Bill James

The past is an inescapable noose around a young man's neck, in this blackly comic, satirical novel from renowned crime writer Bill JamesBritain, 1956. A young actress seemingly tries to commit suicide over a tangled love affair, but is taken to hospital and her life saved. The story is just the sort of thing that journalist Ian Charteris likes to cover: a poignant mix of near tragedy, possible thwarted romance, and glamour, needing sensitive but - of course - dramatic treatment. It should be a routine assignment, a welcome assignment. It would be, if it wasn't for the identity of the young woman. She may - just may - be Ian's sister.The unwelcome reminder of the past drags Ian back into memories of places and events he'd rather forget. As far as Ian is concerned, the past is a foreign country. And not just foreign. Fundamentally and cantankerously hostile. Vengeful, war-torn, dangerous.It is impossible to escape the past; the noose is already around Ian's neck, and every step he takes it tightens . . . And this is not the only noose.

From the one-of-kind mind of Bill James, famous for revolutionizing the way we think about baseball, comes a "thought-provoking meditation" (Seattle Times) and epic tour through American crime--now available in paperback.The man who revolutionized the way we think about baseball examines our cultural obsession with murder--delivering a unique, engrossing, brilliant history of tabloid crime in America. Celebrated writer and contrarian Bill James has voraciously read true crime throughout his life and has been interested in writing a book on the topic for decades. With Popular Crime, James takes readers on an epic journey from Lizzie Borden to the Lindbergh baby, from the Black Dahlia to O. J. Simpson, explaining how crimes have been committed, investigated, prosecuted and written about, and how that has profoundly influenced our culture over the last few centuries--even if we haven't always taken notice. Exploring such phenomena as serial murder, the fluctuation of crime rates, the value of evidence, radicalism and crime, prison reform and the hidden ways in which crimes have shaped, or reflected, our society, James chronicles murder and misdeeds from the 1600s to the present day. James pays particular attention to crimes that were sensations during their time but have faded into obscurity, as well as still-famous cases, some that have never been solved, including the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Boston Strangler and JonBenet Ramsey. Satisfyingly sprawling and tremendously entertaining, Popular Crime is a professed amateur's powerful examination of the incredible impact crime stories have on our society, culture and history.

A woman and her stepson are gunned down while driving to school on a quiet residential street. An former bodyguard kills himself by firing two pistols simultaneously. Was the killer really aft er the woman’s husband, the notorious drug baron Mansel Shale? And what possible connection could Shale’s collection of pre-Raphaelite works of art have to the killings? Nothing in Bill James’s latest Harpur & Iles thriller is as it seems. When the police chase the shooting suspect into a busy second-hand shop the action quickly turns into a deadly cat-and-mouse standoff . As the siege unfolds, with more than just gunplay in the mix, events threaten to take down more than the gunman and his hostages. Will this spell the end of Detective Harpur and his troubled boss, Assistant Chief Constable Iles?

For years drug baron Ralph Ember has run his crooked enterprises peacefully enough alongside those of his rival, Mansel Shale. Their empires have been tolerated by Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles as a way of keeping violence off the streets. But are things changing? Karl Marx s bleak theory that all capitalists including drug tycoons lust for monopoly seems to be coming true. Do Ember and Shale long for sole control of the trade and the profits? Ember fears that Shale now wants to kill him and take over his firm. Shale, on the other hand, is about to get remarried and believing in keeping his (so-called) friends close and his enemies closer has asked Ember to be his best man. Will Ember be appallingly exposed as he stands with Shale at the altar? Or will Shale? Ember wonders whether he should act first to protect himself; one of his people has already been gunned down and the killer has not yet been caught. Iles and Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur have picked up hints of this acutely dangerous shift in the Ember-Shale relationship and must urgently try to head off the inevitable carnage."

Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles s absence from a police undercover conference sets the stage for the moral and practical dilemmas faced by one of his colleagues, ACC Esther Davidson, as she works to bring down the largest gang operating in her sector. The role of undercover agents or out-located officers is brought into sharp focus as James masterfully unfolds the story of Davidson s decision to infiltrate the gang against the events of the resulting court case."

There s intrigue right from the start of this new entry in Bill James s Harpur and Iles series: A houseful of paintings is stolen and the body of a finely dressed stranger is discovered. Villainous drug dealers fight for dominance on Constable Iles and Detective Harpur s turf. While the kingpins maneuver and scheme, Harpur is helped-or hindered?-by his very persistent daughters and by Iles s irregular and perhaps illicit methods. In this fast-paced thriller, there s no telling who will catch the next bullet."

For years Panicking Ralph Ember and Mansel Shale have run profitable drugs empires in peaceful cooperation with each other, and ACC Iles will blind-eye their trade as long as it keeps violence off the streets. But this happy arrangement is threatened by foreign dealers moving in and offering not just drugs, but punters exploited girls from Eastern Europe. And bloody gang warfare threatens as a scrabble for territory ensues."

Savagely comic and expertly choreographed. --The Guardian

A brilliant combination of almost Jacobean savagery and sexual betrayal with a tart comedy of contemporary manners. John Harvey, The Guardian.

His mutual agreements with local mobsters compromised by the arrival of a new chief of police, Harpur and Iles witness growing animosity between local drug lords and send in a female undercover agent to infiltrate a particularly threatening gang. Reprint.

Now in paperback, Michael Coffey's wonderful book about baseball's holy grail, the perfect game: “The best baseball book of the...season” (Booklist).There have been only fifteen perfect games pitched in the modern era of baseball: The great Cy Young fittingly hurled the first one, in 1904, and Randy Johnson pitched the last one, in May 2004. In between, some great and famous pitchers—Sandy Koufax, Catfish Hunter, Jim Bunning, and Don Larsen—performed the feat, as did those lesser-known, like Charlie Robertson and Len Barker. Fifteen in 160,000 games: The odds are staggering. In 27 Men Out, popular historian Michael Coffey offers an expansive look at these unsurpassable pitching performances. Here you'll find play-by-play accounts of each of the fifteen perfect games and expert assessments of those who pitched them. Along the way, Coffey goes beyond the box scores to provide fascinating details about how these games unfolded, as well as compelling anecdotes about all of the key players—from Koufax's controversial holdout with Don Drysdale to Mike Witt's victimization by the baseball commissioner to Dennis Martinez's struggle up from an impoverished Nicaraguan childhood. A must-have for baseball fans, historians, and statisticians alike, 27 Men Out is an exciting new benchmark in sports literature.