The saga of Patty Hearst highlighted a decade in which America seemed to be suffering a collective nervous breakdown. Based on more than a hundred interviews and thousands of previously secret documents, AMERICAN HEIRESS recounts the craziness of the times (there were an average of 1,500 terrorist bombings a year in the early 1970s). Jeffrey Toobin portrays the lunacy of the half-baked radicals of the SLA and the toxic mix of sex, politics and violence that swept up Patty Hearst and re-creates her melodramatic trial. The book examines the life of a young woman who suffered an unimaginable trauma and then made the stunning decision to join her captors’ crusade. Or did she?

Lately, defense lawyer Andy Carpenter has been involved in a county prison program where inmates help train dogs the Tara Foundation has rescued to make them more adoptable. One of the prisoners Andy has been working with is Brian Atkins, who has 18 months left on a five-year term for fraud. Brian has been helping to train Boomer, an adorable fox terrier the Tara Foundation rescued from a neglectful owner. But one day, Andy arrives at the prison to discover that Brian has used Boomer to make an ingenious escape. The next day, the man on whose testimony Brian was convicted is found murdered. Brian is caught and arrested for the crime, though he forcefully protests his innocence.

As a child, Joseph Beck heard about his father’s legacy: Foster Beck had once been a respected trial lawyer who defied the unspoken code of 1930s Alabama by defending a black man charged with raping a white woman. Now a lawyer himself, Beck has become intrigued by the similarities between his father’s story and the one at the heart of Harper Lee’s iconic novel. This riveting memoir seeks to understand how race, class and the memory of the South’s defeat in the Civil War produced the trial’s outcome, and how these issues figure into our literary imagination.

Arrested, charged and convicted of a brutal race-based killing, Henry Hays, a member of Klavern 900 of the United Klans of America, was sentenced to death --- the first time in more than half a century that the state of Alabama sentenced a white man to death for killing a black man. On behalf of the victim’s grieving mother, legendary civil rights lawyer Morris Dees filed a civil suit against the members of the local Klan unit involved and the UKA, the largest Klan organization. Charging them with conspiracy, Dees put the Klan on trial, resulting in a verdict that would level a deadly blow to its organization.

Beginning in December 1884, Austin, Texas was terrorized by someone equally as vicious and, in some ways, far more diabolical than London's infamous Jack the Ripper. For almost exactly one year, the Midnight Assassin crisscrossed the entire city, using axes, knives and long steel rods to rip apart women. Before it was all over, at least a dozen men would be arrested in connection with the murders. When Jack the Ripper began his attacks in 1888, London police investigators did wonder if the killer from Austin had crossed the ocean to terrorize their own city.

John Hay, famous as Lincoln’s private secretary and later as secretary of state under presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, and Samuel Langhorne Clemens, famous for being “Mark Twain,” grew up 50 miles apart in the same rural antebellum stew of race and class and want. This shared history helped draw them together when they first met as up-and-coming young men in the late 1860s, and their mutual admiration never waned in spite of sharp differences in personality, worldview and public conduct. In THE STATESMAN AND THE STORYTELLER, the last decade of their lives plays out against the tumultuous events of the day.

The man who brutally murdered Uncle Harry is dead. In an effort to recover from the confrontation and collect himself, Jack Dana takes refuge on Torcello, a small island in the Venetian lagoon, to return to his writing career. Even more urgently, he wants to win back Kerry, the beautiful lawyer who rejected him after the bloody episode with Harry's assassin. But events beyond Jack's control intervene: Kerry loses her life in circumstances that contradict everything Jack thinks he knew about her. Soon death begins to stalk Jack himself. It is impossible not to recognize in its drumbeat the machinations of Abner Brown, the man who orchestrated Harry's demise.

Relief pitcher/private investigator Johnny Adcock doesn't have an office; he has the bullpen. That's where he meets Tiff Tate, the femme-fatale stylist responsible for half the looks in Major League Baseball, from Brian Wilson's beard to Big Papi's gold ropes. Tiff has a problem. Her new client, the rookie phenom Yonel Ruiz, has been threatened by a cartel of smugglers. Adcock is her last best hope. As he embarks on this potentially deadly mission, Adcock tangoes with a mysterious, sexy assassin known only as La Loba. And he still has the playoffs to worry about.

Jeffrey Lockhart’s father, Ross, is a billionaire in his 60s, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say “an uncertain farewell” to her as she surrenders her body.

On March 18, 1980, the immensely powerful Duke basketball program announced the hiring of its new coach --- the man who would resurrect the team, restore glory to Duke and defeat the legendary Dean Smith, who coached down the road at UNC Chapel Hill and had turned UNC into a powerhouse. The table was set nine days later, when on March 27, Jim Valvano was hired by North Carolina State to be their new head coach. In the skillful hands of John Feinstein, this extraordinary rivalry --- and the men behind it --- come to life in a unique, intimate way.