"Vince Granata remembers standing in front of his suburban home in Connecticut the day his mother and father returned from the hospital with his three new siblings in tow. He had just finished scrawling their names in orange chalk on the driveway: Christopher, Timothy, and Elizabeth. Twenty-three years later, Vince was a thousand miles away when he received shocking news that would change his life-his younger brother, Tim, propelled by unchecked schizophrenia,...

On June 22, 1954, teenage friends Juliet Hulme-- better known as bestselling mystery writer Anne Perry-- and Pauline Parker went for a walk in a New Zealand park with Pauline's mother, Honora. When Honora Parker was found in a pool of blood with the brick used to bludgeon her to death close at hand, Juliet and Pauline confessed to the killing. Their motive: a plan to escape to the United States to become writers, and Honora's determination to keep...

“[This] deeply engaging tale of a teenager who may—or may not—have helped kill her parents [is] a model of evenhanded true-crime writing.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
Sixteen-year-old Patricia Columbo began working for pharmacist Frank DeLuca, a married father of five, in the 1970s, and the two soon entered into a sexual relationship. Against her father’s wishes, Patricia and Frank moved in...

The Lizzie Borden Ax Murdersexplores all sides of these unsolved ax murders and the woman suspected of committing them. It discusses police investigations, conspiracy theories, historical impacts, and more. Features include a glossary, references, websites, source notes, and an index. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.

Tempers rise as a jury of middle-aged men find themselves unable to sway a single member of their group to the majority opinion. Confronted with a seemingly clear-cut case, bolstered by opinions and assumptions, but with no verdict in sight the group threatens to become deadlocked. Will the 12th juror, stubbornly convinced of a young defendent's innocence, be able to sway the entire group to his viewpoint, or will the group ultimately force the holdout...

"Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement, 'I shot him between the eyes.' Everything in between is a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness, and as the tale proceeds, the narrator's murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. In this powerful novella, Natalia Ginzburg's writing is...

After being accused of murdering their father, a detective in the small resort town of Bayport, teenage brothers Frank and Joe Hardy must team up with Nancy Drew to prove their innocence.

Documents the 1873 case in which eighteen-year-old Frank Walworth shot and killed his father in the Sturtevant House hotel, tracing how the Walworth family rose to prominence in the New York aristocracy before succumbing to decades of corruption and mental illness.