Helen Plum Library

"For fans of I'll Be Gone in the Dark, the thrilling true story of a would-be terrorist attack against a Kansas farming town's immigrant community, and the FBI informant who exposed it. In the spring of 2016, as immigration debates rocked the United States, three men in a militia group known as the Crusaders grew aggravated over one Kansas town's growing Somali community. They decided that complaining about their new neighbors and threatening them...

"A thought-provoking, masterfully told work of literary journalism about a shocking crime committed by a teenager--and its even more shocking aftermath. In 1985 in Gary, Indiana, a black teenage girl kills an elderly white woman in a robbery gone wrong. The shock and awe of the case captivates the state, whose citizens cry out for vengeance. Soon after, Paula Cooper, the fifteen-year-old killer, is sentenced to death. Indiana's minimum age for the...

"One sunlit evening, May 6, 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, were ambushed and stabbed to death while strolling through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The murders were funded by American supporters of Irish independence and carried out by the Invincibles, a militant faction of republicans armed with specially-made surgeon's blades. They ended what should have been a turning point in Anglo-Irish...

Two true-crime tales relate the stories of a wealthy man buried alive with only forty-eight hours of air, and a grisly shooting high in the Sierra Nevada mountains involving the locals and rich developers

A principios de la década de 1920, los miembros de la nación indígena de los Osage, en Oklahoma, se convirtieron en las personas más ricas del mundo. Tras descubrirse enormes depósitos de petróleo bajo su reserva, los Osage vivían en mansiones, vestían con pieles y joyas costosas, viajaban en automóviles con chofer y tenían sirvientes blancos. Pero pronto, los Osage comenzaron a desaparecer misteriosamente o a morir asesinados, uno tras...

History remembers John Adams as a Founding Father and our country's second president. But in the tense years before the American Revolution, he was still just a lawyer, fighting for justice in one of the most explosive murder trials of the era. On the night of March 5, 1770, shots were fired by British soldiers on the streets of Boston, killing five civilians. The Boston Massacre has often been called the first shots of the American Revolution. As...

"Inside Cardboard Box 39 at the South Australian Museum's storage facility lies the forgotten skull of an Aboriginal man who died eighty-five years before. His misspelled name is etched on the crown, but the many bones in boxes around him remain unidentified. Who was Yokununna, and how did he die? His story reveals the layered, exploitative white Australian mindset that has long rendered Aboriginal reality all but invisible. When policeman Bill McKinnon's...

"Juniper Baker had just graduated from high school and was deep in the throes of a summer romance when Cal and Beth Murphy, a childless couple who lived on a neighboring farm, were brutally murdered. When her younger brother became the prime suspect, June's world collapsed and everything she loved that summer fell away. She left, promising never to return to tiny Jericho, Iowa. Until now. Officially, she's back in town to help an ill friend manage...

The search for justice for this one man's death--his body found in broad daylight, with tape over his eyes, an undisguised hit--would deliver more than the truth. It exposed his status as an informant and led to protests, campaigns, far-reaching changes to British law, a historic ruling from a senior judicial body, a ground-breaking police investigation, and bitter condemnation from a US Congressional commission. And there have been persistent rumors...

Till murder do us part: Kathi Spiars can't believe she's found such a good man to marry as Stephen Marcum. Twelve years later, she starts to suspect that he isn't who he says he is. As she digs into his past, she doesn't realize that learning the truth will lead to a lifetime of fear and hiding Ramp up to murder: Brandi McClain, a young beautiful teenager, moves to Tucson, Arizona, where she quickly meets her new best friend and her new boyfriend....