Darcy O'Brien

An Edgar Award–winning author’s true crime account of a grisly string of killings in Kentucky—and the shocking spectacle of greed that followed. Kentucky never deserved its Indian appellation “A Dark and Bloody Ground” more than when a small-town physician, seventy-seven-year-old Roscoe Acker, called in an emergency on a sweltering evening in August 1985. Acker’s own life hung in the balance, but it was already too late for his college-age daughter, Tammy, savagely stabbed eleven times and pinned by a kitchen knife to her bedroom floor. Three men had breached Dr. Acker’s alarm and security systems and made off with the fortune he had stashed away over his lifetime. The killers—part of a three-man, two-woman gang of the sort not seen since the Barkers—stopped counting the moldy bills when they reached $1.9 million. The cash came in handy soon after when they were caught and needed to lure Kentucky’s most flamboyant lawyer, the celebrated and corrupt Lester Burns, into representing them. Full of colorful characters and desperate deeds, A Dark and Bloody Ground is a “first-rate” true crime chronicle from the author of Murder in Little Egypt (Kirkus Reviews). “An arresting look into the troubled psyches of these criminals and into the depressed Kentucky economy that became fertile territory for narcotics dealers, theft rings and bootleggers.” —Publishers Weekly “The smell of wet, coal-laden earth, white lightning, and cocaine-driven sweat arises from these marvelously atmospheric—and compelling—pages.” —Kirkus Reviews “O’Brien creates a fascinating portrait of the mountain way of life and thought that forged the lives of these criminals.” —Library Journal

New York Times Bestseller: The “fascinating” true story of John Dale Cavaness, a much-admired Illinois doctor—and the cold-blooded killer of his own son (The Washington Post). Fusing the narrative power of an award-winning novelist and the detailed research of an experienced investigator, author Darcy O’Brien unfolds the story of Dr. John Dale Cavaness, the southern Illinois physician and surgeon charged with the murder of his son Sean in December 1984. Outraged by the arrest of the skilled medical practitioner who selflessly attended to their needs, the people of Little Egypt, as the natives call their region, rose to his defense. But during the subsequent trial, a radically different, disquieting portrait of Dr. Cavaness would emerge. Throughout the three decades that he enjoyed the admiration and respect of his community, Cavaness was privately terrorizing his family, abusing his employees, and making disastrous financial investments. As more and more grisly details of the Cavaness case come to stark Midwestern light in O’Brien’s chilling account, so too does the hidden gothic underside of rural America and its heritage of violence and blood. “A meticulous account . . . An implicit indictment of a culture that condones and encourages violent behavior in men.” —The New York Times Book Review “A fascinating story, and Darcy O’Brien does a great job of structuring it for suspense.” —The Washington Post “Riveting.”—Publishers Weekly “A terrifying story of family violence and the community that honored the perpetrator.” —Kirkus Reviews “Stunning material . . . Handled with justice and fastidiousness by a natural storyteller.” —Seamus Heaney, winner of the Nobel Prize

“A deeply disturbing book—cool, ironical, and ferocious.” —Thomas Flanagan, author of The Year of the French For several weeks in the fall of 1977, Los Angeles was held hostage by fear as the body count of sexually violated, brutally murdered young women escalated. With increasing alarm, newspapers headlined the deeds of a serial killer they named the Hillside Strangler. More than a year later, the mysterious disappearance of two university students near Seattle led to the arrest of a security guard—the handsome, charming, fast-talking Kenny Bianchi—and the ghastly discovery that the strangler was not one man but two. Like Truman Capote in In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer in The Executioner’s Song, Darcy O’Brien weds the narrative skill of an award-winning novelist with the detailed observations of an experienced investigator to bring the story of Bianchi and his sadistic cousin, Angelo Buono, to the page. Based on hundreds of hours of recorded testimony from one of the longest and most controversial criminal court cases in American history, The Hillside Stranglers is a true crime tour de force.

James Joyce, the great and bold literary innovator of our time, was also a rebel in life, a self-exile from family, nation, and religion. Criticism of Joyce, when it has not been purely technical, has sought in Joyce's work ideas as radical as his techniques and as rebellious as his life. Mr. O'Brien discovers that Joyce was neither morally revolutionary nor morally neutral. Instead, Joyce emerges as an Irishman clinging to a conception of human nature largely derived from the Irish Catholic background he so vehemently denounced. In this study of Joyce's work, from his early poems through Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Mr. O'Brien argues that Joyce eventually achieved, in his books, a comic perspective on the follies of mankind. Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

James Joyce, the great and bold literary innovator of our time, was also a rebel in life, a self-exile from family, nation, and religion. Criticism of Joyce, when it has not been purely technical, has sought in Joyce's work ideas as radical as his techniques and as rebellious as his life. Mr. O'Brien discovers that Joyce was neither morally revolutionary nor morally neutral. Instead, Joyce emerges as an Irishman clinging to a conception of human nature largely derived from the Irish Catholic background he so vehemently denounced. In this study of Joyce's work, from his early poems through Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Mr. O'Brien argues that Joyce eventually achieved, in his books, a comic perspective on the follies of mankind. Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The hero of Darcy O'Brien's A Way of Life, Like Any Other is a child of Hollywood, and once his life was a glittery dream. His father starred in Westerns. His mother was a goddess of the silver screen. The family enjoyed the high life on their estate, Casa Fiesta. But his parents' careers have crashed since then, and their marriage has broken up too. Lovesick and sex-crazed, the mother sets out on an intercontinental quest for the right--or wrong--man, while her mild-mannered but manipulative former husband clings to his memories in California. And their teenage son? How he struggles both to keep faith with his family and to get by himself, and what in the end he must do to break free, makes for a classic coming-of-age story--a novel that combines keen insight and devastating wit to hilarious and heartbreaking effect.