The most astonishing and extraordinary bequests and last requests found in people's wills.“This will is uncommon and capricious.” As beginnings go, this opening line shows how our final words don’t need to be written in standard legalese but can instead be creative and individualistic. Will Power tells the stories of big names and ordinary people writing their last wills and testaments who did just that.There’s the eccentric will that left...

In 1934, fifty-three-year-old beer tycoon John Sackville Labatt was kidnapped from his Lake Huron summer home and held ransom for three days. His captors, a group of ex-rumrunners, desperate in the days following prohibition and the Great Depression, were hoping for a big payday. This bizarre true crime story traces the abduction through to the trials of the abductors. From a heavily populated hideout to a case of mistaken identity, follow the story of Labatt, the first person in Canada to...

Glamorous young wife Alma Rattenbury takes her chauffeur as a lover and their scandalous relationship leads to a murder most foul.The 1935 murder of architect Francis Mawson Rattenbury, famous for his design of the iconic Parliament Buildings and Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia, and the arrest and lurid trial of his 30-years-younger second wife, Alma, and the family chauffeur, George Percy Stoner, her lover, riveted people.Francis and Alma had m...

"The 1935 murder of architect Francis Mawson Rattenbury, world famous for his design of the iconic Parliament Buildings and Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia, and the arrest and lurid trial of his thirty years younger second wife, Alma, and the family chauffeur, George Percy Stoner, her lover, who was half her age, riveted people. Debate continues even today as to which one of them really was responsible. Francis and Alma had moved to Bournemouth, England, when Victoria had ostra...

Jeffrey Dahmer committing his first murder with a fear of being left alone, then went on luring young boys and keeping souvenirs of their skulls.Ted Bundy who appeared to be a generous and charming young man with a brilliant future started with a petty crime and worked his way up to the murder of young women.John Wayne Gacy was a pillar of the community, organizing themed block parties and entertaining as Pogo the Clown, bu...

The “enormously entertaining” (The Wall Street Journal) account of a shocking 1897 murder mystery that “artfully re-create[s] the era, the crime, and the newspaper wars it touched off” (The New York Times)AN EDGAR NOMINEE FOR BEST FACT CRIME • “Fascinating . . . won’t disappoint readers in search of a book like Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City.”—The Washington PostOn Long Island, a farmer finds a...

From New York Times bestselling author C. David Heymann, an in-depth and controversial look at the much talked about but never fully revealed relationship between Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Robert F. Kennedy.Few writers have immersed themselves in the world of the Kennedys as completely or successfully as C. David Heymann, whose Jackie Kennedy Onassis biography, A Woman Named Jackie, reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, s...

Was Albert DeSalvo Really the Boston Strangler?Handyman Albert DeSalvo confessed to eleven brutal rape/murders that terrorized Boston from 1962 to 1964. The repeat sex offender boasted he had raped an additional 2,000 women. His story became the subject of a bestselling book, a major Hollywood movie, and a Hulu docuseries. But DeSalvo was not The Boston Strangler.Author Susan Kelly’s detailed investigation shows us the true DeSalvo—a pathological liar whose...

Here is the shocking true saga of the Irish American mob. In Paddy Whacked, bestselling author and organized crime expert T. J. English brings to life nearly two centuries of Irish American gangsterism, which spawned such unforgettable characters as Mike "King Mike" McDonald, Chicago's subterranean godfather; Big Bill Dwyer, New York's most notorious rumrunner during Prohibition; Mickey Featherstone, troubled Vietnam vet turned Westies gang leader; and James "Whitey" Bulger, the ruthless a...

A real-life Talented Mr. Ripley, the unbelievable thirty-year run of a shape-shifting con man.The story of Clark Rockefeller is a stranger-than-fiction twist on the classic American success story of the self-made man-because Clark Rockefeller was totally made up. The career con man who convincingly passed himself off as Rockefeller was born in a small village in Germany. At seventeen, obsessed with getting to America, he flew into the country on dubious st...

#1 New York Times bestselling biographer “Christopher Andersen has a real track record when it comes to celebrity bios.…He looks at Jack and Jackie Kennedy during their final year, pondering aloud whether after all the triumphs and betrayals they still loved each other” (Library Journal).They were the original power couple—outlandishly rich, impossibly attractive, and endlessly fascinating.Now, in this rare, behind-the-scenes portrait of t...

Former Boston Globe reporter Tina Cassidy delivers a remarkable account of one year in the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, America's favorite first lady and an international icon. 1975 was a year of monumental changes for Jackie: it was the year she lost her second husband, shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, saved one of New York City's cultural landmarks at Grand Central Station, and found her true calling—not as a powerful man's wife or the mother of future leaders, but as ...