Killer on the Road

Killer on the Road PDF Author: James Ellroy
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 038080896X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Martin Michael Plunkett is a product of his times -- the possessor of a genius intellect, a pitiless soul of brushed steel, and a heart of blackest evil. With criminal tendencies forged in the fires of L.A.'s Charles Manson hysteria, he comes to the bay city of San Francisco -- and submits to savage and terrible impulses that reveal to him his true vocation as a pure and perfect murderer. And so begins his decade of discovery and terror, as he cuts a bloody swath across the full length of a land, ingeniously exploiting and feeding upon a society's obsessions. As he maneuvers deftly through a seamy world of drugs, flesh, and perversions, the media will call him many things -- but Martin Plunkett's real name is Death. His brilliant, twisted mind is a horriying place to explore. His madness reflects a nation's own. The killer is on the road. And there's nowhere in America to hide.

Killer on the Road

Killer on the Road PDF Author: James Ellroy
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 038080896X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Martin Michael Plunkett is a product of his times -- the possessor of a genius intellect, a pitiless soul of brushed steel, and a heart of blackest evil. With criminal tendencies forged in the fires of L.A.'s Charles Manson hysteria, he comes to the bay city of San Francisco -- and submits to savage and terrible impulses that reveal to him his true vocation as a pure and perfect murderer. And so begins his decade of discovery and terror, as he cuts a bloody swath across the full length of a land, ingeniously exploiting and feeding upon a society's obsessions. As he maneuvers deftly through a seamy world of drugs, flesh, and perversions, the media will call him many things -- but Martin Plunkett's real name is Death. His brilliant, twisted mind is a horriying place to explore. His madness reflects a nation's own. The killer is on the road. And there's nowhere in America to hide.

Killer on the Road

Killer on the Road PDF Author: Ginger Strand
Publisher: Univ of TX + ORM
ISBN: 029274210X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
True crime meets cultural history in this story of how America’s interstate highway system opened a world of mobility and opportunity . . . for serial killers. Starting in the 1950s, Americans eagerly built the planet’s largest public work: the 42,795-mile National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Before the concrete was dry on the new roads, however, a specter began haunting them: the highway killer. He went by many names: the “Hitcher,” the “Freeway Killer,” the “Killer on the Road,” the “I-5 Strangler,” and the “Beltway Sniper.” Some of these criminals were imagined, but many were real. The nation’s murder rate shot up as its expressways were built. America became more violent and more mobile at the same time. Killer on the Road tells the entwined stories of America’s highways and its highway killers. There’s the hot-rodding juvenile delinquent who led the National Guard on a multistate manhunt; the wannabe highway patrolman who murdered hitchhiking coeds; the record promoter who preyed on “ghetto kids” in a city reshaped by freeways; the nondescript married man who stalked the interstates seeking women with car trouble; and the trucker who delivered death with his cargo. Thudding away behind these grisly crime sprees is the story of the interstates—how they were sold, how they were built, how they reshaped the nation—and how we came to equate them with violence. Through the stories of highway killers, we see how the “killer on the road,” like the train robber, the gangster, and the mobster, entered the cast of American outlaws, and how the freeway—conceived as a road to utopia—came to be feared as a highway to hell. “Strand . . . Explores the connection between America’s sprawling highway system and the pathology of the murderers who have made them a killing ground. . . . The grim stories of murder on the highway may do for road trips what Jaws did for surfing. An interesting detour into a true-crime niche.” ―Kirkus Reviews “Strand’s cross-threaded tales of drifters, stranded motorists, and madmen got its hooks into me. Reading Ms. Strand’s thoughtful book is like driving a Nash Rambler after midnight on a highway to hell.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times “A titillating, clever volume that mixes the sweeping sociological assertions of an urban-studies textbook with the chilling gore of true-crime stories.” —Bookforum “Ginger Strand is in possession of a sharp eye, a biting wit, a beguiling sense of fun—and a magnificent obsession.” —Bloomberg

Shallow Graves

Shallow Graves PDF Author: Maureen Boyle
Publisher: University Press of New England
ISBN: 1512601276
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Eleven women went missing over the spring and summer of 1988 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, an old fishing port known as the Whaling City, where Moby Dick, Frederick Douglass, textile mills, and heroin-dealing represent just a few of the many threads in the community's diverse fabric. In Shallow Graves, investigative reporter Maureen Boyle tells the story of a case that has haunted New England for thirty years. The Crimes: The skeletal remains of nine of the women, aged nineteen to thirty-six, were discovered near highways around New Bedford. Some had clearly been strangled, others were so badly decomposed that police were left to guess how they had died. The Victims: All the missing women had led troubled lives of drug addiction, prostitution, and domestic violence, including Nancy Paiva, whose sister was a hard-working employee of the City of New Bedford, and Debra Greenlaw DeMello, who came from a solidly middle-class family but fell into drugs and abusive relationships. In a bizarre twist, Paiva's clothes were found near DeMello's body. The Investigators: Massachusetts state troopers Maryann Dill and Jose Gonsalves were the two constants in a complex cast of city, county, and state cops and prosecutors. They knew the victims, the suspects, and the drug-and-crime-riddled streets of New Bedford. They were present at the beginning of the case and they stayed to the bitter end. The Suspects: Kenneth Ponte, a New Bedford attorney and deputy sheriff with an appetite for drugs and prostitutes, landed in the investigative crosshairs from the start. He was indicted by a grand jury in the murder of one of the victims, but those charges were later dropped. Anthony DeGrazia was a loner who appeared to fit the classic serial-killer profile: horrific childhood abuse, charming, charismatic, but prone to bursts of violence. He hunted prostitutes in the city by night and served at a Catholic church by day. Which of these two was the real killer? Or was it someone else entirely? Maureen Boyle first broke the story in 1988 and stayed with it for decades. In Shallow Graves she spins a riveting narrative about the crimes, the victims, the hunt for the killers, and the search for justice, all played out against the backdrop of an increasingly impoverished community beset by drugs and crime. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews, along with police reports, first-person accounts, and field reporting both during the killings and more recently, Shallow Graves brings the reader behind the scenes of the investigation, onto the streets of the city, and into the homes of the families still hoping for answers.

Silent Terror

Silent Terror PDF Author: James Ellroy
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099539705
Category : Confession stories
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
In this crime novel, there is a man on the loose in America. A man who kills for the sheer pleasure of spilling blood. A man who rearranges the mutilated bodies of his victims in positions that, to him, have the purity of art. The author also wrote The Big Nowhere and Suicide Hill.

The Road of the Dead

The Road of the Dead PDF Author: Kevin Brooks
Publisher: Chicken House
ISBN: 1908435720
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Late one night, two brothers learn that their sister has died in the worst way imaginable. She's found strangled, hundreds of miles from home. Ruben is the smarter of the two, with a gift for getting into other people's hearts. Cole doesn't care if he lives or dies. Together they set out to find their own answers and retrace Rachel's final journey.

Redemption Road

Redemption Road PDF Author: John Hart
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0312380364
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
"Imagine: A boy with a gun waits for the man who killed his mother. A troubled detective confronts her past in the aftermath of a brutal shooting. After thirteen years in prison, a good cop walks free. But for how long? And deep in the forest, on the altar of an abandoned church, the unthinkable has just happened... This is a town on the brink. This is a road with no mercy."--

I Am Not A Serial Killer

I Am Not A Serial Killer PDF Author: Dan Wells
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 9780765362360
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
John Wayne Cheever keeps his obsession with serial killers in check by a set of rigid rules that he lives by, hoping to the prevent himself from committing murder, but when a body turns up at a laundromat, must confront a danger outside himself.

The I-5 Killer

The I-5 Killer PDF Author: Ann Rule
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593441370
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
"Previously publisher under the pseudonym Andy Stack."--Title page verso.

The Road Out of Hell

The Road Out of Hell PDF Author: Anthony Flacco
Publisher: Diversion Books
ISBN: 1626811725
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
The New York Times–bestselling author’s “haunting, compassionate, and terrifyingly true” story of a man breaking free from his notorious past (Gregg Olson, New York Times–bestselling author of Starvation Heights). From 1926 to 1928, Gordon Stewart Northcott committed at least twenty murders on a chicken ranch outside of Los Angeles. He held his nephew, Sanford Clark, captive there from the age of thirteen to fifteen. Sanford would be Northcott’s sole surviving victim. Forced by Northcott to take part in the murders, he carried tremendous guilt all his life. Yet despite his youth and the trauma he endured, Sanford helped gain justice for the dead and their families by testifying at the trial that led to Northcott’s execution. These shocking events inspired Clint Eastwood’s film The Changeling. But in The Road Out of Hell, acclaimed crime writer Anthony Flacco uses revelatory new accounts from Sanford’s son to tell the complete, true story. Going beyond the film’s narrative, Flacco recounts not only Sanford’s nightmarish captivity, but also the inspiring life he led afterward. In dramatizing one of the darkest cases in American crime, Flacco constructs a riveting psychological drama about how Sanford was able to detoxify himself from the evil he’d encountered, offering the ultimately redemptive story of one man’s remarkable ability to survive hell on earth and emerge intact.

Paper Ghosts

Paper Ghosts PDF Author: Julia Heaberlin
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0804178046
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
A Texas map marked with three red dots like drops of blood. A serial killer who claims to have dementia. A mysterious young woman who wants answers. What could go wrong? FINALIST FOR THE ITW THRILLER AWARD • “Fast and furious . . . You’ll never see what’s coming.”—The Washington Post Years ago, her sister Rachel vanished. Now she is almost certain the man who took Rachel sits in the passenger seat beside her. He claims to have dementia and no memory of murdering girls across Texas in a string of places where he shot eerie pictures. To find the truth, she proposes a dangerous idea: a ten-day road trip with a possible serial killer to examine cold cases linked to his haunting photographs. Is he a liar or a broken old man? Is he a pathological con artist—or is she? You won’t see the final, terrifying twist spinning your way until the very last mile. Praise for Paper Ghosts “Paper Ghosts is a riveting summer read that shows Texas in a powerfully intimate light.” —The Austin Chronicle “[An] artful and elegiac psychological thriller . . . riveting.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “[Paper Ghosts] elevates the often tawdry genre of the serial killer novel to a work of art.”—Sunday Express (UK) “Texas has yet again bred a major American noir writer.”—D Magazine “[Heaberlin has] developed a distinctive literary voice, one that is on full display in Paper Ghosts.”—Houston Chronicle “Entertainingly unnerving.”—The Dallas Morning News “Strong characterisation, haunting images, a wonderful sense of place, and some dark comedy make this travelogue-cum-psychological thriller well worth the read.”—The Guardian