In 1900, Margaret Hossack, the wife of a prominent Iowa farmer, was arrested for bludgeoning her husband to death with an ax while their children slept upstairs. The community was outraged: How could a woman commit such an act of violence? Firsthand accounts describe the victim, John Hossack, as a cruel and unstable man. Perhaps Margaret Hossack was acting out of fear. Or perhaps the story she told was true—that an intruder broke into the house, killed her husband while she slept soundly beside him, and was still on the loose. Newspapers across the country carried the story, and community sentiment was divided over her guilt. At trial, Margaret was convicted of murder, but later was released on appeal. Ultimately, neither her innocence nor her guilt was ever proved. Patricia Bryan and Thomas Wolf examine the harsh realities of farm life at the turn of the century and look at the plight of women—legally, socially, and politically—during that period. What also emerges is the story of early feminist Susan Glaspell, who covered the Hossack case as a young reporter and later used it as the basis for her acclaimed work " A Jury of Her Peers." Midnight Assassin expertly renders the American character and experience: our obsession with crime, how justice is achieved, and the powerful influence of the media.

A New York Times bestseller and the basis for the Netflix film 22 July: "A chilling descent into the mind of mass murderer Anders Breivik." —Kirkus ReviewsOne of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside the Norwegian prime minister's office in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the wooded island of Utøya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenage members of the country's governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and its reverberations. How did Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become Europe's most reviled terrorist? How did he accomplish an astonishing one-man murder spree? And how did a famously peaceful and prosperous country cope with the slaughter of so many of its young?Delving deep into Breivik's childhood, Seierstad shows how a hip-hop and graffiti aficionado became a right-wing activist, a successful entrepreneur, and then an Internet game addict and self-styled master warrior who believed he could save Europe from the threat of Islam and multiculturalism. She writes with equal intimacy about Breivik's victims, tracing their political awakenings, teenage flirtations and hopes, and ill-fated journeys to the island. In the book's final act, Seierstad describes Breivik's tumultuous public trial.Lauded in Scandinavia for its literary merit and moral poise, One of Us is at once a psychological study of violent extremism, a dramatic true crime procedural, and a compassionate inquiry into how a privileged society copes with homegrown evil.

Atrue crime account of a woman who conspired with her teenage lover and his two friends to brutally murder her husband.They met while working together at a Taco Bell in Augusta, Georgia: seventeen-year-old Larry Kelley and thirty-one-year-old wife and mother Gina Spann. Their unusual friendship soon blossomed into something much more when Gina invited Larry to live with her, her husband Kevin, and their teenage son. While Kevin slept in a back room of the house, Larry and Gina shared the master bedroom, flaunting their love in front of Kevin.But it didn't stop there. Gina enlisted Larry and three of his friends to murder her husband and cash in on his $300,000 life insurance policy. So on Mother's Day of 1997, two teenagers knocked on the Spanns' door, and when Kevin opened it, shot him point-blank. As Kevin Spann's lifeless body hit the ground, his two assassins sauntered away casually.Police zeroed in on the motley crew soon enough—and each would pay heavily for their crime. Gina, Larry, and two of his friends would each receive life sentences for the ruthless murder of Kevin Spann. In a case as twisted and shocking as fiction, bestselling author Wensley Clarkson explores this volatile web of sex, greed, and murder that ended in deadly disaster.

A San Antonio woman's baffling disappearance leads police to suspect her husband of murder in this dramatic true crime exposé.Susan McFarland was a vivacious, successful mother of three young sons. On November 25, 2002, she disappeared. Three days later, her car was found, keys in the ignition. Later that day, her husband reported her missing—and a desperate search began.Her friends and family hoped against hope that Susan was not gone forever. But investigators became increasingly suspicious of Richard McFarland. When the charred, decomposed body of Susan McFarland was finally discovered at an overgrown farmstead outside of San Antonio, a new hunt began—for justice.McFarland maintained his innocence, and investigators only had circumstantial evidence against him. While headlines screamed out new details in the case, and police tried to gather more evidence, a blockbuster trial was about to begin. Then, Richard McFarland finally spoke . . . and a terrifying, chilling truth came out . . .

In this memoir of true crime and survival, a woman recounts the remarkable story of her father's murderous rampage and how she was left for dead.On April 14, 1989, in California's idyllic Sonoma Valley, Mexican immigrant Ramón Salcido went on a rampage, killing his wife, her two younger sisters, his mother-in-law, and his wife's suspected lover. Then he slashed the throats of his three young daughters—ages four years, three years, and twenty-two months—and left them for dead in the county dump. A day later, when the children's bodies were finally discovered, three-year-old Carmina was miraculously still alive. "Daddy cut me," she told her rescuers.In Not Lost Forever, Carmina Salcido reaches back into her traumatic past to reconstruct, in sobering detail, her father's crimes and their aftermath. Recalling with clear-eyed candor, courage, and grace the horrific event and troubled childhood that followed, a remarkable young woman carries readers along on her miraculous journey of survival, discovery, and hope.

A family tragedy propels this gripping true crime debut as a mother searches for answers in the shocking murder of her husband—and conviction of her son.In the early morning of October 18, 1986, Cherie Wier’s life collapses when her teenage son takes the life of her beloved husband. For years, Cherie grapples with events preceding and following the crime, struggling to overcome the consuming grief she suffers from her loss and the difficulty she faces as she attempts to forgive her son. The courtroom accounts of gruesome details and the shocking testimonies from experts, only add to Cherie’s yearning to make sense of the crime. She is tormented, wanting to know how and WHY this tragedy happened and if there was anything she could have done to prevent it . . .