Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History

Two months before Andrew Cunanan murdered Gianni Versace on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion, Maureen Orth was investigating a major story on the serial killer for Vanity Fair. Now the award-winning journalist and Vanity Fair special correspondent tells the complete story of Cunanan, his unwitting victims, and the moneyed, hedonistic world in which they lived and died, culled from interviews with over 400 people, and details from thousands of pages of police reports.

In chilling detail, Maureen Orth reveals how Andrew Cunanan met his superstar victim…why police and the FBI repeatedly failed to catch Cunanan…why other victims’ families stonewalled the investigation…controversial findings of the Versace autopsy report, and more. Here is a late-century odyssey that races across America from California’s wealthy gay underworld to modest midwestern homes of families mourning their slaughtered sons to the celebration of decadence that is Versace’s South Beach. It is at once a landmark work of investigative journalism and a riveting account of a sociopath, his savage crimes, and the mysteries he left along the way.

Night Shade / Night Smoke

The hours between dusk and dawn are filled with mystery, danger — and romance. Here are two dark and dazzling classic tales of passion and peril by the incomparable mistress of romantic suspense, #1 New York Timesbestselling author Nora Roberts.

Nightshade

They sure were making cops in interesting packages these days. Colt Nightshade couldn’t believe his luck partnering on a case with Lieutenant Althea Grayson. But the breathtaking detective was strictly by-the-book and had no use for Colt’s easygoing renegade style. Thawing the heart of this enticing ice goddess just might be the toughest challenge Colt had ever faced.

Night Smoke

He had a reputation for being abrasive, aggressive and annoying — but if Natalie Fletcher was going to save her business, she needed arson investigator Ryan Piasecki’s help. The classy executive was accustomed to being in control and Ry’s arrogance was utterly infuriating — and oddly irresistible. Only, as the sparks flew, danger was hot on their trail.

Night Shift / Night Shadow

Her voice was like hot whiskey; smooth and potent but it was her contradictions that fascinated Detective Boyd Fletcher – the vulnerability beneath her self-sufficient facade.  Radio announcer Cilla O’Roarke was being threatened, and it was Boyd’s job to protect her.  But though she protested his intrusion into her life, an undeniable attraction sizzled between them… anything could happen on the Night Shift.

He walked the night, a shadow among shadows.  They called him Nemesis and he was everywhere.  But the night he saved Deborah O’Roarke from an attacker, he rediscovered the sweet ache of longing.  As Gage Guthrie he could woo her.  But the idealistic prosecutor ahborred his vigilante approach to crime fighting.  So how could he reveal he was the phantom who lurked in the Night Shadow?

Post-Read Note:

If you are familiar with Nora Robert’s books, then this would not be a surprise to you.  Good read if you are very much into romance books.  Otherwise, the ending is always too predictable, especially for Nora’s books.

Night Shield/Night Moves

The night is filled with mystery, danger . . . and romance. Here is the last Night Tales book, reissued for the first time, plus a bonus classic tale of passion and peril by the incomparable mistress of romantic suspense, #1 New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts.

Night Shield — She was too much of a cop not to be suspicious of a shady character like Jonah Blackhawk . . . and too much of a woman not to be drawn into him. So working undercover in Jonah’s club was getting extremely complicated. For despite Allison Fletcher’s determined distrust, the smooth-talking tough guy was getting under her skin, and that was too close for comfort.

Night Moves — Some people had skeletons in their closets; Maggie Fitzgerald had one in her yard. She’d retreated from her fast-paced life, seeking peace and solitude. And if surly landscaper Cliff Delaney’s rude manner and irresistible sexuality weren’t disturbing enough, now an old murder shattered her peace entirely, imperiling her life and forcing her right into the protective arms of the most irritating man alive.

The Manhattan Hunt Club

The acknowledged master of psychological suspense and heart-stopping terror, New York Times bestselling author John Saul now invites you to descend to chilling new depths of darkness–and discover a secret, savage world that exists beneath our very feet.

The promising future of New York City college student Jeff Converse has suddenly been shattered by a nightmarish turn of events. Falsely convicted of a brutal crime, Jeff sees his life vanishing before his eyes. But someone has other plans for Jeff, in a far deadlier place than any penitentiary. He finds himself beneath the teeming streets of Manhattan, in a hidden landscape of twisting tunnels and forgotten subterranean chambers. Here, an invisible population of the homeless, the desperate, and the mad has carved out its own shadow society.

But they are not alone. The pitch-dark tunnels and abandoned subway stations are haunted by the unmistakable sounds of predators in search of game. Someone has made this forsaken civilization beneath the city a private killing ground . . . and the hunt is on.

Trapped in a treacherous underground maze, cut off at every turn by ragged gangs of sinister “gamekeepers,” and stalked relentlessly by unseen hunters, Jeff faces overwhelming odds in the race to reach salvation and elude capture. With no weapon but his wits, and an unimaginable threat lurking around every dark corner, Jeff must somehow move heaven and earth to escape from a living hell.

The Manhattan Hunt Club is the most thrilling and suspenseful novel yet from the ingenious mind of John Saul.

Post-Read Note:

John Saul really made this book one of those hard-to-put-down.  It was excellent and the characters from the books had me rooting for them.  An excellent twist in the plot really makes you want to carry on reading.  Being able to imagine such an event happening in the maze/tunnels in the underground subway stations really made this book an excellent one. 

Time And Again

They crossed centuries to find a timeless love …

He was stranded in the present, but time traveler Caleb Hornblower’s biggest predicament wasn’t returning to the 23rd century … It was leaving behind beguilingly innocent Liberty Stone, who’d shown him a love more powerful than Time Was.

Cynical Jacob Hornblower had followed his brother, Caleb, into the past, hoping to lure him back. But once captivated by Liberty’s spitfire sister, Sunny, he discovered that even for a romance-resistant man of the future, Times Change.

Multi-New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts enchants readers once again with two unique and intriguing tales about passion so powerful it transcends time itself.

Post-Read Note:

As usual, Nora’s character will always fall in love quickly, sometimes with a little resistance in the beginning, which will no doubt melt away in the arms of the handsome hero.  And they all live happily ever after.  I’m not thrashing Nora’s novels (they made a good read sometimes) but it does get predictable.  And yet, I read her books again and again.  Perhaps it is the romantic angle that gets to me; that sometimes fairy tales do come true.  And if they don’t, oh well, there’s always Nora Roberts’ books.

I Heard That Song Before

In a riveting psychological thriller, Mary Higgins Clark takes the reader deep into the mysteries of the human mind, where memories may be the most dangerous things of all.

At the center of her novel is Kay Lansing, who has grown up in Englewood, New Jersey, daughter of the landscaper to the wealthy and powerful Carrington family. Their mansion — a historic seventeenth-century manor house transported stone by stone from Wales in 1848 — has a hidden chapel. One day, accompanying her father to work, six-year-old Kay succumbs to curiosity and sneaks into the chapel. There, she overhears a quarrel between a man and a woman who is demanding money from him. When she says that this will be the last time, his caustic response is: “I heard that song before.”

That same evening, the Carringtons hold a formal dinner dance after which Peter Carrington, a student at Princeton, drives home Susan Althorp, the nineteen-year-old daughter of neighbors. While her parents hear her come in, she is not in her room the next morning and is never seen or heard from again.

Throughout the years, a cloud of suspicion hangs over Peter Carrington. At age forty-two, head of the family business empire, he is still “a person of interest” in the eyes of the police, not only for Susan Althorp’s disappearance but also for the subsequent drowning death of his own pregnant wife in their swimming pool.

Kay Lansing, now living in New York and working as a librarian in Englewood, goes to see Peter Carrington to ask for permission to hold a cocktail party on his estate to benefit a literacy program, which he later grants. Kay comes to see Peter as maligned and misunderstood, and when he begins to courther after the cocktail party, she falls in love with him. Over the objections of her beloved grandmother Margaret O’Neil, who raised her after her parents’ early deaths, she marries him. To her dismay, she soon finds that he is a sleepwalker whose nocturnal wanderings draw him to the spot at the pool where his wife met her end.

Susan Althorp’s mother, Gladys, has always been convinced that Peter Carrington is responsible for her daughter’s disappearance, a belief shared by many in the community. Disregarding her husband’s protests about reopening the case, Gladys, now terminally ill, has hired a retired New York City detective to try to find out what happened to her daughter. Gladys wants to know before she dies.

Kay, too, has developed gnawing doubts about her husband. She believes that the key to the truth about his guilt or innocence lies in the scene she witnessed as a child in the chapel and knows she must learn the identity of the man and woman who quarreled there that day. Yet, she plunges into this pursuit realizing that “that knowledge may not be enough to save my husband’s life, if indeed it deserves to be saved.” What Kay does not even remotely suspect is that uncovering what lies behind these memories may cost her her own life.

I Heard That Song Before once again dramatically reconfirms Mary Higgins Clark’s worldwide reputation as a master storyteller.

I’ll Be Seeing You

Covering the story of a stabbing victim, television news reporter Meghan Collins stares down at the sheet-wrapped body of a beautiful young woman in a New York City hospital. What she sees in the dead girl’s face draws her into a terrifying web of treachery, where nothing is as it seems and the truth may be too devastating to pursue….

In a tragic bridge accident, Meghan’s father has disappeared — but no trace has been found of his body or his car. Meghan’s mother, neither widow nor wife, is unable to convert joint assets she needs to retain ownership of the family’s Connecticut inn. Before his disappearance, Edwin Collins had taken all the cash out of his substantial insurance policies. Now, in absentia, he has become the suspect in a brutal murder.

Trying to identify the dead girl, find her murderer, and clear her own father’s name, Meghan finds that her search is entwined with a story she is doing on the Manning Clinic, an in-vitro fertilization center where women seek the children nature has denied them. On a twisting trail of deadly passions and deceit, Meghan is venturing ever closer to the truth…a nightmare journey that may cost her her very life.

Cries Unheard

What brings a child to kill another child? In Cries Unheard, Gitta Sereny, one of our greatest authorities on questions of crimes and conscience, takes up the case of Mary Bell, who in 1968, at age eleven, was tried and convicted of murdering two small boys in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Twenty-seven years after her conviction, Bell agreed to talk to Sereny about her harrowing childhood, her terrible acts, her public trial, and her years of imprisonment. What emerges is a wrenching portrait of a damaged childhood and an adult’s fight for moral regeneration, one that forces us to ponder society’s responsibility for all children at the breaking point, whether in Newcastle, Arkansas, or Colorado.

In a searching examination of how children become violent criminals, and how the judicial system treats them, Sereny focuses on the case of Mary Bell. At age 11 in 1968, Bell committed the motiveless murder of two boys, ages three and four, in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. The British tabloids demonized Bell as a “born killer” and “vicious psychopath.” But Sereny, who extensively interviewed Bell, her therapists and social workers, portrays Bell, at the time of the murders, as a cauldron of repressed rage and anguish who lived in a grotesque fantasy world dissociated from reality. A prostitute’s daughter, Bell was forced to watch as her mother was whipped by clients; she was also sexually abused by her mother’s customers. Sentenced to life in prison but released in 1980, Bell, according to Sereny (who covered the trial in a 1972 book, The Case of Mary Bell), today feels profound remorse, sees a parole officer regularly, has a stable relationship with a caring man and is raising a daughter. Sereny’s account of Bell’s 12-year incarceration is disjointed and overwritten, but it offers a scorching look at British women’s prisons as cesspools of drugs, abuse and coerced sex. Sereny (Albert Speer) proposes that children under 14 should not be held criminally responsible and should be tried by a specially convened panel instead of by jury. Her harrowing inquiry, marked by a rigorous and by no means easy exercise of sympathetic imagination, will compel people to rethink how to deal with children who kill or commit other serious crimes.

Worth More Dead

Former Marine sergeant and judo instructor Roland Pitre Jr. claimed it was all an elaborate plan to win back his wife’s love — it wasn’t supposed to end with her dead body in the trunk of a car. Nearly twenty years later, he acknowledged that he had hired someone to kill his estranged wife in 1988, though his alleged excuse for why a monstrous “mistake” happened is as shocking and convoluted as the crime itself. Eventually, he was charged with first-degree murder in the long-unsolved death of Cheryl Pitre, after a mysterious witness betrayed Pitre to save his own skin. Tracing back the dark and bloody path of Pitre’s life, two generations of detectives found a chain of brutal and terrifying crimes by a man who manipulated the courts and prisons to walk free.