Crime & criminology Books

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...

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...

When 'The Journey to Prison' was published in 2002 it became an instant best seller. In it, Celia Lashlie analysed the forces that shape the face of crime in New Zealand, the way we punish offenders, the effectiveness of prison (for both men and women), parental responsibility, the role of drugs, wh...

Based on never-before-published family, police and court records, photographs, interviews with people who knew him, including criminals, football colleagues and police officers, this is the biography of Frank 'Bumper' Farrell. He was a gambler, a hard drinker, a devoted husband and father, a devout ...

Garth McVicar is the quintessential Kiwi battler. A farmer from the Hawke's Bay and a dedicated family man, he - like many New Zealanders - noticed an alarming increase in violent crime. Garth took it upon himself to ask the hard questions of the legislators, demanding fairness and honesty in crimin...

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 ...

 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...

Mexican drug cartels. Double agents. International money laundering. Gun fights. Massacres. Based on a true story, this is the life of Keith Bulfin - a conservative Melbourne father, pushing middle age - who is drawn into a world of drug smuggling and horrific violence in Mexico City. Bulfin is a st...

Imagine being a middle-class, university-educated young Pakeha woman from Wellington's leafy suburbs and turning your back on all that to live in a house with Black Power gang connections in the rundown inner-city. Imagine organising the young women who come to live in that house, most of whom are f...

By day…he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night…he spent it as fast as he could on drugs, sex and travel. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht, crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab; to the wife and kids who waited for him at home; and the fast-tal...

DAY 5 MONDAY 23 JULY 2001 5.53AM 'The sun is shining through the bars of my window on what must be a glorious summer day. I've been incarcerated in a cell five paces by three for twelve and a half hours, and will not be let out again until midday; eighteen and a half hours of solitary confinement. T...

The final volume of Jeffrey Archer's prison diaries covers the period of his transfer from Wayland to his eventual release on parole in July 2003. It includes a shocking account of the traumatic time he spent in the notorious Lincoln jail and the events that led to his incarceration there - it also ...

On 9th August 2001, 22 days after Jeffrey Archer was sentenced to four years in prison for perjury, he was transferred from HMP Belmarsh, a double-A Category high-security prison in south London, to HMP Wayland, a Category C establishment in Norfolk. He served 67 days in Wayland and during that time...

A Christchurch publican shot in a crowded pub, an Indian fruiterer beaten to death in Hawera and a trail of destruction left across Waikato and the Bay of Plenty by a mass murderer - these are just some of the fascinating unsolved murders profiled in Shot in the Dark. While the ten cases profile...

In the 1990s Jordan Belfort became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper.He was THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, whose life of greed, power and excess was so outrageous it could only be true: no one could make this up!But the day Jordan was arrested and tak...

When the hitman hiding in Roberta Williams′ roof confessed that he couldn′t kill her, she knew she had to get herself and her kids out of the bloodiest battle the Australian underworld had ever known. Roberta′s marriage to Melbourne career criminal Carl Williams had been a rolle...

For more than 160 years New Zealand has struggled to find a formula for dealing with criminals in a humane, workable and effective way. Arthur Hume, the first Inspector of Prisons, presided over a regime of hard physical labour and severe discipline under austere conditions. Changing philosophies ov...

Australia's leading legal historian examines the chain of events that occurred between Ned Kelly's last stand at Glenrowan and the day he faced the public executioner revealing the truth behind the drama, intrigue, and pathos of the death of Australia's most notorious outlaw. In 1880, Ned Kelly was ...

Walter Stadnick is not an imposing man. At five-foot-four, his face and arms scarred by fire in a motorcycle accident, he would not spring to mind as a leader of Canada's most notorious biker gang, the Hells Angels. yet through sheer guts and determination, intelligence and luck, this Hamilton-born ...

A classic memoir of prison breaks and adventure -- a bestselling phenomenon of the 1960s Condemned for a murder he had not committed, Henri Charriere (nicknamed Papillon) was sent to the penal colony of French Guiana. Forty-two days after his arrival he made his first break, travelling a thousand gr...

Bernard O'Mahoney was a key member of the Essex Boys firm - one of the most violent criminal gangs in Britain. In December 1995, the three leaders of the gang were executed as they sat in their Range Rover down a deserted farm track. For many, this meant that the horror of the gang's brutal reign wa...

Crime is a collection of true crime stories told by one of Germany's most prominent defense lawyers. Some of the cases are strange, some bewildering and others heartbreaking, but all are told with genuine concern for those who have slipped through the protective nets of society. - What would make a ...

Organised crime in Australia doesn't just exist on our television screens. The real world of serious crime operates every day and in every state of the country. It is a multi-billion dollar business and at its core are the drug trade and a world of secrecy and self-protection where intimidation and ...

Forensic scientists are crime-solving sleuths producing slam-dunk evidence and tidy endings all in a day's work ...because being a forensic scientist is just like it is on the television, isn't it- In fact, it's so much more than this. From examining illegal drugs to collecting pollen samples from c...

The news of teenagers and even younger children committing ever more serious and violent crimes continues to shock and baffle. The escalating psychological and social toll of youth crime is being paid by all - from victims to offenders to parents and siblings to teachers and to the community as a wh...

This is a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of murderer Gary Gilmore's desire to die. In the summer of 1976 Gilmore robbed two men and then shot them in cold blood. No one had been executed in America for ten years but Gilmore, rather than have his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, wanted to die,...

Like the Salem witch-hunts, rooting out alleged Satanic sexual abuse rings became a theme of the 1990's. This is the story of how four teachers at a public creche were accused of Satanic sexual abuse of babies and children, and even murder and cannibalism. Amazingly, one teacher was convicte...

The Christchurch Civic Creche case in which Peter Ellis was convicted of the sexual abuse of children in his care, smoulders in the public mind. Was justice done? Did demonic fears influence the judgement of professionals and others involved? Did scapegoating play a part? Important questions - becau...

Since the 1980s prison construction and incarceration rates in the U.S. have been rising exponentially, evoking huge public concern about their proliferation, their recent privatisation and their promise of enormous profits. But these prisons house hugely disproportionate numbers of people of colour...

Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction Guided tour Guided tour of the companion website Chapter 1: What is Crime? Chapter 2: Measuring Crime Chapter 3: Who Commits Crime? Chapter 4: Crime and the Media Chapter 5: Classicist Criminology Chapter 6: Biological Positivist Criminol...

Thad Roberts, a fellow in a prestigious NASA program had an idea--a romantic, albeit crazy, idea. He wanted to give his girlfriend the moon. Literally. Thad convinced his girlfriend and another female accomplice, both NASA interns, to break into an impregnable laboratory at NASA--past security check...

How can it be, in a nation that elected Barack Obama, that one third of African American males born in 2001 will spend time in a state or federal prison, and that black men are seven times likelier than white men to be in prison? Blacks are much more likely than whites to be stopped by the police, a...

Respected crime reporters Peter Edwards and Michel Auger have pooled their research and expertise to create The Encyclopedia of Canadian Organized Crime. Sometimes grim, sometimes amusing and always entertaining, this book is filled with 300 entries and more than 150 illustrations, covering centurie...

Virginia's capital city knew poverty, injustice, slavery, vagrancy, substandard working conditions, street crimes, brutality, unsanitary conditions, and pandemics. One of the biggest stains in the city's past was the spectacle of public executions, attended by throngs. Thousands, including the old a...

Witnesses of terrorism, spread throughout the world, watched the 9/11 terrorist attacks in real-time. Images were instantly beamed to audiences both near and far from where passenger airplanes were hijacked and flown into some of the United States' most recognisable locations. These images were capt...

From the back streets of London to neon-soaked Las Vegas, organized crime is the world's biggest and most profitable business. A truly global enterprise, no country can claim to be free from the taint of this ever growing threat to established society. This explosive investigation reveals the past, ...

A searing look at one of Canada's most dangerous gangsGang violence is nothing new to Vancouver, but the brutality of the Bacon Brothers--Jonathan, Jarrod, and Jamie--has become legendary. "The Notorious Bacon Brothers" follows the chaotic rise of these three gangland figures to the pinnacle of Vanc...