True stories Books

A donation will be paid to the Burwood Spinal Unit for every copy of this book sold. 'It was all so sudden. Twenty seconds and then silence. I started calling out, 'Can anyone hear me?' - nothing but silence. Over the next few hours I heard hysterical sobbing and people clapping as others were...

The story of Australian Keli Lane, water polo champion and elite private school teacher, who did not want children, yet became pregnant five times in seven years. She had two abortions and three births. At no time did family, friends and lovers know that Keli was pregnant. Two babies ...

For the first time in 40 years, the man wrongly convicted of the Crewe Murders breaks his silence to tell the full story. A NEW WITNESS COMES FORWARD: “Dear Ian, I have had information since 1970 that I have been far too frightened to release. I made an effort to inform the Police in 1970 a...

At 7.09 a.m. on 20 June 1994, David Bain called emergency services and reported finding his entire family of five dead. A year later he was convicted of having murdered them in cold blood, with determination and cunning. He was sentenced to life in prison. However, after 12 years of public contro...

A young boy emerges from life-saving surgery with remarkable stories of his visit to heaven. "Heaven Is for Real "is the true story of the four-year old son of a small town Nebraska pastor who during emergency surgery slips from consciousness and enters heaven. He survives and begins talk...

Do not think for one instant that a life of crime is glamorous and exciting. It is not. It is a life of degradation, dishonesty, misery, violence, and loss of liberty. It has been more than 30 years since the Mr Asia drug syndicate came apart, when the handless, toothless body of Martin Johnstone...

From the shady cover of a tropical tax haven, they hatched a billion dollar plan to raid the treasuries of the world, robbing the poor to give to the rich. A death, missing computer disks, a winebox full of secret files, a tax haven, alleged extortion, arms dealing, corruption, coverups and crimi...

Would you recognise a child molester standing in a supermarket queue? And if you did, would you understand what went on in his - or her - mind? Nigel Latta is a forensic psychologist. He spends his working life with the sort of people most of us would prefer to pretend didn't exist. In this new edit...

'A Kiwi Mum, her kidnapped babies, and a 30-year worldwide search.' She was a former New Zealand fashion model and a diplomat's wife. He was the British WW2 fighter ace-turned-criminal who seduced her. She attended garden parties with the Queen. He got her pregnant, then kidnapped her children. It's...

THE DETECTIVES OF THE NEW ZEALAND POLICE CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION BRANCH (CIB) ARE CHARGED WITH INVESTIGATING AND SOLVING SERIOUS CRIME. To outsmart and defeat New Zealand's hardened organised crime rings, the CIB employ the most sophisticated techniques and technologies available. But at the end ...

An authorized tie-in for the 15 million people who watch Criminal Minds each week. Most episodes of Criminal Minds feature a briefing where the show's team of FBI profilers defines the type of criminal they're looking for and provides some real-life examples. This book tells the story of those exam...

1875 A True Tale of Shipwreck and Survival in the Southern Seas Imagine one woman, forty-seven men and a three-year-old boy, shipwrecked on a tiny sub-Antarctic island. For seven months they eat albatross and burn penguin skins for fuel, before a passing whaler picks them up. The woman was my gr...

From the co-author of the bestselling 'The Dangerous Book for Boys', this is a book of heroes, new and old, known and sadly forgotten, now to be glorified as they ought to be. From Captain Scott to Joe Simpson, from Douglas Bader to Ernest Shackleton, from Gertrude Bell to Emily Pankhurst, Conn Iggu...

One day a woman of average means waltzes by a jewellery shop window and spots a GBP20,000 diamond necklace. She can't get it out of her head. Eventually she gets the idea of sharing it with friends, persuading them to chip in a grand each to buy the necklace. This is the story of 13 ordinary women, ...

The most authoritative and comprehensive investigation into the life and crimes of Josef Fritzl, who engineered one of the most elaborate and disturbing cases of abuse in modern times. Based on 150 new interviews with Fritzl's neighbours, colleagues, people who knew him and those involved in exposin...

A hard-hitting and revealing true crime book by the producer-director of The Investigator, the six-part TVNZ series that screened in late 2007. Did David Tamihere murder the Swedish tourists on his own? Who killed Kirsty Bentley? Why has the man who murdered Kayo Matsuzawa not been arrested? Is John...

The West Coast of the South Island holds a special place in the mythology of New Zealand culture. It is the last frontier, the 'wild west' of New Zealand - and the coasters are larger-than-life characters. The authors have both spent significant parts of their working lives on the Coast and know the...

Compact Disc - Unabridged, 9 CDs, 11 hours As acclaimed psychological researcher and author David Buss writes, "People are mesmerized by murder. It commands our attention like no other human phenomenon, and those touched by its ugly tendrils never forget." Though we may like to believe ...

On 10 June 1991, eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard was abducted from a school bus stop within sight of her home in Tahoe, California. It was the last her family and friends saw of her for over eighteen years. On 26 August 2009, Dugard, her daughters, and Phillip Craig Garrido appeared in the office of h...

In 2008, a YouTube.com film clip became an internet phenomenon. It showed the emotional reunion of two young men and their pet lion, Christian, after they had left him in Africa with "Born Free"'s George Adamson, who would introduce him into his rightful home in the wild. "A Lion Call...

"The Monster of Florence" is a true account of brutal serial murder in idyllic Florence. After settling in Italy in 2000, Douglas Preston discovered that the olive grove in front of his family's new home had been the scene of one of the most infamous double-murders in Italian history, comm...

Generation Kill is about the young men sent to fight their nation's first open-ended war since Vietnam. Despite the flurry of media images to come of the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, you have never really met any of these people, who serve as front-line troops. For whatever reason, the media...

"An amazing tale of perilous adventure...Vibrant with life and fear and the sense of momentous events in the making."—Chicago Tribune In 1943, a group of brave Danish and Norwegian hunters carried out one of the most dramatic operations of World War II. Using dogsleds to patrol a st...

The follow-up to the international bestseller The Game. If you want to play the Game, you've got to know the Rules. In The Game Neil Strauss delved into the secret world of Pick Up Artists, men who have created a science out of the art of seduction. Not only did he reveal the techniques that they ha...

'So there I was - a twenty-one year old black female university student walking down a suburban street with a gun, no shoes and murder on my mind. I was going to kill the past. I didn't know what else to do with it' Stacey Patton today is a vibrant and impressive young woman with a promising career ...

This is a true story. It really happened. "The Game" recounts the incredible adventures of an everyday man who transforms himself from a shy, awkward writer into the quick-witted, smooth-talking Style, a character irresistible to women. But just when life is better than he could have ev...

When she was fourteen, Jasvinder Sanghera was shown a photo of the man chosen to be her husband. She was terrified. She'd witnessed the torment her sisters endured in their arranged marriages, so she ran away from home, grief-stricken when her parents disowned her. "Shame" is the heart-ren...

Dave Pelzer was brutally beaten and starved by his emotionally unstable, alcoholic mother, a mother who played tortuous, unpredictable games - games that left one of her three sons nearly dead. She no longer considered Dave a son, but a slave; no longer a boy, but an 'it'. His bed was an old army co...

In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist grew into a living legend to the Jews of Cracow. He was a womaniser, a heavy drinker and a bon viveur, but to them he became a saviour. This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupi...

The first-person account of a 26-year-old who fought in the war in Sierra Leone as a 12-year-old boy. 'My new friends have begun to suspect that I haven't told them the full story of my life. "Why did you leave Sierra Leone?" "Because there is a war." "You mean, you saw people running around with g...

Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher, or a colleague. Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching, helped you to see the world as a more profound place and gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it. For Mitch Albom that person was Morrie...

RESTLESS SOULS LARGE PRINT By Statman, Alisa R - Tate, Brie ISBN13: 9780062107299 Price (NZ RRP): $ 44.99 Release Date: 23/03/2012 Book Format: TPB : Trade Paperback Available 23/03/2012 Sharon Tate was a promising young actress who received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance ...

The brutal, premeditated murder of Honorah Parker in 1954 in a lonely park by her 16-year-old daughter Pauline and Pauline's 15-year-old friend Juliet Hulme made shock headlines around the world. International media flocked to New Zealand to follow the trial. Still today, the murder remains one of t...

Sharon Tate was a promising young actress who received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in Valley of the Dolls; the beautiful wife of famous film director Roman Polanski; an expectant mother eight and a half months pregnant at the time of her murder; and a loving daughter and sister. He...

Damon Courtenay died on the morning of April Fool's Day. In this tribute to his son, Bryce Courtenay lays bare the suffering behind this young man's life. Damon's story is one of lifelong struggle, his love for Celeste, the compassion of family, and a fight to the end for integrity. A testimony to t...

I heard a horrible screaming sound, like an animal being slaughtered ...then I realised it was me.' When Katie Piper was 24, her life was near perfect. Young and beautiful, she was well on her way to fulfilling her dream of becoming a model. But then she met Daniel Lynch on Facebook and her world qu...

On 2 March 1989 ten-year-old Natascha Kampusch was snatched off the street by a stranger and bundled into a white van. Hours later she found herself in a dark cellar, wrapped in a blanket. When she emerged eight years later, her childhood had gone. In "3,096 Days" Natascha tells her incredible story...

 In 2003, Adam Shand, until then a finance journalist, naively set out to unravel Melbourne's bloody gangland wars. A few months' research, a guaranteed cover story. But his foray into the underworld took him deeper than that. He became embroiled in a complex world where feuds raged between riv...

Another collection of outrageous hunting yarns from the master of the genre,'Big Al' Lester. A jetboat trip gone disastrously wrong, kamikaze deer, the Hermit of Fiordland, a pigeon called Tegal, the sacred eel - these are just some of the rollicking stories told by 'Big Al' and his mates. Plent...

From the author of The Perfect Storm, a gripping book about Sebastian Junger's almost-fatal year with the 2nd battalion of the American Army. They were known as "The Rock." For one year, in 2007-2008, Sebastian Junger accompanied a single platoon of thirty men from the storied 2nd bat...