Bad Times, Big Crimes

Bad Times, Big Crimes
Author: Carolyn Keene
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2005-11
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0689878834

Nancy Drew finds herself in the 1930s, solving a crime that occurred during the Great Depression.

Dangerous Plays

Dangerous Plays
Author: Carolyn Keene
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2011-09-13
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1442445661

Dad, Bess, and I are all set for London when Ned's Shakespeare professor asks us to do a simple favor: to take a look at his townhouse while we're there, since he can't seem to locate the housekeeper and fears something's wrong. Sounds easy enough, so I take the key. Eager to cross the favor off our list, we stop by 53 Banbury Square shortly after we land. And let's just say things in the townhouse aren't quite tip-top. And the key? Well, it unlocks a Pandora's box of serious trouble.

The Big Over Easy

The Big Over Easy
Author: Jasper Fforde
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2006-07-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101158301

Welcome to the seedy underbelly of nursery crime. From the New York Times bestselling author of the Thursday Next series comes a rollicking novel—“as if the Marx brothers were let loose in the children’s section of a strange bookstore” (USA Today). “A wonderfully readable riot . . . cleverly plotted, magically overstuffed yet amazingly digestible . . . [for] anyone who wants the thrill of a good crime novel larded with highly literate humor.”—The Wall Street Journal Meet Inspector Jack Spratt, family man and head of Reading’s Nursery Crime division. He’s investigating the murder of ovoid D-class nursery celebrity Humpty Dumpty, ex-convict and lover of women, found shattered to death beneath a wall in a shabby area of town. Yes, the big egg is down, and all those brittle pieces sitting in the morgue point to foul play. Spratt and his new partner, Sergeant Mary Mary, search through Humpty’s sordid past in hopes of finding the key to his death. Before long, Jack and Mary find themselves immersed in a bizarre case that reaches into the highest echelons of Reading society and business.

Bad City

Bad City
Author: Paul Pringle
Publisher: Celadon Books
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2022-07-19
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1250824095

"Pringle’s fast-paced book is a master class in investigative journalism... when institutions collude to protect one another, reporting may be our last best hope for accountability." —The New York Times For fans of Spotlight and Catch and Kill comes a nonfiction thriller about corruption and betrayal radiating across Los Angeles from one of the region's most powerful institutions, a riveting tale from a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who investigated the shocking events and helped bring justice in the face of formidable odds. On a cool, overcast afternoon in April 2016, a salacious tip arrived at the L.A. Times that reporter Paul Pringle thought should have taken, at most, a few weeks to check out: a drug overdose at a fancy hotel involving one of the University of Southern California’s shiniest stars—Dr. Carmen Puliafito, the head of the prestigious medical school. Pringle, who’d long done battle with USC and its almost impenetrable culture of silence, knew reporting the story wouldn’t be a walk in the park. USC is one of the biggest employers in L.A., and it casts a long shadow. But what he couldn’t have foreseen was that this tip would lead to the unveiling of not one major scandal at USC but two, wrapped in a web of crimes and cover-ups. The rot rooted out by Pringle and his colleagues at The Times would creep closer to home than they could have imagined—spilling into their own newsroom. Packed with details never before disclosed, Pringle goes behind the scenes to reveal how he and his fellow reporters triumphed over the city’s debased institutions, in a narrative that reads like L.A. noir. This is L.A. at its darkest and investigative journalism at its brightest.

Big Dirty Money

Big Dirty Money
Author: Jennifer Taub
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1984879995

“Blood-boiling…with quippy analysis…Taub proposes straightforward fixes and ways everyday people can get involved in taking white-collar criminals to task.”—San Francisco Chronicle How ordinary Americans suffer when the rich and powerful use tax dodges or break the law to get richer and more powerful—and how we can stop it. There is an elite crime spree happening in America, and the privileged perps are getting away with it. Selling loose cigarettes on a city sidewalk can lead to a choke-hold arrest, and death, if you are not among the top 1%. But if you're rich and commit mail, wire, or bank fraud, embezzle pension funds, lie in court, obstruct justice, bribe a public official, launder money, or cheat on your taxes, you're likely to get off scot-free (or even win an election). When caught and convicted, such as for bribing their kids' way into college, high-class criminals make brief stops in minimum security "Club Fed" camps. Operate the scam from the executive suite of a giant corporation, and you can prosper with impunity. Consider Wells Fargo & Co. Pressured by management, employees at the bank opened more than three million bank and credit card accounts without customer consent, and charged late fees and penalties to account holders. When CEO John Stumpf resigned in "shame," the board of directors granted him a $134 million golden parachute. This is not victimless crime. Big Dirty Money details the scandalously common and concrete ways that ordinary Americans suffer when the well-heeled use white collar crime to gain and sustain wealth, social status, and political influence. Profiteers caused the mortgage meltdown and the prescription opioid crisis, they've evaded taxes and deprived communities of public funds for education, public health, and infrastructure. Taub goes beyond the headlines (of which there is no shortage) to track how we got here (essentially a post-Enron failure of prosecutorial muscle, the growth of "too big to jail" syndrome, and a developing implicit immunity of the upper class) and pose solutions that can help catch and convict offenders.

Framed

Framed
Author: Carolyn Keene
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2006
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 068987863X

Nancy Drew tries to free a prince who has been framed for the theft of a painting.

Trade Wind Danger

Trade Wind Danger
Author: Carolyn Keene
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2012-05-08
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 144245945X

San Francisco has tons to offer tourists like Bess, George, and me. Fresh crabs, cable cars, hikes -- and stalkers! Well, maybe stalkers! is a little harsh, but this older couple, Ed and Harriet, keeps popping up everywhere. Coincidental or not, Ed and Harriet's appearances are smelling fishier than San Francisco Bay to me. So the investigation begins. But who knew it'd lead to more sleuthing -- in Hawaii?

2666

2666
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 1053
Release: 2013-07-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1466804823

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM "ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS" (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW) Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.

The Crime Book

The Crime Book
Author: DK
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2021-02-02
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1465466541

Investigate 100 of the world's most notorious crimes, including the Great Train Robbery, the Lindbergh kidnapping, and the murders of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Were the perpetrators delusional, opportunist, or truly evil? Find out what really happened and how the cases were solved. Discover conmen with sheer verve, such as Victor Lustig who "sold" the Eiffel Tower to scrap dealers in 1925, adrenaline-fuelled escapes, and mind-bending exploits of pirates, kidnappers, and drug cartels. The Crime Book demystifies malware, cybercrimes, and Ponzi schemes and sets out the terrifying ploys of mass murderers from 16th-century Elizabeth Báthory who drained young girls' blood to the more recent exploits of Rosemary and Fred West. Like a virus, crime mutates and adapts. The Crime Book explains how pivotal moments in history opened up new opportunities for criminals, such as the smuggling of alcohol during the American Prohibition era. It also charts developments in justice and forensics including the Innocence Project, which used DNA testing to exonerate wrongly convicted convicts. It examines how the forces of law and order have fought back against crime, explaining ingenious sting operations such as tracking down the jewel thief Bill Mason and the final capture of murderer Ted Bundy. With a foreword from bestselling crime author Cathy Scott, The Crime Book is an enthralling introduction to humanity's darker side. Series Overview: Big Ideas Simply Explained series uses creative design and innovative graphics, along with straightforward and engaging writing, to make complex subjects easier to understand. These award-winning books provide just the information needed for students, families, or anyone interested in concise, thought-provoking refreshers on a single subject.

The Great Big Book of Horrible Things

The Great Big Book of Horrible Things
Author: Matthew White
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 689
Release: 2011-10-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393081923

A compulsively readable and utterly original account of world history—from an atrocitologist’s point of view. Evangelists of human progress meet their opposite in Matthew White's epic examination of history's one hundred most violent events, or, in White's piquant phrasing, "the numbers that people want to argue about." Reaching back to 480 BCE's second Persian War, White moves chronologically through history to this century's war in the Congo and devotes chapters to each event, where he surrounds hard facts (time and place) and succinct takeaways (who usually gets the blame?) with lively military, social, and political histories. With the eye of a seasoned statistician, White assigns each entry a ranking based on body count, and in doing so he gives voice to the suffering of ordinary people that, inexorably, has defined every historical epoch. By turns droll, insightful, matter-of-fact, and ultimately sympathetic to those who died, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things gives readers a chance to reach their own conclusions while offering a stark reminder of the darkness of the human heart.