Two witnesses to a crime are removed to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in the Federal Witness Security Program--no picnic, even though they are innocent victims rather than plea-bargaining mobsters.

"The girls' names were Padma and Lalli, but they were so inseparable that people in the village called them Padma Lalli. Sixteen-year-old Padma sparked and burned. Fourteen-year-old Lalli was an incorrigible romantic. They grew up in Katra Sadatganj, an eye-blink of a village in western Uttar Pradesh crammed into less than one square mile of land. It was out in the fields, in the middle of mango season, that the rumors started. Then one night in the...

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created...

A brutal legacy of cruelty and hate is awakened in the bayou. When Sonny Boy Marsallus returns to New Iberia after fleeing for Central America to avoid the wrath of the powerful Giacana family, his old troubles soon follow. Meanwhile Dave Robicheaux becomes entangled in the affairs of the Fontenot family, descendants of sharecroppers whose matriarch helped raise Dave as a child. They are in danger of losing the land they've lived on for more than...

The notorious Gotti family is the stuff of mob legend. The "Dapper Don," John Gotti Sr., and his son John A. "Junior" Gotti ran New York's powerful Gambino crime family and were well known for their flamboyant style and brutal ways. John Alite, a mob hit man, associate, and close friend of the Gottis, has a very different story to tell. An Albanian-American from Queens, Alite was an unlikely ally to the Italian mob, but with his street smarts he was...

"Some pasts won’t stay forgotten . . . She calls herself Hope Miller, but she has no idea who she actually is. Fifteen years ago, she was found in a small New Jersey town thrown from an overturned vehicle, with no clue to her identity. Doctors assumed her amnesia was a temporary side effect of her injuries, but she never regained her memory. Hope eventually started a new life with a new name in a new town that welcomed her, yet always wondered...

"In 1908, Hazel Drew was found floating in a pond in Sand Lake, New York, beaten to death. The unsolved murder inspired rumors, speculation, ghost stories, and, almost a century later, the phenomenon of 'Twin Peaks.' Who killed Hazel Drew? Like Laura Palmer, she was a paradox of personalities--a young, beautiful puzzle with secrets. Perhaps the even trickier question is, Who was Hazel Drew? Seeking escape from her poor country roots, Hazel found work...

Jon Krakauer's literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. In UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN, he shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders. At the core of his book is an appalling double murder committed by two Mormon Fundamentalist brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a revelation from God commanding them to kill their...

"Rye Mallett, a fearless "freight dog" pilot charged with flying cargo to far-flung locations, is often rough-spoken and all business, but soft on regulations when they get in the way of meeting a deadline. But he does have a rock-solid reputation: he will fly in the foulest weather, day or night, and deliver the goods safely to their destination. So when Rye is asked to fly into a completely fogbound northern Georgia town and deliver a mysterious...

"In this spellbinding true story, a pair of award-winning CNN investigative journalists track down the mysterious French psychic at the center of an international scam targeting the elderly and emotionally vulnerable, resulting in an expose of one of the longest running cons in history. While investigating financial crimes for CNN Money, Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken were intrigued by reports that elderly Americans were giving away thousands of dollars...