True Crime

Casper, Wyoming:1973. Eleven-year-old Amy Burridge rides with her eighteen-year-old sister, Becky, to the grocery store. When they finish their shopping, Becky’s car gets a flat tire. Two men politely offer them a ride home. But they were anything but Good Samaritans. The girls would suffer unspeakable crimes at the hands of these men before being thrown from a bridge into the North Platte River. One miraculously survived. The other did not. Years later, author and journalist Ron Franscell—who lived in Casper at the time of the crime, and was a friend to Amy and Becky—can’t forget Wyoming’s most shocking story of abduction, rape, and murder. Neither could Becky, the surviving sister. The two men who violated her and Amy were sentenced to life in prison, but the demons of her past kept haunting Becky…until she met her fate years later at the same bridge where she’d lost her sister.

A spellbinding story of a mother with nothing left to lose who sets out on an all-consuming quest for justice after her daughter is murdered on the town playground. Sometimes the answers are worse than the questions. Sometimes it's better not to know. Set in the poorest part of the Missouri Ozarks, in a small town with big secrets, The Familiar Dark opens with a murder. Eve Taggert, desperate with grief over losing her daughter, takes it upon herself to find out the truth about what happened. Eve is no stranger to the dark side of life, having been raised by a hard-edged mother whose lessons Eve tried not to pass on to her own daughter. But Eve may need her mother's cruel brand of strength if she's going to face the reality about her daughter's death and about her own true nature. Her quest for justice takes her from the seedy underbelly of town to the quiet woods and, most frighteningly, back to her mother's trailer for a final lesson. The Familiar Dark is a story about the bonds of family—women doing the best they can for their daughters in dire circumstances—as well as a story about how even the darkest and most terrifying of places can provide the comfort of home.

From the co-author of I Would Find a Girl Walking and an award-winning true-crime television reporter comes the shocking story of Debbie Flores, a Las Vegas showgirl whose dreams of a dazzling career ended in a nightmare… Vivacious Debbie Flores was a college educated Washington Redskins cheerleader when she headed for “Sin City.” It was a smart move for the aspiring showgirl who’d soon be making her star-making solo debut at the legendary Luxor. But after the morning rehearsals of December 12, 2010, no one saw Debbie alive again. A cryptic text message she left for her mother led authorities to Debbie’s charismatic boyfriend, Jason “Blu” Griffith. A fellow Vegas dancer, Blu was hiding a terrible secret. It involved a rental van, bags of cement, two plastic tubs, and a handsaw. When the details of the crime unfolded, everyone how could a girl with such passion and promise come to an end so violent and unexpected? In time, the truth would reveal a life more tumultuous than believed—and what exactly transpired on Debbie’s tragic final day would stun the nation. INCLUDES PHOTOS

A razor-sharp thriller about a mother forced to the breaking point when her life and the lives of her children are threatened by an intruder Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother tucks her son back into bed in the middle of the night. She hears a noise—old houses are always making some kind of noise. But this sound is disturbingly it’s the tread of footsteps, unusually heavy and slow, coming up the stairs. Shrouded in the shadows, she sees the figure of a man appear down the hallway. Terrified, she quietly wakes her children and hustles them into the oldest part of the house, a tiny, secret room concealed behind a wall. There they hide as the man searches for them, trying to tempt the children out with promises and scare the mother into surrender. In the suffocating darkness, the mother struggles to remain calm, to plan, to search for any opportunity to find a weapon or escape and get help. But then she catches another glimpse of him. That face. That voice. And at once she knows her situation is even more dire than she’d feared, because she knows exactly who he is—and what he wants.