The motto of the Mossad is “By way of deception, thou shalt do war.” From Ostrovsky’s description of the activities of the feared Israeli Secret Service one is compelled to accept the conclusion that the Mossad faithfully treads in the footsteps of all other secret-service agencies throughout the world, from the Gestapo to the KGB to the CIA. Far from being a book cramped and stilted by reiteration of fact after fact, Ostrovsky’s book reads like a best-selling thriller, except the names have not been changed to protect the guilty. JB

Publisher: St. Martin's
Paperback: 396 pages

There’s nothing like a nut with a gun, a grudge and plenty of ammunition to add spice to anyone’s day. Berserk! offers up a whole passel full, ranging from modern legends like Charles “Texas Tower” Whitman and James “McDonald’s” Huberty to lesser-known but no less interesting mass murderers like Wagner von Degerloch (who killed nine people in Germany in 1913) and Howard Unruh (Camden, New Jersey, 1949: 13 dead in 12 minutes). Chester offers up excellent, concise accounts of some of the more interesting criminals of the 20th century. JM

Publisher: St. Martin's
Paperback: 260 pages
Illustrated

“America may have had its fill of psychos for the last 40 years, but none of them has inspired so many books and films (Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) as Wisconsin’s cannibalistic handyman, Ed Gein. None of them has been used as the ultimate ogre in countless children’s stories and off-color jokes, and none of them has been found guilty of as many unspeakable atrocities as Ed Gein. This is his story. This is his legend.”

Publisher: St. Martin's
Paperback: 165 pages
Illustrated

The 1977 disappearance of Helen Brach, the widow of multimillionaire candy maker Frank Brach, is one of the most fascinating crimes of the last 20 years. Her fate remained a mystery until a few years ago when her death was linked to her unwitting involvement with an elaborate scam involving the killing of heavily insured show horses. Apparently, Brach got wind of what was really going on and was rewarded with a professional hit when she threatened to go to the police.
Unfortunately, Englade proves that for every interesting crime, there’s a mediocre crime book. Hot Blood is pedestrian enough to try the patience of all but the most devoted Brach fans, with its pages and pages of bad trial coverage and the novelistic, sycophantic stuff all too common in the crime genre these days. Yawn. JM

Publisher: St. Martin's
Hardback: 309 pages
Illustrated

“They smelled the foul odors. They heard the power saw buzzing in the dead of night. But neighbors never imagined the horrors happening right next door… The hot sultry night of July 22, 1991, was one the tenants of the Oxford Apartments would never forget. A panic-stricken young man—a pair of handcuffs still dangling from his wrists—ran out of Apartment 213 and told police an incredible tale of terror… Shaking with fear, he led officers back to his captor’s lair, where they made a gruesome discovery. Inside were the body parts of at least 15 men—including torsos stuffed into a barrel, severed heads in a refrigerator, and skulls boiled clean and stashed in a filing cabinet. Tacked to the freezer were Polaroid photographs of mutilated corpses.” Guess whose crib it was?

Publisher: St. Martin's
Paperback: 311 pages
Illustrated

“The shocking true story of Richard Ramirez… During a two-year rampage, a sadistic serial killer entered the homes of families from El Paso to San Francisco. He raped, mutilated and tortured his unfortunate victims in one of the most vicious crime sprees in California history. This is the horrifying account of his bloody journey, of the strange coincidence that led to his arrest—and of the sensational trial where the Night Stalker’s eerie sexual magnetism resulted in women actually demonstrating for his acquittal. Filled with accounts of Satanism, cult worship and the killer’s twisted obsession with heavy metal rock music.”

Publisher: St. Martin's
Paperback: 304 pages
Illustrated

Plunged into a nightmare of unspeakable abuse and depravity, they lived as SLAVE GIRLS… one of the first glimpses into the shocking world of human bondage… a sordid world of slaves and masters, where innocent young girls are sold to the rich, kidnapped and subjected to horrifying degradation… virtual captives in the mansions of the rich and famous, or in the squalid dungeons of the utterly degenerate… the survivors who lived through the ordeal now tell all… JB

Publisher: St. Martin's
Paperback: 259 pages
Illustrated

“In the early 1950s, Lynette Fromme’s world was more or less a paint-by-numbers existence shared by millions of suburban children living in Southern California… On the day that Lynette met a freshly released convict named Charles Manson, her world abruptly turned inside-out. Society became the enemy. Illegal drugs, violence, weapons and social outcasts now surrounded her and led her in the course of a decade to another dimension—to be imprisoned for the term of her natural life in the custody of the attorney general of the United States.”

Publisher: St. Martin's
Hardback: 398 pages

“Face-to-face with some of America’s most terrifying killers, FBI veteran and ex-Army CID colonel Ressler learned from them how to identify the unknown monsters who walk among us—and put them behind bars. Now, the man who coined the phrase ‘serial killer’ and advised Thomas Harris on The Silence of the Lambs shows how he is able to track down some of today’s most brutal murderers… Ressler uses the evidence at a crime scene to put together a psychological profile of the killers. From the victims they choose, to the way they kill, to the often grotesque souvenirs they take with them—Ressler unlocks the identities of these vicious killers for the police to capture. And with his discovery that serial killers share certain violent behavior, Ressler’s gone behind prison walls to hear the bizarre firsthand stories of countless convicted murderers… Join Ressler as he takes you on the hunt for today’s most dangerous psychopaths.”

Publisher: St. Martin's
Paperback: 289 pages
Illustrated

This book contains information on a wide-ranging variety of subjects, but the tone of it is so snide and dismissive of them that one wonders why the author even bothered to write the book. The author is an escape artist like Houdini, and in the tradition of Houdini he likes to debunk faux magic. This attitude is fine when exposing things like the levitation of tables, spirit writing and other parlor tricks. It gets a little wearing when used to describe historical or traditional things. Writing of the I Ching the author states: “… it is probably as a form of self-administered pop psychology that the system finds any value whatsoever.” The single-page synopsis of the entire Bible is funny in ways that perhaps were not intended. When the author is not being glib and clever it can be a useful resource. One place where the humor is absolutely on target is a closing appendix on “Forty-nine-End-of-the-World-Prophecies-That-Failed.” SA

Publisher: St. Martin's
Hardback: 284 pages
Illustrated