| This is a story about a psychopath who terrorizes a small town. This is a story about the woman who this psychopath terrorizes. This is the story about the woman who is in love with this psychopath. This is story about 3 damaged people who desperately try to survive one another. This is a story about courage and the will to survive. Who will survive the horror, the horror? |
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Los Angeles, 1956. Glamorous. Prosperous. The place to see and be seen. But beneath the shiny exterior beats a dark heart. For when the sun goes down, L.A. becomes the noir city of James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential or Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins novels. Segregation is the unwritten law of the land. The growing black population is expected to keep to South Central. The white cops are encouraged to deal out harsh street justice. In L.A. ’56, Joel Engel paints a tense, moody portrait of the city as a devil weaves his way through the shadows.
While R&B and hot jazz spill out of record shops and clubs and all-night burger stands, Willie Fields cruises past in his dark green DeSoto, looking for a woman on whom he can bestow the gift of his company. His brilliant idea: Buy a tin badge in the five-and-ten to go along with his big flashlight and Luger and pretend to be an undercover vice cop. The young white girls doing it with their boyfriends in the lovers’ lanes dotting the L.A. hills would never say no to a cop. Into the car they go for a ride downtown on a “morals charge,” before he kicks out the young man in the middle of nowhere and takes the girl for a ride she’ll spend a lifetime trying to forget. There’s a bad guy on the loose in the City of Angels. Enter Detective Danny Galindo — he’d worked the Black Dahlia case back in ’47 as a rookie. The suave Latino — one of the few in the department — is able to move easily among the white detectives. Maybe it’s all those stories he’s sold to Jack Webb for Dragnet. When Todd Roark, a black ex-cop, is arrested, Galindo knows he’s innocent. But there’s no sympathy for Roark among the white cops on the LAPD; Galindo will have to go it alone. There’s only one problem: The victims aren’t coming forward. The white press ignores the story, too, making Galindo’s job that much more difficult. And now he’s fallen in love with one of the rapist’s first victims. If he’s ever found out, he can kiss his badge good-bye. With his back up against a wall, Galindo realizes that it will take some good old-fashioned Hollywood magic to take down a devil in the City of Angels. Thomas Dunne Books |
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Meet Richard D. McVickers, Aka Big Mack …drug dealer from Marion, Indiana-a small town in the Midwest. Just one year out of prison, this aspiring rap artist is a Realtor by day and a gangsta by night. He’s caught up in the sticky web of the streets. Big Mack starts funding this real estate and rap careers with drug money. He just wants to make it out the dope game and be a rap star. Mack s biggest setback in becoming that gangsta rapper is that he lives what he raps and he raps what he lives. Talent isn’t the issue, the issue is: Can Mack stay out of prison? The fact that Mack is gaining success and notoriety in the music business pushed the task force over the edge. They know drug money is the power behind him. But they just can t catch him, and they are determined to send him to Michigan City, a rough prison in Northern Indiana. Fed up with Mack outsmarting them and laughing in their faces, task force detectives Steve Popodopolus and Bobby Reese come up with a plan to bring Big Mack down for good. They turn those close to him against him and frame him in what is written in history to be the biggest cocaine but in the history of Grant County. Judges and prosecutors are involved. Lawyers have walked away. All those involved are confident Mack will be convicted and sentenced to 50 years. But Mack is more connected than they think. With the help of Frederico, young Underboss of the Panamanian drug cartel, the county can’t hold him. And once Mack is free…All Hell Breaks Loose! |
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The story of Dai Break Jones is the story of a woman with aggressive ambition born into a man’s world. She never accepted the thought that a woman had her place. Born the only child to the founder of one of Chicago’s largest street organizations, Dai Break Jones accepted her position of royalty, and stood toe to toe against all foes. More Boy than Girl is Street Lit at its finest. It is a hard core story, about a hard core world.
Penknife Press |
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When I first got to Progress, it freaked me out to be locked in a room and unable to get out. But after a while, when you got to thinking about it, you knew nobody could get in, either.
It seems as if the only progress that’s going on at Progress juvenile facility is moving from juvy jail to real jail. Reese wants out early, but is he supposed to just sit back and let his friend Toon get jumped? Then Reese gets a second chance when he’s picked for the work program at a senior citizens’ home. He doesn’t mean to keep messing up, but it’s not so easy, at Progress or in life. One of the residents, Mr. Hooft, gives him a particularly hard time. If he can convince Mr. Hooft that he’s a decent person, not a criminal, maybe he’ll be able to convince himself. Acclaimed author Walter Dean Myers offers an honest story about finding a way to make it without getting lost in the shuffle. Amistad |
Lockdown Walter Dean Myers Amistad February 1, 2010 Hardcover
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A drug deal goes south and a cop has been shot. Lil J’s on the run. And he’s starting to get dope sick. He’d do anything to change the last twenty-four hours, and when he stumbles into an abandoned building, it actually might be possible. . . .
Elements of magical realism intensify this harrowing story about drug use, violence, perceptions of reality, and second chances. Amistad |
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New York Times bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey returns with a flaming-hot stand-alone set in the world of con men and thieves.
We can plan all we want, but sometimes fate has a different agenda… Dmytryk was a respectable man…once. College educated, happily married, a stable job at a car factory in Detroit. He’s the king of the world with nowhere to go but up. But when a crippling recession annihilates the auto industry, Dmytryk and his wife Cora suddenly find themselves without jobs. And after two years of trying to live honestly, they begin to realize that honesty just doesn’t pay the bills. Afraid of losing her home and her marriage, Cora compromises her faith and makes some choices that she isn’t proud of. And when a powerful and ruthless crime boss named Eddie Coyle gives them an opportunity to buy back their old lives, Cora urges Dmytryk to man up. All he has to do is join Eddie’s crime ring and rob some banks: two minutes, in and out, nobody gets hurt. Torn between desperation and his moral integrity, Dmytryk gives in, but no sooner does he enter a life of crime than Cora abandons him, taking with her his dreams for a better life and disappearing without a trace. Now, more determined than ever to get his life back on track, Dmytryk is only one bank job away from having enough money to leave Eddie Coyle and find Cora. But when the job goes dangerously wrong, he realizes yet again that destiny has another plan for him. Forced into seclusion with one of his partners-a dangerous and damaged woman with a plan of her own-Dmytryk wonders if he’ll ever find his way back to his old life. And in the end, will he even want to? Dutton Adult |
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The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Race, Class and Crime in America Charles Ogletree Palgrave Macmillan Shortly after noon on Tuesday, July 16, 2009, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., MacArthur Fellow and Harvard professor, was mistakenly arrested by Cambridge police sergeant James Crowley for attempting to break into his own home. The ensuing media firestorm ignited debate across the country. The Crowley-Gates incident was a clash of absolutes, underscoring the tension between black and white, police and civilians, and the privileged and less privileged in modern America. Charles Ogletree, one of the country’s foremost experts on civil rights, uses this incident as a lens through which to explore issues of race, class, and crime, with the goal of creating a more just legal system for all. Working from years of research and based on his own classes and experiences with law enforcement, the author illuminates the steps needed to embark on the long journey toward racial and legal equality for all Americans. |
The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates
by Wes Moore
Spiegel & Grau
Available April 27, 2010 in Hardcover
Two kids with the same name lived in the same decaying city. One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison. Here is the story of two boys and the journey of a generation.
In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a series of articles about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One was named Wes Moore.
Wes just couldn’t shake off the unsettling coincidence, or the inkling that the two shared much more than space in the same newspaper. After following the story of the robbery, the manhunt, and the trial to its conclusion, he wrote a letter to the other Wes, now a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. His letter tentatively asked the questions that had been haunting him: Who are you? How did this happen?
That letter led to a correspondence and relationship that have lasted for several years. Over dozens of letters and prison visits, Wes discovered that the other Wes had had a life not unlike his own: Both had grown up in similar neighborhoods and had had difficult childhoods, both were fatherless; they’d hung out on similar corners with similar crews, and both had run into trouble with the police. At each stage of their young lives they had come across similar moments of decision, yet their choices would lead them to astonishingly different destinies.
Told in alternating dramatic narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world.
In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance
by Wilbert Rideau
Knopf
Available April 27, 2010 in Hardcover
From Wilbert Rideau, the award-winning journalist who spent forty-four years in Louisiana prisons working against unimaginable odds to redeem himself, the story of a remarkable life: a crime, its punishment, and ultimate triumph.
After killing a woman in a moment of panic following a botched bank robbery, Rideau, denied a fair trial, was improperly sentenced to death at the age of nineteen. After more than a decade on death row, his sentence was amended to life imprisonment, and he joined the inmate population of the infamous Angola penitentiary. Soon Rideau became editor of the prison newsmagazine The Angolite, which under his leadership became an uncensored, daring, and crusading journal instrumental in reforming the violent prison and the corrupt Louisiana justice system.
With the same incisive feel for detail that brought Rideau great critical acclaim, here he brings to vivid life the world of the prison through the power of his pen. We see Angola’s unique culture, encompassing not only rivalries, sexual slavery, ingrained racism, and daily, soul-killing injustices but also acts of courage and decency by keeper and kept alike. As we relive Rideau’s remarkable rehabilitation — he lived a more productive life in prison than do most outside — we also witness his long struggle for justice. In the Place of Justice goes far beyond the confines of a prison memoir, giving us a searing expose of the failures of our legal system framed within the dramatic tale of a man who found meaning, purpose, and hope in prison. This is a deeply moving, eloquent, and inspirational story about perseverance, unexpected friendships and love, and the possibility that good can be forged under any circumstances.