The Black Widower

Author: Michael Fleeman

Category: General Nonfiction

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Deal starts: August 05, 2025

Deal ends: August 05, 2025

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She was his second wife—to die. . . Coming off a failed marriage, a beautiful woman named Toni joined an online dating site, hoping to find true and lasting love. Harold Henthorn seemed like her dream come true—a handsome man who said he had "a heart for others." Only weeks after meeting, they were wed. But Toni's family began noticing Harold's dark side—especially his controlling nature, which Toni didn't seem to mind. Until she met her end at the bottom of a ravine. . .Was he a grieving husband—or a black widower? Harold's tearful story of his wife's hiking "accident" just didn't hold up with Toni's family—or the police. Then a shocking truth was uncovered: twenty years before, Harold's first wife had also died suspiciously in a remote area with no witnesses. Soon, more questions arose: Who was Harold Henthorn—a devoted, grief-stricken husband or a cold, calculating killer? Could authorities find a way to connect his wives' deaths and expose the truth?

Thus Spoke the Plant

Author: Monica Gagliano

Category: General Nonfiction

Regular price: $12.99

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Deal starts: August 01, 2025

Deal ends: August 01, 2025

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Studying plant intelligence reveals “humans may have been misunderstanding plants, and ourselves, for all of history”—for fans of The Hidden Life of Trees (Paris Review).“A compelling story of discovery . . . It will change the way you see the world.” —Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass In this “phytobiography”—a collection of stories written in partnership with a plant—research scientist Monica Gagliano shares genuine first-hand accounts from her research into plant communication and cognition.   By transcending the view of plants as the objects of scientific materialism, Gagliano encourages us to rethink plants as people—beings with subjectivity, consciousness, and volition, and hence having the capacity for their own perspectives and voices. The book draws on up-close-and-personal encounters with the plants themselves, as well as plant shamans, indigenous elders, and mystics from around the world and integrates these experiences with an incredible research journey and the groundbreaking scientific discoveries that emerged from it.   Gagliano has published numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers on how plants have a Pavlov-like response to stimuli and can learn, remember, and communicate to neighboring plants. She has pioneered the brand-new research field of plant bioacoustics, for the first time experimentally demonstrating that plants emit their own 'voices' and, moreover, detect and respond to the sounds of their environments. By demonstrating experimentally that learning is not the exclusive province of animals, Gagliano has re-ignited the discourse on plant subjectivity and ethical and legal standing. This is the story of how she made those discoveries and how the plants helped her along the way.

The Murder of Dr. Chapman

Author: Linda Wolfe

Category: General Nonfiction

Regular price: $9.99

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Deal starts: July 30, 2025

Deal ends: July 30, 2025

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In this "first-rate blending of true-crime, character-study and history" a 19th-century love con leads to murder and a sensational double trial (Susan Isaacs, New York Times–bestselling author of Compromising Positions). In 1831 Lucretia Winslow Chapman was a wife and mother of five who had founded one of Philadelphia's first boarding schools for girls. But her comfortable life and marriage to prominent local scientist William Chapman changed forever the night Lino Espos y Mina appeared at their door, requesting lodging. It wasn't long before the Cuban con artist had entrenched himself in the Chapman home and begun an illicit affair with Lucretia. A little over a month later, William Chapman was dead from a lethal dose of poison. Lino and Lucretia were eventually arrested and charged with murder—and the double trial of the century began.   Wolfe skillfully weaves court transcripts, love letters, and period recollections into an edge-of-your-seat historical thriller about the crime that rocked pre–Civil War America. With its shocking verdicts that raised troubling questions about sexism and racism, this mesmerizing true-crime tale still resonates nearly two hundred years later.

Everybody’s Best Friend

Author: Ken Englade

Category: General Nonfiction

Regular price: $9.99

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Deal starts: July 29, 2025

Deal ends: July 29, 2025

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The shocking 1997 murder that exposed a devoted Philadelphia husband as a cold-hearted killer, from the author of A Family Business and Hot Blood."[Engalde is] one of the most astute observers of America's wild side." —Jack Olsen, New York Times–bestselling authorInside a beautiful house in Philadelphia's ritzy Main Line section lay the body of a young mother—dead of an apparent drowning in her bathtub. With no sign of a break-in, no history of marital problems, and the naïve belief that these things sometimes just happen, Stefanie Rabinowitz's family prepared to bury the twenty-nine-year-old wife and mother. But because Stefanie was so young, and because there were no witnesses to her death, an autopsy was ordered at the eleventh hour. And what it revealed was unthinkable: Stefanie had been murdered—strangled in her home, then dragged into the tub to stage a fake drowning. Even more shocking was the suspected killer—Stefanie's thirty-four-year-old husband, Craig: devoted family man, loyal husband, and "everybody's best friend."When the astounding truth began to emerge, so did the tawdry double life of Craig Rabinowitz, a man so obsessed with a two-thousand-dollar-a-week exotic dancer, that his habit caused him to look to the insurance money he would get from murdering his wife. Now, with exclusive interviews and startling inside details, bestselling author Ken Englade blows wide open the shocking true account of a storybook marriage that ended in bone-chilling murder.

Pathological

Author: Henry J. Cordes

Category: General Nonfiction

Regular price: $9.99

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Deal starts: July 26, 2025

Deal ends: July 26, 2025

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A horrific account of the murders, investigation, and trial of the serial killer doctor known as the "Creighton Killer." "A powerful and compelling story."—The Haunted Reading Room Detective Derek Mois wasn't sure what he was dealing with when in March 2008 he walked into a home in an affluent Omaha neighborhood and was confronted with the bodies of an 11-year-old boy and the housekeeper. Both had been murdered with kitchen knives plunged into their throats. Who would do something so vile—and why? Lacking answers, Mois and other detectives working the case were stumped. Five years later, a strikingly similar crime occurred in which two more victims were brutally murdered with knives expertly thrust into their jugular veins. The modus operandi of the murders pointed Mois and a special task force in the direction of looking for a serial killer. But no one could have anticipated that path would lead to the Department of Pathology at Creighton University. In Pathological: The Murderous Rage of Dr. Anthony Garcia, authors Henry J. Cordes and Todd Cooper, who covered the story for the Omaha World-Herald, recount the dramatic tale of deep-seated revenge, determined detectives, and the sensational trial of the doctor-turned-serial killer.

Fred & Rose

Author: Howard Sounes

Category: General Nonfiction

Regular price: $11.99

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Deal starts: July 25, 2025

Deal ends: July 25, 2025

Description:

The definitive account of one of Britain's most notorious killer couples, who loved, tortured, and slayed together as husband and wife—from the Senior Producer of Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story, now on Netflix.Updated with a new afterword from the author on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the arrestsFrom the outside, 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, England, looked as commonplace as the married couple who lived there. But in 1994, Fred and Rose West's home would become infamous as a "house of horrors" when the remains of nine young women—many of them decapitated, dismembered, and showing evidence of sexual torture—were found interred under its cellar, bathroom floor, and garden. And this wasn't the only burial ground: Fred's first wife and nanny were unearthed miles away in a field, while his eight-year-old stepdaughter was found entombed under the Wests' former residence.Yet, for more than twenty years, the twosome maintained a façade of normalcy while abusing and murdering female boarders, hitchhikers, and members of their own family. Howard Sounes, who first broke the story about the Wests as a journalist and covered the murder trial, has written a comprehensive account of the case. Beginning with Fred and Rose's bizarre childhoods, Sounes charts their lives and crimes in forensic detail, constructing a fascinating and frightening tale of a marriage soaked in blood. Indeed, the total number of the Wests' victims may never be known.A case reminiscent of the "Moors Murders" committed in the 1960s in Manchester by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady—as if Hindley and Brady had married and kept on killing for decades—Fred & Rose "is a story of obsessive love as well as obsessive murder" (The Times, London).