New books

Unsolved Mystery

Two young women vanished from a downtown hangout in their northern Texas town of Carrollton in 1988. Though the case was never solved and decades have now passed, the missing women are remembered in a new self-published book.

The title is This Night Wounds Time: The Mysterious Disappearances of Stacie Madison and Susan Smalley, available on Lulu.

The author, Shawn Sutherland, has more details on his website.

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Did Jeffrey Dahmer kill Adam Walsh?

Arthur Jay Harris's theory that Jeffrey Dahmer may have killed Adam Walsh has been very controversial, not supported by the police or Adam's family.

But in a new book, Harris, a true crime author from Florida, delineates the evidence he found. Though I don't know the case as others do, the author has done much research, and the theory seems plausible, or at least worth hearing out.

The book is Jeffrey Dahmer's Dirty Secret: The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh [Amazon; not on B&N].

Details are on the author's website.

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The Last Lawyer

It takes a certain strength of character to represent the condemned, because it takes a special crusader to fight to the last ditch.

A new book by John Temple, associate dean of the journalism school at West Virginia University, takes a look at an unusual case.

The story concerns a team of idealistic attorneys and investigators in North Carolina who took on such a challenge in the case of one Bo Jones. The book is The Last Lawyer: The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates [Amazon; B&N]. The book has earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly (which called it "disturbing") and has gotten quite a lot of attention elsewhere as well. It's billed as an indictment of the system. I'm glad to see it's a hardcover, because after it's read, the book might come in handy for propping up one's faith in American criminal justice.

Comments

[Fantasypi (Gene Cox)]

Prosecutors are often persecutors in the name of injustice which is their job to punish. I worked in law offices for two years, and guilt and innocence sometimes has nothing to do with it. Just one big political game for all the lawyers involved. I talk about this sometimes in my Detective / Murder blog Night Stalker Detective sometimes. Justice is a legal term.