that year upon her friends, her husband, her daughter, and herself was nearly impossible to fathom. Incarceration might have ruined her altogether, if not for the stories that sustained her while she was behind bars.

When two bombs exploded at the densely crowded finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, the whole world watched in shock as the story unfolded. First, the death toll and life-altering injuries. Next, the identification of the suspects - Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev - and the tense manhunt that brought Boston to a standstill. And, finally, the courageous and inspiring recovery of a wounded American city. Long Mile Home is the riveting tale of that tragic, surreal, and ultimately inspiring week.

It's the late 1960s, and homosexuality has only just been legalised, and Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal party, has a secret he's desperate to hide. As long as Norman Scott, his beautiful, unstable lover is around, Thorpe's brilliant career is at risk. With the help of his fellow politicians, Thorpe schemes, deceives and embezzles - until he can see only one way to silence Scott for good. The trial of Jeremy Thorpe changed our society forever: it was the moment the British public discovered the truth about its political class.

In 2003, fresh out of NYU, Daniel Genis was working in publishing as his writer father had always expected. But he was also hiding a serious heroin addiction that led him into debt and burglary. After he was arrested for robbing people at knifepoint in 2003, Daniel Genis was nicknamed the "apologetic bandit" in the press, given his habit of apologizing to his victims as he took their cash. He was sentenced to 12 years (10 with good behavior).

Eliot Ness presents the first complete picture of the real Eliot Ness. Both fearless and shockingly shy, he inspired courage and loyalty in men twice his age, forged law-enforcement innovations that are still with us today, and earned acclaim and scandal from both his professional and personal lives. Through it all, he believed unwaveringly in the integrity of law and the basic goodness of his fellow Americans.

A gripping narrative of power, corruption and greed, The Mechanism is the true story of how a simple investigation into money laundering uncovered the biggest corruption scandal in human history. When a small team of investigators discovered that a black market currency dealer was operating out of a Brazilian petrol station, they could never have imagined that their work would destroy the government and lead to the impeachment of two presidents.

February 2016. A daring gun attack in the Regency Hotel brings Dubliner Christy Kinahan and his international criminal cartel to a horrified public's attention. Kinahan's son Daniel, the target of the attack, escapes. A trusted henchman dies at the scene. And the deadly rivalry between the Kinahans and the family and associates of the veteran Dublin gangster Gerry Hutch becomes all-out war. It results in a never-before-seen level of international cooperation - including Irish, UK and US police forces - to topple the Kinahan gang.