Thrilling, true tales from the Vidocq Society, a team of the world's finest forensic investigators whose monthly gourmet lunches lead to justice in ice-cold murders

Three of the greatest detectives in the world--a renowned FBI agent turned private eye, a sculptor and lothario who speaks to the dead, and an eccentric profiler known as the living Sherlock Holmes-were heartsick over the growing tide of unsolved murders. Good friends and sometime rivals William Fleisher, Frank Bender, and Richard Walter decided one day over lunch that something had to be done, and pledged themselves to a grand quest for justice. The three men invited the greatest collection of forensic investigators ever assembled, drawn from five continents, to the Downtown Club in Philadelphia to begin an audacious quest: to bring the coldest killers in the world to an accounting. Named for the first modern detective, the Parisian eugène François Vidocq-the flamboyant Napoleonic real-life sleuth who inspired Sherlock Holmes-the Vidocq Society meets monthly in its secretive chambers to solve a cold murder over a gourmet lunch.

The Murder Room draws the reader into a chilling, darkly humorous, awe-inspiring world as the three partners travel far from their Victorian dining room to hunt the ruthless killers of a millionaire's son, a serial killer who carves off faces, and a child killer enjoying fifty years of freedom and dark fantasy.

Acclaimed bestselling author Michael Capuzzo's brilliant storytelling brings true crime to life more realistically and vividly than it has ever been portrayed before. It is a world of dazzlingly bright forensic science; true evil as old as the Bible and dark as the pages of Dostoevsky; and a group of flawed, passionate men and women, inspired by their own wounded hearts to make a stand for truth, goodness, and justice in a world gone mad.

The defendant told the jury that he did not kill girlfriend. He did, however, admit to dismembering her, boiling her bones, and hiding them in the Port Authority locker.

At the heart of countless crimes lies the mystery of the human mind. In this eye-opening book, Dr. Cheryl Paradis draws back the curtain on the fascinating world of forensic psychology and revisits the most notorious and puzzling cases she has handled in her multifaceted career.

Out it all came, a slew of bizarre comments about the electronic chips implanted in his brain.

Her riveting, sometimes shocking stories reveal the crucial and often surprising role forensic psychology plays in the pursuit of justice. Sometimes the accused believe their own bizarre lies, creating a world that pushes them into frightening, violent crimes.

My client is charged with murder and tells me he is a descendent of kings. He says he is of royal blood. Can you evaluate him for an insanity defense?

Join Dr. Paradis in a stark concrete cell, with the accused handcuffed to a chair opposite her, as she takes on the daunting task of mapping the suspect's madness--or exposing it as fakery. Have a front-row seat in a tense, packed courtroom, where her testimony can determine an individual's fate. The criminal mind has never been so intimately revealed--or so darkly compelling.

A forensic psychologist reveals the dark and troubling human mind. Fascinating.--Robert K. Tanenbaum

Cheryl Paradis, PSY.D., has more than twenty years' experience as a forensic psychologist, and has evaluated thousands of seriously mentally ill and violent individuals. Her research and writings have been published in journals such as Medicine & Psychiatry and the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation. As an expert in psychological and neuropsychological testing, she has testified in both the New York State and federal court systems. Currently a clinical associate professor at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center and associate professor of psychology at Marymount Manhattan College, she has also been a staff psychologist at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn.

The defendant told the jury that he did not kill girlfriend. He did, however, admit to dismembering her, boiling her bones, and hiding them in the Port Authority locker.

At the heart of countless crimes lies the mystery of the human mind. In this eye-opening book, Dr. Cheryl Paradis draws back the curtain on the fascinating world of forensic psychology and revisits the most notorious and puzzling cases she has handled in her multifaceted career.

Out it all came, a slew of bizarre comments about the electronic chips implanted in his brain.

Her riveting, sometimes shocking stories reveal the crucial and often surprising role forensic psychology plays in the pursuit of justice. Sometimes the accused believe their own bizarre lies, creating a world that pushes them into frightening, violent crimes.

My client is charged with murder and tells me he is a descendent of kings. He says he is of royal blood. Can you evaluate him for an insanity defense?

Join Dr. Paradis in a stark concrete cell, with the accused handcuffed to a chair opposite her, as she takes on the daunting task of mapping the suspect's madness--or exposing it as fakery. Have a front-row seat in a tense, packed courtroom, where her testimony can determine an individual's fate. The criminal mind has never been so intimately revealed--or so darkly compelling.

A forensic psychologist reveals the dark and troubling human mind. Fascinating.--Robert K. Tanenbaum

Cheryl Paradis, PSY.D., has more than twenty years' experience as a forensic psychologist, and has evaluated thousands of seriously mentally ill and violent individuals. Her research and writings have been published in journals such as Medicine & Psychiatry and the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation. As an expert in psychological and neuropsychological testing, she has testified in both the New York State and federal court systems. Currently a clinical associate professor at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center and associate professor of psychology at Marymount Manhattan College, she has also been a staff psychologist at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn.

In the horrific aftermath of school shootings, distraught communities struggle to make sense of these seemingly senseless acts. Despite massive media coverage, we know little about what drives young perpetrators or how they rationalize their acts. In this breakthrough analysis, Dr. Peter Langman presents the psychological causes of school shootings and offers unprecedented insight into why certain teens exhibit the potential to kill. He shows how to identify early signs of possible violence and offers preventative measures that parents and educators can take to protect their communities.

Since the crime explosion of the 1960s, the prison population in the United States has multiplied fivefold, to one prisoner for every hundred adults--a rate unprecedented in American history and unmatched anywhere in the world. Even as the prisoner head count continues to rise, crime has stopped falling, and poor people and minorities still bear the brunt of both crime and punishment. When Brute Force Fails explains how we got into the current trap and how we can get out of it: to cut both crime and the prison population in half within a decade.

Mark Kleiman demonstrates that simply locking up more people for lengthier terms is no longer a workable crime-control strategy. But, says Kleiman, there has been a revolution--largely unnoticed by the press--in controlling crime by means other than brute-force incarceration: substituting swiftness and certainty of punishment for randomized severity, concentrating enforcement resources rather than dispersing them, communicating specific threats of punishment to specific offenders, and enforcing probation and parole conditions to make community corrections a genuine alternative to incarceration. As Kleiman shows, zero tolerance is nonsense: there are always more offenses than there is punishment capacity. But, it is possible--and essential--to create focused zero tolerance, by clearly specifying the rules and then delivering the promised sanctions every time the rules are broken.

Brute-force crime control has been a costly mistake, both socially and financially. Now that we know how to do better, it would be immoral not to put that knowledge to work.

On its initial publication in 1998, John R. Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime drew both lavish praise and heated criticism. More than a decade later, it continues to play a key role in ongoing arguments over gun-control laws: despite all the attacks by gun-control advocates, no one has ever been able to refute Lott’s simple, startling conclusion that more guns mean less crime. Relying on the most rigorously comprehensive data analysis ever conducted on crime statistics and right-to-carry laws, the book directly challenges common perceptions about the relationship of guns, crime, and violence. For this third edition, Lott draws on an additional ten years of data—including provocative analysis of the effects of gun bans in Chicago and Washington, D.C—that brings the book fully up to date and further bolsters its central contention.

On July 31, 1997, a six-man Emergency Service team from the NYPD raided a terrorist cell in Brooklyn and narrowly prevented a suicide bombing of the New York subway that would have cost hundreds, possibly thousands of lives.

Seven Shots tells the dramatic story of that raid, the painstaking police work involved, and its paradoxical aftermath, which drew the officers into a conflict with other rank-and-file police and publicity-hungry top brass. Jennifer C. Hunt draws on her personal knowledge of the NYPD and a network of police contacts extending from cop to four-star chief, to trace the experience of three officers on the Emergency Service entry team and the two bomb squad detectives who dismantled the live device. She follows their lives for five years, from that near-fatal day in 1997, through their encounters inside the brutal world of departmental politics, and on to 9/11, when they once again put their lives at risk in the fight against terrorism, racing inside the burning towers and sorting through the ash, debris, and body parts. Throughout this fast paced narrative, Hunt maintains a strikingly fine-grained, street-level view, allowing us to understand the cops on their own terms—and often in their own words. The result is a compelling insider’s picture of the human beings who work in two elite units in the NYPD and the moral and physical danger and courage involved.

As gripping as an Ed McBain novel—and just as steeped in New York cop culture and personalities—Seven Shots takes readers on an unforgettable journey behind the shield and into the hearts of New York City police.

In the United States, there are a staggering number of agents of the CIA, FBI, and state, local, and tribal police, all authorized and empowered to collect intelligence. But is there a way to use these vast resources to gather intelligence in a socially tolerable fashion and still maintain our cherished civil liberties?

This book presents a thorough investigation of intelligence collection in the United States that examines the delicate balance of civil liberties with the effectiveness of intelligence collection. It contains a history of domestic intelligence in America, a description of the various threats against our nation, and a discussion of the complexities of deciding what kind of information needs to be collected— and against whom. The conclusion succinctly states the author's opinions on what needs to be done to best address the issue.

A comprehensive and critical review of corrections, Correctional Contexts: Contemporary and Classical Readings, Fourth Edition, traces the history and development of corrections and punishment as it has evolved in the U.S. over the past few centuries. Editors Edward J. Latessa and Alexander M. Holsinger present both classical and contemporary articles that cover the history of corrections in the U.S.; discuss how various facets of the system operate today; and consider where we as a country may be headed regarding the confinement, control, and treatment of our correctional populations.

Now in its fourth edition, this acclaimed volume contains eleven new articles that discuss some of the most pressing issues facing corrections today. Topics include job stress and burnout among correctional officers; the impact of sex offender laws and registries; the etiology, diagnosis, and treatment of the psychopathic offender; the availability of educational and vocational programs within prisons; recidivism; America's ever-increasing prison population; and the social consequences of the War on Drugs.

The new edition also features:

* Entire sections highlighting rehabilitative treatment efforts within and outside of institutions, the increasingly critical role of reentry, and sources for future major influences in corrective efforts
* A new section focusing solely on working within the prison environment
* Helpful introductions at the beginning of each section and each article
* Insightful discussion questions following each piece

Alphabet City in 1988 was burned with heroin, radicalism, and anti-police sentiment. Working as a plainclothes narcotics cop in the most high-voltage neighbourhood in Manhattan, Detective Sergeant Mike Codella made it his personal mission to put away Davie Blue Eyes - a stone-cold murderer and the head of Alphabet City's heroin supply chain. In this gritty memoir, Codella resurrects the vicious streets that Davie Blue Eyes owned, and tells the story of how he and his partner Gio bagged the forty thieves that surrounded Davie, slowly working their way to the head of the snake one scale at a time. Shining a cool light into the parallel forces, struggles, and stories that transformed the neighbourhood, Codella makes it clear that through all the beatings and gunshots, the foot chases and close calls, he and Gio both saw Alphabet City the same way: worth saving. With the narrative spirit of The French Connection, the straight-up voice of Ed Conlon's Blue Blood, and the insights of Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning, Alphaville is at once the story of an NYPD detective, and of New York City itself.