Summary of Ben Oakley's Bizarre True Crime Volume 1

Summary of Ben Oakley's Bizarre True Crime Volume 1
Author: Everest Media,
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
Total Pages: 37
Release: 2022-07-30T23:00:00Z
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 Charles Walton, a 74-year-old local gardener and hedge cutter, was murdered in 1945. His body was found the same night on Firs Farm, on Meon Hill, Warwickshire. His death remains the oldest unsolved murder in Warwickshire. #2 Charles Walton, an old man who lived on his own, had been murdered. He had been beaten with his own stick and his neck had been cut open with the cutting hook. The pitchfork had been driven through his neck, pinning him to the ground, and the cutting hook was left embedded in the side of his neck. #3 The police arrested Alfred Potter, the local farmer, for the murder. He had been drinking with another farmer, and had seen Walton cutting hedges shortly after the murder. It was believed that he had been killed at around 2 p. m. #4 The murder of Walton was never solved, but it was believed that Potter had killed him. He was never charged, but the local police were suspicious of him. He was a farmer, and he had the strength to overpower Walton and push the pitchfork through him. But he said that he had only touched the murder weapons when he first arrived at the scene.

Love, Lucas

Love, Lucas
Author: Chantele Sedgwick
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2015-05-05
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1634500032

A 2015 Whitney Award Nominee! A powerful story of loss, second chances, and first love, reminiscent of Sarah Dessen and John Green. When Oakley Nelson loses her older brother, Lucas, to cancer, she thinks she’ll never recover. Between her parents’ arguing and the battle she’s fighting with depression, she feels nothing inside but a hollow emptiness. When Mom suggests they spend a few months in California with Aunt Jo, Oakley isn’t sure a change of scenery will alter anything, but she’s willing to give it a try. In California, Oakley discovers a sort of safety and freedom in Aunt Jo’s beach house. Once they’re settled, Mom hands her a notebook full of letters addressed to her—from Lucas. As Oakley reads one each day, she realizes how much he loved her, and each letter challenges her to be better and to continue to enjoy her life. He wants her to move on. If only it were that easy. But then a surfer named Carson comes into her life, and Oakley is blindsided. He makes her feel again. As she lets him in, she is surprised by how much she cares for him, and that’s when things get complicated. How can she fall in love and be happy when Lucas never got the chance to do those very same things? With her brother’s dying words as guidance, Oakley knows she must learn to listen and trust again. But will she have to leave the past behind to find happiness in the future? Sky Pony Press, with our Good Books, Racehorse and Arcade imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of books for young readers—picture books for small children, chapter books, books for middle grade readers, and novels for young adults. Our list includes bestsellers for children who love to play Minecraft; stories told with LEGO bricks; books that teach lessons about tolerance, patience, and the environment, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

The Morgue and Me

The Morgue and Me
Author: John C. Ford
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2015-02-24
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0147510007

Eighteen-year-old Christopher, who plans to be a spy, learns of a murder cover-up through his summer job as a morgue assistant and teams up with Tina, a gorgeous newspaper reporter, to investigate, despite great danger.

Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades
Author: Oakley Hall
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2023-12-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0520353870

The Morton Street Slasher has been leaving the corpses of his victims around San Francisco's Union Square. On the women's naked bodies are spade playing cards. The city's infamous newspaperman, Ambrose Bierce, blames the rash of murders on his old enemy, the Southern Pacific Railroad. A naive reporter at Bierce's Hornet pursues the case, uncovering conspiracy at every turn. In a fast-paced novel that is a combination of murder mystery, historical fiction, and quirky biography, Oakley Hall draws the reader into 1880s San Francisco and the changing world that was California in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Local and state politics, the exploitation of the Chinese, the power of the mining and railroad barons, and San Francisco's colorful history provide a backdrop for this irresistible thriller. The novel's chapters are introduced by appropriate excerpts from Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary and narrated by the young reporter Tom Redmond. Redmond is interested in the murders because of his attraction to a woman threatened by the Slasher, and Bierce encourages him because of his personal vendetta against the Big Four of the Railroad. Bierce's misogyny is an influence as well, which Hall uses to advantage in portraying the enigmatic journalist. Hall knows his territory and his characters well. The sights and smells of late-nineteenth-century California are cleverly evoked, and the story's key players are refreshingly authentic. Bierce brandishes his famed cynicism with all the aplomb of the sharp-eyed, sharp-witted newspaperman he was. Cameo appearances by such California worthies as Ina Coolbrith and Joaquin Miller add to the novel's historical richness. Intelligent, gripping, and often quite funny, Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades will satisfy any reader who craves adventure, mystery, romance, and fine writing.

Albion's Seed

Albion's Seed
Author: David Hackett Fischer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 981
Release: 1991-03-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 019974369X

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

So Many Doors

So Many Doors
Author: Oakley Hall
Publisher: Titan Books (US, CA)
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2018-11-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1785656899

The legendary lost crime novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Oakley Hall, instructor of Ann Rice, Amy Tan, Richard Ford, and Michael Chabon, who calls SO MANY DOORS "Beautiful, powerful, even masterful." It begins on Death Row, with a condemned man refusing the services of the lawyer assigned to defend him. It begins with a beautiful woman dead, murdered - Vassilia Caroline Baird, known to all simply as V. That's where this extraordinary novel begins. But the story it tells begins years earlier, on a struggling farm in the shadow of the Great Depression and among the brawling "cat skinners" of Southern California, driving graders and bulldozers to tame the American West. And the story that unfolds, in the masterful hands of acclaimed author Oakley Hall, is a lyrical outpouring of hunger and grief, of jealousy and corruption, of raw sexual yearning and the tragedy of the destroyed lives it leaves in its wake. Unpublished for more than half a century, So Many Doors is Hall's masterpiece, an excoriating vision of human nature at its most brutal, and one of the most powerful books you will ever read.

A Bad Day for Scandal

A Bad Day for Scandal
Author: Sophie Littlefield
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2011-06-21
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429983213

A Bad Day for Scandal is the third in Sophie Littlefield's award-winning, critically acclaimed series. Written with passion, humor, and guts, this is a mystery to be savored. When Prosper homegirl turned big-city businesswoman Priss Porter returns to town with a body in her trunk, she calls Stella Hardesty to dispose of it. Her uppity ways don't convince Stella to take the job, and Priss attempts to blackmail her with a snapshot of Stella doing what she does best: curing woman-beaters by the use of force. Stella refuses to cooperate and goes home, only to hear later that Priss and her brother, Liman, have gone missing after calling in a disturbance. Stella is implicated when Sheriff "Goat" Jones discovers the scarf she left behind at the house. He warns her to stay local but Stella and her partner, Chrissy Shaw, go looking for Priss in Kansas City, where they discover that she runs an unusual business. When Priss herself—along with two other bodies—turns up in a pond belonging to one of Stella's ex-clients, Stella must investigate a host of suspects, including a crooked but libidinous female judge, a coterie of jealous male escorts, and a Marxist ex-professor.

The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers

The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
Author: Harold Schechter
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2012-11-27
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1439138850

Bestselling true-crime writer Harold Schechter, a leading authority on serial killers, and coauthor David Everitt offer a guided tour through the bizarre and blood-chilling world of serial murder. Through hundreds of detailed entries that span the entire spectrum -- the shocking crimes, the infamous perpetrators, and much more -- they examine all angles of a gruesome cultural phenomenon that grips our imagination. From Art (both by and about serial killers) to Zeitgeist (how killers past and present embody their times)...from Groupies (even the most sadistic killer can claim devoted fans) to Marriage (the perfect domestic disguise for demented killers)...from Homebodies (psychos who slay in the comfort of their homes) to Plumbing (how clogged drains have undone the most discreet killer), THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SERIAL KILLERS is the ultimate reference for anyone compelled by the personalities and pathologies behind the most disturbing of crimes.

Rhapsody in Blood

Rhapsody in Blood
Author: John Morgan Wilson
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2006-03-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780312341473

Disgraced journalist Benjamin Justice, at loose ends between jobs, takes a short vacation with a friend, Los Angeles Times reporter Alexandra Templeton, to a movie set at a faded resort hotel in the California desert. The film being shot is about a star's death in the 1950's and the lynching of a local black man for the murder--the last lynching in California. But the set is in an uproar over the appearance--and then the brutal murder--of a feared Hollywood gossip journalist who had promised to reveal 'explosive' new information. Now Justice finds himself enmeshed in two old deaths and a new murder as he attempts to uncover the truth before another falls victim.