Non Fiction > Crime (True)

On the morning of 23 September 2009 Helen Meads was murdered by her husband Greg at the stables on their Matamata farm. It was the final chapter in years of control and abuse.
Here, Helen's father David White describes the events of that day and what led to it, and tells of the ordeals that a family is subjected to when one of their own is murdered. It is a poignant and compelling story. There are issues of custody, access and bail and looming court appearances. And often, as in this case, there is the killer's family ... read more

Another highly controversial book from Howling At The Moon, this time blowing open the law and order debate. Badlands is the devasting new expose from a justice system insider that reveals for the first time why New Zealand's crime rate is one of the highest in the world.

At 7.09 a.m. on 20 June 1994, David Bain called emergency services and
reported finding his entire family of five dead. A year later he was
convicted of having murdered them in cold blood, with determination and
cunning. He was sentenced to life in prison. However, after 12 years of
public controversy, inquiries and appeals, on 10 May 2007 the Privy
Council concluded that a substantial miscarriage of justice had occurred
and accordingly quashed the convictions and ordered a retrial. For the... read more

Crime of the Time is packed with information to protect you from being the next victim of credit card and cyber fraud. If you've ever wondered what exactly skimming, phishing, shoulder surfing, hacking, and identity theft are, find out how easily these crimes are committed by increasingly tech-savvy thieves. This eye-opening investigation also goes behind the scenes of the banks and criminal networks to uncover how the multitude of ingenious scams is just the tip of a massive international fraud iceberg. Find out how cutting-edge t... read more

For over 40 years the murder of Harvey and Jeanette Crewe has been the great unsolved mystery of NZ criminal history. Local farmer Arthur Allan Thomas was twice convicted of their murders but was later given a Royal Pardon. In this comprehensive anatomy of the investigation Veteran journalist and broadcaster Keith Hunter provides answers to all the unresolved issues.

'As a criminal barrister, you work with the material you get: a junkie shoplifter with thirty-five previous convictions and four packs of Lidl's frozen chicken stuffed down his trousers is heading only one way'. Every day, like every criminal barrister in this country, Alex McBride stands up in court and, with nothing but quick-thinking, sharp-talking and his hard-won legal expertise, attempts to save people from criminal conviction, prison, even a lifetime behind bars. Sometimes he's had only a few hours to prepare his case. Somet... read more

Jailed for a crime he didn't commit, now for the first time in 40 years, he tells his incredible story as we name a new prime suspect.

When you talk about terrorism, most people in New Zealand think about problems overseas. But those in Gisborne and the East Coast merely cast their minds back to the 1980s to the Ruatoria Troubles. From 1985 to 1990 the township was terrorised by a Maori sect calling itself the Rastafarians. Their story is one of the most bizarre chapters in modern New Zealand history. Yet most Kiwis under the age of 40 haven't heard of the Rastas or their reign of terror ...until now.

One Sunday morning in 1993 a 16-year-old girl named Eliza Claps goes missing from a church in the centre of Potenza, Italy. Shortly before her disappearance, Elisa had met Danilo Restivo, a strange local boy with a fetish for cutting women's hair on the back of buses. Elisa's family is convinced that Resitvo is responsible for their daughter's disappearance, but he is protected by local big-wigs: by his Sicilian father, by a doctor with links to organised crime, by a priest who had vices of his own. Years went by and Elisa's family... read more

John Gotti was the original New York Untouchable - a Godfather who laughed at the law. He rose from the streets of Queens to head America's most powerful crime family - and his path there was littered with bodies. He was a criminal, a killer, a womaniser and a celebrity. Known as the Teflon Don because no charge would stick, he loved to stroll out of the courtroom in thousand-dollar suits waving to the waiting crowd. "Time" magazine put him on the cover, but the Feds couldn't put him in jail. But then the FBI assembled a special ta... read more

The inside account of the Fritzl case - Josef Fritzl's horrific incarceration of his daughter in an airless dungeon for 24 years, and the seven children he fathered with her. By the time Elisabeth Fritzl was 11 years old, her father had singled her out for special attention. When she was 12, Fritzl obtained planning permission to build a cellar, which he worked on for five years. By the time Elisabeth was 17, the cellar was ready, but Fritzl feared that a missing minor would attract attention. He waited. Two years later, he ambush... read more

True Stories from the New Zealand Police Criminal Investigation BranchNZ Detectives will go behind closed doors to meet the unsung heroes whose grit and determination cracked some of New Zealand's biggest criminal cases - homicides, kidnappings, bomb plots, arson and elaborate frauds. Following on from the successful documentary series 'Undercover' and 'Line of Fire' this will also be a three-part series to screen on TV1 and will reveal the undisclosed world of the Criminal Investigation Branch of the NZ Police.

In 1978, the US government waged a war against organised crime. One man was left behind the lines. From 1976 until 1981, Special Agent Pistone lived undercover with the Mafia. Only able to visit his young family once every few months, Pistone - under the alias Donnie Brasco - ate, drank, partied, worked and sometimes killed with the wiseguys. He got so close that his Mafia partner, Lefty Ruggiero, asked him to officiate as best man at his wedding. Pistone's eventual testimony, in such spectacular prosecutions as 'the Pizza Connecti... read more

In May, 1855, the citizens of Victorian Great Britain were shocked to read in their morning edition of The Times that GBP12,000 worth of gold bars and other valuables had been stolen from a train travelling between London and Paris. This carefully planned theft of what would be more than GBP1.5 million in today's money was executed without violence and without explosives - its perpetrators relied on skill, teamwork and intelligence. How could it have happened? The investigation that followed was long, exhaustive and costly but ther... read more

This is the true story of the murder of Artemio Bruni, a peasant farmer in the mountains of Casentino, north-eastern Tuscany, in the winter of 1907."Artemio was my husband's great-grandfather. For reasons not understood by my husband's family, Grandpa Artemio's death was never investigated. It was not reported to the police, nor did Bruna Bruni, Artemio's wife, ever demand justice. 'How could that be possible', I asked my mother-in-law - was it because of the mafia? 'No, no, you don't understand,' she answered. 'Things were differe... read more

Many people are familiar with the story of Al Capone, the "untouchable" Chicago gangster best known for orchestrating the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. But few are aware that Capone's remarkable story began in the Navy Yard section of Brooklyn, New York. Tutored by the likes of infamous mobsters Johnny Torrio and Frankie Yale, young Capone's disquieting demeanor, combined with the "technical advice" he learned from these insidious pedagogues, contributed to the molding of a brutal criminal whose pseudonym, "Scarface," evoked fascin... read more

Killing Pablo charts the rise and spectacular fall of Pablo Escobar, the richest and most violent criminal in history. Mark Bowden exposes for the first time the massive covert operation by US Special Forces to hunt down and assassinate the man he describes as 'the billionaire godfather of international drug trafficking'. Pablo Escobar's criminal career is like no other. An elected member of Colombia's parliament, he built houses, roads and hospitals, and became a hero to the poor. This book also tells the story of the men of t... read more

As dawn broke over the vast desert, the body was still hanging beneath the overpass, having been suspended from it - decapitated and dangling by a rope tied around the armpits - at 4.30am. The sun rose about two hours after it had been suspended from the concrete 'Bridge of Dreams', throwing rays like firelight across rush-hour traffic and discarded American school buses carrying workers to sweatshop factories. And it was still there another hour later - swaying, headless, hands cuffed behind its back, in the cold early morning win... read more

The things we do for sex - lie, cheat, scheme, kill . . . Paul Thomas's blackly humorous stories explore the unpredictable and sometimes fatal consequences that can occur when sex rears its not-so-ugly head. The author of the ground-breaking series of New Zealand comic thrillers featuring the Maori detective Tito Ihaka (Old School Tie, Inside Dope and Guerilla Season) takes us into a world of lust, deceit, betrayal and elaborate revenge, where nothing is as it seems and even the best-laid plots never unfold quite according to plan.