Showing titles in Abductions, Kidnapping & Missing Persons

Perfect for readers of Jon Krakauer and Douglas Preston, this "authentic and encyclopedic" book examines real-life cases of those who vanish in the wilderness without a trace (Roman Dial)—and those eccentric, determined characters who try to find them. These are the stories that defy...

An instant #1 New York Times bestseller—Jaycee Dugard’s raw and powerful memoir, her own story of being kidnapped in 1991 and held captive for more than eighteen years. In the summer of June of 1991, I was a normal kid. I did normal things. I had friends and a mother that loved me. I was...

In Volume #1: Ritual Killers we look into the minds of criminals who formed their own justifications for committing the ultimate act of murder. These killers were compelled to repeatedly follow their personal rituals before, during, and after crimes. Many believing they were protected by supernatural forces, some trying to re-live a sick memory, and others were cunning and methodical planners avoiding detection.

On a cold December evening in 2016 a terrified young woman turns up at a brothel in Germany with a French passport but doesn’t speak a word of French. The owner is suspicious and alerts the German authorities, igniting a groundbreaking and history-making global investigation where ancient rituals collide with the modern world of crime fighting.

Liv Anderson can take care of herself, and she knows how to make money in a man's world. The daughter of a convicted murderer, she's made her way in one of the roughest parts of London by entrapping men and extorting them for money. But Liv is playing a dangerous game and soon finds herself in trouble with the city's most notorious gangster.

Josef Fritzl was a 73-year-old retired engineer in Austria. He seemed to be living a normal life with his wife, Rosemarie, and their family - though one daughter, Elisabeth, had decades earlier been "lost" to a religious cult. Throughout the years, three of Elisabeth's children mysteriously appeared on the Fritzls' doorstep; Josef and Rosemarie raised them as their own. But only Josef knew the truth about Elisabeth's disappearance.... For 27 years, Josef had imprisoned and molested Elisabeth in his man-made basement dungeon.

John Edward Robinson was a 56-year-old grandfather from rural Kansas. An entrepreneur and Eagle Scout, he was even honored as "Man of the Year" at a Kansas City charity. To some of the women he met on the internet, he was known as Slavemaster - a sexual deviate with a taste for sadomasochistic rituals of extreme domination and torture...even killing. 

'From cold cases and serial killers to the death of a spy, Peter's true life story is as gripping as the finest thriller' – Peter James, bestselling author of One of Us Is Dead Discover the truth beyond the police tape in What Lies Beneath, the arresting memoir of murder, investigation and...

Margot Davies is an aspiring investigative journalist stuck in a rudderless job at a small-time newspaper, until one night she stumbles upon a new development in an unsolved, decades-old case that took place in her very own hometown: the infamous murder of six-year-old January Jacobs. With this new information come to light, Margot quickly becomes obsessed with solving the case. She packs up and heads back to the hometown she left at eight years old, hoping to bring justice to January, who was discovered dead in a ditch only hours after her family awoke to find her gone.

'Tony is the real deal.' Andy McNab Sierra Leone, 2000. While on patrol as part of a peacekeeping mission, eleven British soldiers are kidnapped. The captors are a dangerous rebel group known as the West Side Boys. Fuelled by alcohol and drugs, the behaviour of the rebels is notoriously...

In January 1959, ten experienced young skiers set out to travel to a mountain named Mount Otorten in the far north of Russia. During the trip, one of the skiers fell ill and returned. The remaining nine lost their way and ended up on another mountain slope known as Kholat Syakhl, or "Mountain of the Dead."

Seventeen-year-old Haley McWaid never gave her parents a moment's worry. Until one morning her mother wakes to find that Haley didn't come home the night before. Three months quickly pass without a word, and everyone assumes the worst. Wendy Tynes is a reporter on a mission: to identify and...

A psychopathic criminal on the run from prison. A family of five held hostage in their home. A frantic police manhunt across the snowbound Derbyshire moors. Just one survivor. The definitive account of the terrifying 1977 Pottery Cottage murders that shocked Britain. For three days, escaped prisoner Billy Hughes played macabre psychological games with Gill Moran and her family, keeping them in separate rooms of their home while secretly murdering them one by one.

In May 2005, authorities discovered the Groene family murdered in their Idaho home. The family’s youngest members—eight-year-old Shasta and her brother, nine-year-old Dylan—were nowhere to be found. As a community prayed for their return, Shasta and Dylan were already miles away in the woods of Montana at the hands of serial killer Joseph Edward Duncan. After a harrowing forty-eight day ordeal, Shasta was rescued. In many ways, her survival story was only beginning.

As investigators brought out the bagged remains of several dozen young men from a small Chicago ranch home and paraded them in front of a crowd of TV reporters and spectators, attention quickly turned to the owner of the house. John Gacy was an upstanding citizen, active in local politics and charities, famous for his themed parties and appearances as Pogo the Clown. But in the winter of 1978-79, he became known as one of many so-called “sex murderers” who had begun gaining notoriety in the random brutality of the 1970s.

After more than a decade, when sisters Nikki, Sami, and Tori Knotek hear the word mom, it claws like an eagle’s talons, triggering memories that have been their secret since childhood. Until now. For years, behind the closed doors of their farmhouse in Raymond, Washington, their sadistic mother, Shelly, subjected her girls to unimaginable abuse, degradation, torture, and psychic terrors. Through it all, Nikki, Sami, and Tori developed a defiant bond that made them far less vulnerable than Shelly imagined.

The book focuses on the 1978 disappearance of Genette Tate. The 13-year-old schoolgirl vanished while out delivering newspapers on her bicycle in the Exeter countryside; no trace of her was ever discovered. With new and rarely seen comments from family, police and inside the courtroom, the story links her case to the earlier abductions of April Fabb (also 13), Christine Markham (9) and Mary Boyle (6).

With a boom in cold-blooded cases throughout the 1980s, police began to rely on DNA evidence to help them find perpetrators, and since then forensic science has taken off as a powerful tool in solving murders. Best-selling true-crime author Wensley Clarkson takes us beyond the headlines to examine the real-life stories where forensics have played a crucial role. He speaks to experts who have worked on the most gruesome, most chilling and most shocking crime scenes and explains how notorious criminal cases from across the world were solved.

My name is Nora Logue. You’ve probably heard of me – most people have. I am the mother of Daisy Logue. Seven years ago, I took her for a walk in the woods. Only I came out. I have no memory of what happened that day. I have tried to rebuild my life. Met a man, had another child – Luca. But I can’t let go of Daisy, or give up hope of seeing her again. And now, I have the chance to find out what happened to her. But what if pursuing the truth about my daughter risks my son’s life?

In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker, investigated a woman's claim that, aged four, she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. At first incredulous, Margaret discovered that this was just the tip of an enormous iceberg. Up to 150,000 children, some as young as three years old, had been deported from children's homes in Britain and shipped off to a 'new life' in distant parts of the Empire, right up until as recently as 1970. Many were told that their parents were dead, and parents were told that their children had been adopted.