Murder in the Courthouse

Murder in the Courthouse
Author: Nancy Grace
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2016-10-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1942952899

Hailey Dean, the prosecutor who never lost a case, jets to Savannah as an expert witness on the sensational Julie Love-Adams murder trial but very quickly finds herself embroiled in a deadly mystery. As soon as she touches down, Hailey bumps into her old partner, crime investigator Garland Fincher. Leaving the Savannah airport, the two hear an APB on a murder that's just been committed. Racing to the scene, they find Alton Turner, a courthouse sheriff known for crossing t's and dotting i's. The mild-mannered paperpusher is prone to extreme tidiness, but he's a hot mess now . . . sprawled dead in a pool of blood, severed in half by a garage door. Never one to stay in the background, Hailey jump-starts Turner's murder investigation while juggling the Julie Love-Adams trial. The timing of the trial and murder could be a coincidence, but everyone knows there are no coincidences in criminal law. And that's just the beginning. Courthouse regulars start dropping dead one by one . . . but why? While Lt. Billings is falling hard for Hailey, she digs in to find a killer with a mysterious agenda . . . as it becomes deathly apparent the next murder victim may very well be Hailey herself. It's crime sleuth Hailey Dean at her best!

Murder at the Courthouse (The Hidden Springs Mysteries Book #1)

Murder at the Courthouse (The Hidden Springs Mysteries Book #1)
Author: A. H. Gabhart
Publisher: Revell
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2015-10-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 149340122X

After a few years as a police officer in Columbus, Michael Keane has no trouble relaxing into the far less stressful job of deputy sheriff in his small hometown. After all, nothing ever happens in Hidden Springs, Kentucky. Nothing, that is, until a dead body is discovered on the courthouse steps. Everyone in town is a little uneasy. Still, no one is terribly worried--after all the man was a stranger--until one of their own is murdered right on Main Street. As Michael works to solve the case it seems that every nosy resident in town has a theory. When the sheriff insists Michael check out one of these harebrained theories, his surprising discovery sends him on a bewildering search for a mysterious killer that has him questioning everything he has ever believed about life in Hidden Springs. Bringing with her a knack for creating settings you want to visit and an uncanny ability to bring characters to life, A. H. Gabhart pens a whodunit that will keep readers guessing.

On the Courthouse Lawn

On the Courthouse Lawn
Author: Sherrilyn Ifill
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2007-02-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807009903

Nearly 5,000 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1960. Over forty years later, Sherrilyn Ifill's On the Courthouse Lawn examines the numerous ways that this racial trauma still resounds across the United States. While the lynchings and their immediate aftermath were devastating, the little-known contemporary consequences, such as the marginalization of political and economic development for black Americans, are equally pernicious. On the Courthouse Lawn investigates how the lynchings implicated average white citizens, some of whom actively participated in the violence while many others witnessed the lynchings but did nothing to stop them. Ifill observes that this history of complicity has become embedded in the social and cultural fabric of local communities, who either supported, condoned, or ignored the violence. She traces the lingering effects of two lynchings in Maryland to illustrate how ubiquitous this history is and issues a clarion call for American communities with histories of racial violence to be proactive in facing this legacy today. Inspired by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as by techniques of restorative justice, Ifill provides concrete ideas to help communities heal, including placing gravestones on the unmarked burial sites of lynching victims, issuing public apologies, establishing mandatory school programs on the local history of lynching, financially compensating those whose family homes or businesses were destroyed in the aftermath of lynching, and creating commemorative public spaces. Because the contemporary effects of racial violence are experienced most intensely in local communities, Ifill argues that reconciliation and reparation efforts must also be locally based in order to bring both black and white Americans together in an efficacious dialogue. A landmark book, On the Courthouse Lawn is a much-needed and urgent road map for communities finally confronting lynching's long shadow by embracing pragmatic reconciliation and reparation efforts.

Let the Lord Sort Them

Let the Lord Sort Them
Author: Maurice Chammah
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2021-01-26
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1524760277

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A deeply reported, searingly honest portrait of the death penalty in Texas—and what it tells us about crime and punishment in America “If you’re one of those people who despair that nothing changes, and dream that something can, this is a story of how it does.”—Anand Giridharadas, The New York Times Book Review WINNER OF THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS AWARD In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: the country’s death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment. Then, amid a larger wave of criminal justice reform, came the death penalty’s decline, a trend so durable that even in Texas the punishment appears again close to extinction. In Let the Lord Sort Them, Maurice Chammah charts the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched. We meet Elsa Alcala, the orphaned daughter of a Mexican American family who found her calling as a prosecutor in the nation’s death penalty capital, before becoming a judge on the state’s highest court. We meet Danalynn Recer, a lawyer who became obsessively devoted to unearthing the life stories of men who committed terrible crimes, and fought for mercy in courtrooms across the state. We meet death row prisoners—many of them once-famous figures like Henry Lee Lucas, Gary Graham, and Karla Faye Tucker—along with their families and the families of their victims. And we meet the executioners, who struggle openly with what society has asked them to do. In tracing these interconnected lives against the rise of mass incarceration in Texas and the country as a whole, Chammah explores what the persistence of the death penalty tells us about forgiveness and retribution, fairness and justice, history and myth. Written with intimacy and grace, Let the Lord Sort Them is the definitive portrait of a particularly American institution.

Shiloh and Other Stories

Shiloh and Other Stories
Author: Bobbie Ann Mason
Publisher: Modern Library
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2011-09-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307806324

"These stories will last," said Raymond Carver of Shiloh and Other Stories when it was first published, and almost two decades later this stunning fiction debut and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award has become a modern American classic. In Shiloh, Bobbie Ann Mason introduces us to her western Kentucky people and the lives they forge for themselves amid the ups and downs of contemporary American life, and she poignantly captures the growing pains of the New South in the lives of her characters as they come to terms with feminism, R-rated movies, and video games. "Bobbie Ann Mason is one of those rare writers who, by concentrating their attention on a few square miles of native turf, are able to open up new and surprisingly wide worlds for the delighted reader," said Robert Towers in The New York Review of Books.

Dark Fire

Dark Fire
Author: Bernadette Rule
Publisher:
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2021-04-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781777644000

In the 1920s, tobacco farmers were struggling to form a union, as Buck Duke controlled the market, keeping them in crushing poverty. Two young families, the Drews & the Lawrences, lived & worked side by side - one in the union, one not. Dark Fire is the story of their brief, incandescent lives.

Anatomy of Injustice

Anatomy of Injustice
Author: Raymond Bonner
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2013-01-08
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 0307948544

From Pulitzer Prize winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row. In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim's body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case. With the exemplary moral commitment and tenacious investigation that have distinguished his reporting career, Bonner follows Holt's battle to save Elmore's life and shows us how his case is a textbook example of what can go wrong in the American justice system. Moving, enraging, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation's ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.

The Eleventh Victim

The Eleventh Victim
Author: Nancy Grace
Publisher: Hachette Books
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2009-08-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1401394531

"Seconds passed; minutes. She could hear movement now in the waiting room she had just left...it was the metal magazine rack she was sure, that crashed to the tile floor. Then quiet. She strained to hear in the darkness. Nothing more, and then... The air moved in the room and she knew. He was here." As a young psychology student, Hailey Dean's world explodes when Will, her fianc, is murdered just weeks before their wedding. Reeling, she fights back the only way she knows how: In court, prosecuting violent crime . . . putting away the bad guys one rapist, doper, and killer at a time. But dedicating her life to justice takes a toll after years of courtroom battles and the endless tide of victims calling out from crime scene photos and autopsy tables. Just as she grows truly weary, a serial killer unlike any other she's encountered begins to stalk the city of Atlanta, targeting young prostitutes, each horrific murder bearing his own unique mark. This courtroom battle will be her last. Hailey heads for Manhattan to pick up the pieces of the life she had before Will's murder, training as a therapist. In a vibrant new world, she finally leaves her ghosts behind. But then her own clients are brutally murdered one by one by a copycat using the same M.O. as the Atlanta killer she hunted down years before. As the body count rises across Manhattan, Hailey is forced to match wits not only against a killer, but the famed NYPD. Unless she returns to her former life and solves the case, still more innocent people will die at the hands of a killer who plans to get her, before she can get him!

A Shot in the Moonlight

A Shot in the Moonlight
Author: Ben Montgomery
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2021-01-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0316535567

The sensational true story of George Dinning, a freed slave, who in 1899 joined forces with a Confederate war hero in search of justice in the Jim Crow south. “Taut and tense. Inspiring and terrifying in its timelessness.”(Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad ) Named a most anticipated book of 2021 by O, The Oprah Magazine Named a "must-read" by the Chicago Review of Books One of CNN's most anticipated books of 2021 After moonrise on the cold night of January 21, 1897, a mob of twenty-five white men gathered in a patch of woods near Big Road in southwestern Simpson County, Kentucky. Half carried rifles and shotguns, and a few tucked pistols in their pants. Their target was George Dinning, a freed slave who'd farmed peacefully in the area for 14 years, and who had been wrongfully accused of stealing livestock from a neighboring farm. When the mob began firing through the doors and windows of Dinning's home, he fired back in self-defense, shooting and killing the son of a wealthy Kentucky family. So began one of the strangest legal episodes in American history — one that ended with Dinning becoming the first Black man in America to win damages after a wrongful murder conviction. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery resurrects this dramatic but largely forgotten story, and the unusual convergence of characters — among them a Confederate war hero-turned-lawyer named Bennett H. Young, Kentucky governor William O'Connell Bradley, and George Dinning himself — that allowed this unlikely story of justice to unfold in a time and place where justice was all too rare.