Crime, True Story, Mob, Immigration, Biopic, Italian American, Fiction
Showing posts with label true crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label true crime. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 5, 2025
Monday, June 3, 2024
My Illusion of Normal - Book Tour
The Peculiar Case of Jean Stevens
Inspirational, Spiritual, True Crime
Date Published: March 21, 2024
Publisher: Mindstir Media
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
My Illusion of Normal
The Peculiar Case of Jean Stevens
Inspirational, Spiritual, True Crime
Date Published: March 21, 2024
Publisher: Mindstir Media
Tuesday, March 5, 2024
The Berman Murders - Book Tour
Unraveling the Mojave Desert's Most Mysterious Unsolved Crime
True Crime
Date Published: March 5th 2024
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Monday, March 4, 2024
The Berman Murders - Release Blitz
Unraveling the Mojave Desert's Most Mysterious Unsolved Crime
True Crime
Date Published: March 5th 2024
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Thursday, November 23, 2023
Finding The Zodiac Killer - Book Tour
True Crime, Serial Killers True Accounts , Crime & Criminal Biographies
Date Published: October 1, 2023
Tuesday, October 3, 2023
Finding the Zodiac Killer
True Crime, Serial Killers True Accounts , Crime & Criminal Biographies
Date Published: October 1, 2023
Wednesday, July 12, 2023
Bad Henry
Henry Louis Wallace terrorized Charlotte, North Carolina, from May 1992 to March 1994. Wallace preyed on lower economic class Black women between 17 and 35 years old. He knew most of his victims, some through his job at Taco Bell, and gained their trust with his friendly demeanor and gentle nature-concealing a monster fueled by drug abuse and rage against women.
Wednesday, May 17, 2023
Stripped : From Recovery to Liberation
Memoir, True Crime, Christian Living
Date Published: May 9, 2023
Monday, July 25, 2022
Burt Reynolds, Miko, Dinah and The Slasher
True Crime, Biography, Short Story
Date Published: 6/27/22
The True Story of a Serial Killer Waiting in Burt's Closet
Thursday, June 2, 2022
Wednesday, May 11, 2022
UNJUST Precipitant of Greed
True Crime
Date Published: January 23, 2022
Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Wednesday, February 9, 2022
Unraveling the Zodiac Ciphers and Codes
Nonfiction / True Crime
Date Published: October 2019
Publisher: Mindstir Media
Unraveling the Zodiac Ciphers and Codes takes the reader on a historical trek through the Zodiac letters and ciphers associated with the Zodiac murders in the 1960s.
Sunday, January 23, 2022
Unraveling the Zodiac Ciphers and Codes
Nonfiction / True Crime
Date Published: Oct. 17, 2019
Publisher: Mindstir Media
Unraveling the Zodiac Ciphers and Codes takes the reader on a historical trek through the Zodiac letters and ciphers associated with the Zodiac murders in the 1960s.
Wednesday, January 19, 2022
The Mirror Code
Breaking the Zodiac Killer Cipher Codes
Nonfiction / Serial Killers / True Crime
Date Published: Sept 28, 2021
Publisher: MindStir Media
Breaking the Zodiac Killer Ciphers and Codes presents the mathematical solutions to the Zodiac Killer's ciphers. For the first time, the exact messages contained in these ciphers are revealed.
Sunday, April 7, 2019
Velvalee Dickinson
See below to read an excerpt and sign up for the GIVEAWAY
Velvalee Dickinson was born in Sacramento, California, graduated from Stanford University, married three times, and then in the early 1930s moved to New York City where she eventually opened her own exclusive doll shop on the prestigious Madison Avenue. It was there that she built her reputation as an expert in rare, antique, and foreign dolls. She traveled extensively around the country lecturing and exhibiting her dolls while building a wealthy clientele that included Hollywood stars, members of high society, and other collectors.
When medical bills started to accumulate because of her husband’s poor health and business started to fail with the onset of World War II, she accepted the role as a spy for the Imperial Japanese Government. By hiding coded messages in her correspondence about dolls, she was able to pass on to her Japanese contacts critical military information about the US warships. After surveilling Velvalee for over a year, the FBI arrested her and charged her with espionage and violation of censorship laws. She became the first American woman to face the death penalty on charges of spying for a wartime enemy.
Velvalee Dickinson: The “Doll Woman” Spy is a carefully researched glimpse into the “Doll Woman’s” life as a collector of dolls, and as the highest paid American woman who spied for the Imperial Japanese Government during World War II.
My Review
This is a
difficult book to describe; not a bad book at all, just hard to verbally
describe. Let me start out by saying that at first it was not what I expected.
I had in my convoluted brain that it would be more story like. A story about a woman
spy who liked dolls. And it was that. It is exactly what it says it is, biographical.
But as I continued through the book, I found that Barbara Casey had a way of
flowing from facts to an interesting piece of descriptive writing. Really sort
of back and forth, creating a nice flow for reading a non-fiction book.
The above may
well be the style of the author as I have not read her other books. It is better
researched than any dissertation. It is laid out beautifully. Every source,
every credit and an Index to die for. Being a retired librarian, I tend to go
to the back of the book first. I was overwhelmed at the work and organization.
This isn’t just well-written, it is a book which obviously involved a LOT of time
and work.
Having said
the above, I want to say that this book does encompass true crime, biography
and of course non-fiction. It is also a history lover’s read. The people and
the places as well as the instances are all here, but as I said earlier it
seems to flow well and read easily.
In looking
at previously published works by Barbara Casey I found all have very good
reviews. Obviously, a good author to check out.
Read an excerpt...
As intrigued as Eunice (Kennedy) was of these three women—Iva Toguri D’Aquino, Mildred Elizabeth Gillars, and Lilly Stein—Eunice was especially drawn to Velvalee Dickinson, now 56 years old and 29 years her senior—the former owner of a prestigious collectable doll shop on Madison Avenue in Manhattan who had been convicted of spying for the Japanese during the war. By the time Eunice met Velvalee, the “Doll Woman” had already been at Alderson a little over four years, spending her time writing letters to her brother, Oswald, and asking him to send her things like “bobbie pins,” reading the publication Cathedral Bulletin, learning how to play the electric organ, writing magazine articles, and reading books such as Citidal by A.J. Cronin and The Razors Edge by Somerset Maughan. She also took care of a yellow male cat “which will soon be a father,” she wrote to her brother.
It is ironic that on the very day Velvalee was given the maximum sentence of ten years in prison at Alderson and a $10,000 fine for violation of the censorship laws, J.P. Kennedy, Jr., son of ex-ambassador Joseph Kennedy and Eunice’s brother, was killed when a Navy bomber he was piloting exploded in flight. And only a year earlier, in August 1943, another brother, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had been seriously injured by the Japanese in the Solomon Islands, an injury that caused him chronic back pain for the rest of his life.
Some speculate that Eunice felt sympathetic toward Velvalee because she, like Eunice, had graduated from Stanford University. In fact, by strange coincidence, Velvalee belatedly received her degree the same year that Eunice graduated from Stanford. Or maybe it was because she believed Velvalee’s story that it had been her husband, Lee, who spied for the Japanese and not her. So many of the women Eunice had met and counselled through her work in social services, after all, had gotten into trouble because of their controlling and manipulative husbands or boyfriends. Or it could have been that Velvalee had worked in social services for a time while living in San Francisco, an interest and passion that Eunice also shared.
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
In 2018 Barbara received the prestigious Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award and Top Professional Award for her extensive experience and notable accomplishments in the field of publishing and other areas. Barbara lives on a mountain in Georgia with her husband, and three pets who adopted her: Benton, a hound-mix; Reese, a black cat; and Earl Gray, a gray cat and Reese’s best friend.
Tuesday, February 5, 2019
Smuggler
This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Nicholas Fillmore will be awarding a $10 Amazon or B&N GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. See below to sign up for the GIVEAWAY.
When twenty-something post-grad Nick Fillmore discovers the zine he’s been recruited to edit is a front for drug profits, he begins a dangerous flirtation with an international heroin smuggling operation and in a matter of months finds himself on a fast ride he doesn’t know how to get off of.
After a bag goes missing in an airport transit lounge he is summoned to West Africa to take a voodoo oath with Nigerian mafia. Bound to drug boss Alhaji, he returns to Europe to put the job right, but in Chicago O’Hare customs agents “blitz” the plane and a courier is arrested.
Thus begins a harried yearlong effort to elude the Feds, prison and a looming existential dead end…. Smuggler relates the real events behind OITNB.
Read an excerpt...
Later that afternoon I walked, drunk, through the Musee d’Arte Moderne in Brussels, down a winding white hallway to some inner recess. In a corner, behind glass, a little ventriloquist’s dummy in baggy pants and jacket sat before a brass bell. For minutes on end he just sat there with his feet sticking out in front of him, like he’d been knocked down in the street. Then something seemed to stir inside him and the doll’s torso jerked forward an inch and its metal head—bang! struck the bell producing an unexpectedly bright peal like the bell of a steamship. A little placard read, “Attempt to Raise Hell.” Dennis Oppenheim. American.
A small group waited in anticipation for it to happen again. Just as a couple turned to walk away, bang! the bell clanged again. I stayed for another half hour listening to the intermittent clanging; the little brute kept at it, as if he had a mind of his own—as if, in spite of whatever wind-up mechanism controlled him, he was determined to carry out this errand he alone knew the meaning of.
Read an Interview from the author about this book. INTERVIEW
Read an Interview from the author about this book. INTERVIEW
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Nicholas Fillmore attended the graduate writing program at University of New Hampshire. He was a finalist for the Juniper Prize in poetry and co-founded and published SQUiD magazine in Provincetown, MA. He is currently at work on Sins of Our Fathers, a family romance and works as a reporter and lecturer in English. He lives on windward Oahu with his wife, his daughter and three dogs.
Author website: http://www.nicholasfillmore.com
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