Format: ebook

The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia by Emma Copley Eisenberg
Published by Hachette Books on January 21, 2020
Pages: 336
Format: ebook
Genres: Criminal Justice, Memior, Nonfiction, True Crime
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Synopsis

In the afternoon or early evening of June 25, 1980, two young women, Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero, were killed in an isolated clearing in rural Pocahontas County West Virginia. They were hitchhiking to an outdoor peace festival known as the Rainbow Gathering, but never arrived. Their killings have been called “The Rainbow Murders.”
For thirteen years, no one was prosecuted, though suspicion was cast on a succession of local men. In 1993, the state of West Virginia convicted a local farmer named Jacob Beard and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Later, it emerged that a convicted serial killer and diagnosed schizophrenic named Joseph Paul Franklin had also confessed. With the passage of time, as the truth behind the Rainbow killings seemed to slip away, its toll on this Appalachian community became more concrete—the unsolved murders were a trauma, experienced on a community scale.
Emma Copley Eisenberg spent five years re-investigating these brutal acts, which once captured the national media’s imagination, only to fall into obscurity. A one-time New Yorker who came to live in Pocahontas Country, Eisenberg shows how that crime, a mysterious act of violence against a pair of middle-class outsiders, came to loom over several generations of struggling Appalachians, many of themlaborers who earned a living farming, hauling timber, cutting locust posts, or baling hay—and the investigators and lawyers for whom the case became a white whale.
Part “Serial”-like investigation, part Joan Didion-like meditation, the book follows the threads of this crime through the history of West Virginia, the Back-to-the-Land movement, and the complex reality contemporary Appalachia, forming a searing portrait of America and its divisions of gender and class, and its violence.

“What Do I Know To Be True?”: Emma Copley Eisenberg on Truth in Nonfiction, Writing Trauma, and The Dead Girl Newsroom

Force of Nature

Force of Nature

Force of Nature by Jane Harper
Published by Flatiron Books on February 6, 2018
Series: ,
Pages: 336
Format: ebook
Genres: Mystery, Suspense
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Synopsis

Five women go on a hike. Only four return. Jane Harper, the New York Times bestselling author of The Dry, asks: How well do you really know the people you work with?
When five colleagues are forced to go on a corporate retreat in the wilderness, they reluctantly pick up their backpacks and start walking down the muddy path.
But one of the women doesn’t come out of the woods. And each of her companions tells a slightly different story about what happened.
Federal Police Agent Aaron Falk has a keen interest in the whereabouts of the missing hiker. In an investigation that takes him deep into isolated forest, Falk discovers secrets lurking in the mountains, and a tangled web of personal and professional friendship, suspicion, and betrayal among the hikers. But did that lead to murder?
“Force of Nature bristles with wit; it crackles with suspense; it radiates atmosphere. An astonishing book from an astonishing writer.”—A.J. Finn, author of The Woman in the Window
Select praise for The Dry:"One of the most stunning debuts I've ever read. Every word is near perfect. Read it!"—David Baldacci, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“A breathless page-turner … Ms. Harper has made her own major mark.”—The New York Times

Blackout

Blackout

Blackout by Ragnar Jónasson
Published by Minotaur Books on August 28, 2018
Series: Dark Iceland #3
Pages: 272
Format: ebook
Genres: Mystery, Police Procedural, Scandinavian and Nordic Mysteries & Thrillers
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Synopsis

A huge bestseller in England, France, and Australia, the third book in the Dark Iceland series from a spectacular new crime writer."Easily the best yet. Beautifully written and elegantly paced with a plot that only gradually becomes visible, as if the reader had been staring into the freezing fog waiting for shapes to emerge."—The Guardian, UK (Readers' Books of the Year 2016)
"A chiller of a thriller whose style and pace are influenced by Jonasson’s admiration for Agatha Christie. It’s good enough to share shelf space with the works of Yrsa Sigurdardottir and Arnaldur Indridason, Iceland’s crime novel royalty."—The Washington PostOn the shores of a tranquil fjord in Northern Iceland, a man is brutally beaten to death on a bright summer's night. As the 24-hour light of the arctic summer is transformed into darkness by an ash cloud from a recent volcanic eruption, a young reporter leaves Reykajvik to investigate on her own, unaware that an innocent person's life hangs in the balance. Ari Thor Arason and his colleagues on the tiny police force in Siglufjordur struggle with an increasingly perplexing case, while their own serious personal problems push them to the limit. What secrets does the dead man harbour, and what is the young reporter hiding? As silent, unspoken horrors from the past threaten them all, and the darkness deepens, it's a race against time to find the killer before someone else dies...
Dark, terrifying and complex, Blackout is an exceptional, atmospheric thriller from one of Iceland's finest crime writers.

The Hangman

The Hangman

The Hangman by Louise Penny
Published by Grass Roots Press on December 1, 2011
Series: Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #6.5
Pages: 96
Format: ebook
Genres: Mystery, Suspense
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Synopsis

On a cold November morning, a jogger runs through the woods in the peaceful Quebec village of Three Pines. On his run, he finds a dead man hanging from a tree.The dead man was a guest at the local Inn and Spa. He might have been looking for peace and quiet, but something else found him. Something horrible.Did the man take his own life? Or was he murdered? Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is called to the crime scene. As Gamache follows the trail of clues, he opens a door into the past. And he learns the true reason why the man came to Three Pines.