Books like The Falcon Thief by Joshua Hammer

A real crime that shook a London museum: a young American musician steals hundreds of historic bird skins, sparking a 2009 investigation that leads author Kirk Wallace Johnson to pursue justice.

Robert Putnam's seminal work on the decline of community in America, focusing on the impact of the decline of bowling leagues and the loss of social capital.

Ian Urbina exposes the hidden world of ocean crime—from piracy to slave trade—revealing how the fishing, oil, and shipping industries fuel global exploitation.

Tim Cahill's *Buried Dreams* brings to life the brutal crimes of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Jr., revealing the complex personality behind his twisted atrocities.

Born 1880. Shot dead 1911. Buried 1997. In life Elmer McCurdy was a plumber-cum-miner who jumped a train and drifted west across America on the back of an infectious, turn-of-the-century optimism. He was a drunk too and, soon enough, a failed outlaw. In 1911, after a short spree of failed robberies, he held up the wrong train and rode away with a haul that was described by papers as "one of the smallest in the history of train robbery." It wasn't long before the sheriff and his posse caught up with him and shot him dead. At this point McCurdy, like us all, should have slipped into the earth and quietly from memory. But, in death, he accidentally found fame. From the Joseph Johnson Funeral Home, where the owner propped up McCurdy's preserved corpse and charged a nickel-a-look, to the sideshows of the Great Patterson Carnival where he was exhibited as a felled outlaw, McCurdy became big business. In 1928 he was the star attraction in a carnival that accompanied an extraordinary transcontinental running race from Los Angeles to New York. In the 30s and 40s, he was reinvented as a prop for a series of Hollywood exploitation films like Dwain (Reefer Madness) Esper's film Narcotic, before winding up painted day-glow orange and hanging by his neck in the Laff in the Dark ghost tunnel in Long Beach, California. It was here, in 1976, during the filming of an episode of The six Million Dollar Man, that Elmer was rescued from his strange journey, a forgotten corpse as light as tinderwood. In his mouth the coroner discovered a green, corroded 1924 penny and a ticket stub that read "Louis Sonney's Museum of Crime". Mark Svenvold tells the bizarre story of this quixotic American anti-hero and the journey through the 20th century of his embalmed remains. A travel book, an exposition of the exotic corners of the entertainment industry, a meditation on death and its meanings and one of the most daring biographies of recent times, Elmer McCurdy brilliantly reveals America's deepest obsessions and how they have changed. - Jacket flap.

A groundbreaking English course on gay identity created by a leading LGBTQ studies scholar, now published as a book.

Philip Weiss investigates the 1975 murder of Peace Corps volunteer Deb Gardner in Tonga, uncovering a scandal that rattled American volunteers and government officials and exposing the clash between duty, ethics and personal violence.

An investigative account of corrupt practices in the New York criminal justice system, detailing sex crimes, human trafficking and the influence of powerful financiers.