George Timothy Clooney is an American actor and filmmaker. Known for his work in both blockbuster and independent films, he has received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, a British Academy Film Award and four Golden Globe Awards. His honors include the Cecil B. DeMille Award, the Honorary César, the AFI Life Achievement Award, and the Kennedy Center Honor.
True crime is a nonfiction literary, podcast, and film genre in which the author examines a crime and details the actions of people associated with and affected by criminal events. It is a cultural phenomenon that can refer to the promotion of sensationalized and emotionally charged content around the subject of violent crime, for the general public. Many works in this genre recount high-profile, sensational crimes such as the killing of JonBenét Ramsey, the O. J. Simpson murder case, and the Pamela Smart murder, while others are devoted to more obscure slayings.
Lincoln Child is an American author of techno-thriller and horror novels. Though he is most well known for his collaborations with Douglas Preston, he has also written eight solo novels, including the Jeremy Logan series. Over twenty of the collaborative novels and most of his solo novels have become New York Times bestsellers, some reaching the #1 position. Child and Preston's first novel together, Relic, was adapted into a feature film. Their books are notable for their thorough research and scientific accuracy.
Brimstone is a thriller novel written by American authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and published on August 3, 2004, by Warner Books. This is the fifth installment in the Special Agent Pendergast series and the first novel in the Diogenes trilogy that also includes Dance of Death (2005) and The Book of the Dead (2006).
International Thriller Writers (ITW), was founded October 9, 2004, at Bouchercon XXXV, the "World Mystery and Suspense Conference", in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Six months later, some 150 authors with more than one billion books sold worldwide had joined the organization as founding members. As of October 5, 2014, the organization's website boasts more than 3,100 members in 28 countries.
Mario Lozano is a United States Army specialist, best known for once being indicted by an Italian court for his role in the death of Italian Secret Service officer Nicola Calipari in a supposed incident on Route Irish, immediately following the rescue of Giuliana Sgrena. Lozano was not the only American soldier involved in this incident, but received much more attention because he was the one who fired the machine gun killing Calipari. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion of the 69th Infantry Regiment, 42nd Infantry Division of the New York Army National Guard, based in Manhattan.
Douglas Jerome Preston is an American journalist and author. Although he is best known for his thrillers in collaboration with Lincoln Child, he has also written six solo novels, including the Wyman Ford series and a novel entitled Jennie, which was made into a movie by Disney. He has authored a half-dozen nonfiction books on science and exploration and writes occasionally for The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and other magazines.
A lovers' lane is a secluded area where people kiss, make out or engage in sexual activity. These areas range from parking lots in secluded rural areas to places with extraordinary views of a cityscape or other features. The Oxford English Dictionary records use of the phrase "lovers' lane" from 1853.
Rick Shefchik is an American novelist, nonfiction writer, and journalist. He is the author of the novels Amen Corner, published in 2007, Green Monster, published August 1, 2008 by Poisoned Pen Press, Frozen Tundra, published in 2010 by North Star Press and Rather See You Dead, e-published in 2011. 2012 saw the release of his first book of nonfiction, From Fields to Fairways: Classic Golf Clubs of Minnesota. In 2015, he released Everybody's Heard About the Bird: The True Story of 1960s Rock 'n' Roll in Minnesota. In October 2021, he announced on Facebook that he was collaborating with musician Paul Metsa on a work of historical nonfiction centered on the Minnesota musicians who played on Bob Dylan’s 1975 album Blood on the Tracks, for release in 2022 by the U of M Press.
Kathryn Casey is an American writer of mystery novels and non-fiction books. She is best known for writing She Wanted It All, which recounts the case of Celeste Beard, who married an Austin multimillionaire only to convince her lesbian lover, Tracey Tarlton, to kill him.
Monster is a psychological thriller and murder mystery novel by Jonathan Kellerman. It is the 14th novel in the Alex Delaware series.
Amanda Marie Knox is an American author, activist, and journalist. She spent almost four years incarcerated in Italy after her wrongful conviction in the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a fellow exchange student, with whom she shared an apartment in Perugia. In 2015, Knox was definitively acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation. In 2024, an Italian appellate court upheld Amanda Knox's slander conviction for falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba of murdering Meredith Kercher.
Mario Spezi was an Italian journalist, author, illustrator, and caricaturist. He wrote the non-fiction true crime books Dolci Colline di Sangue (2006) and Il Mostro di Firenze (1983). He was a co-author in the book The Monster of Florence A True Story (2008) with American author Douglas Preston. Additionally, he was credited by Preston for providing details used in the novel Brimstone.
Michael Capuzzo is an American journalist and author best known for his New York Times-bestselling nonfiction books The Murder Room and Close to Shore He was formerly a reporter with the Miami Herald and the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he received four Pulitzer Prize nominations. The Murder Room, the true story of a private dining club of famous detectives who solve cold murders, and Close to Shore, an historic thriller and recreation of the first American shark attack in World War I-era New Jersey, both enjoyed wide acclaim from critics and authors such as Gay Talese, Mark Bowden, John Sanford, and Michael Connelly.
The Monster of Florence is the name commonly used by the Italian media for a non-definitively identified serial killer active within the Metropolitan City of Florence between 1968 and 1985. The Monster murdered 16 victims, usually young couples secluded in search of intimacy, in wooded areas during new moons. Several connected persons have been convicted for involvement in the murders, yet the exact sequence of events, the identity of the main actor and the motives remain unclear.
The Maguindanao massacre, also known as the Ampatuan massacre, named after the town where mass graves of victims were found, occurred on the morning of November 23, 2009, in the town of Ampatuan in then-undivided Maguindanao province, on the island of Mindanao. The 58 victims were on their way to file a certificate of candidacy for Esmael Mangudadatu, vice mayor of Buluan, when they were kidnapped and later killed. Mangudadatu was challenging Datu Unsay mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr., son of the incumbent Maguindanao governor Andal Ampatuan Sr. and member of one of Mindanao's leading Muslim political clans, in the forthcoming Maguindanao gubernatorial election, part of the national elections in 2010. The people killed included Mangudadatu's wife, his two sisters, journalists, lawyers, aides, and motorists who were witnesses or were mistakenly identified as part of the convoy.
Giuliano Mignini is an Italian magistrate. He retired as a public prosecutor in Perugia, Umbria, in 2020.
Amal Clooney is a British international human rights lawyer. Notable clients of hers include former Maldivian president Mohamed Nasheed, Australian WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, Yazidi human rights activist Nadia Murad, Filipino-American journalist Maria Ressa, Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova, and Egyptian-Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy. She has held various appointments with the Government of the United Kingdom and the United Nations, and is also an adjunct law professor at Columbia Law School. In 2016, she and her husband, the American actor George Clooney, co-founded the Clooney Foundation for Justice.
My Favorite Murder is a weekly true crime comedy podcast hosted by American comedians Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. The first episode was released in January 2016. The podcast debuted at #25 on the iTunes podcast charts and peaked at #3 on April 27, 2018. Weekly episodes regularly land within the iTunes' Top 10 Comedy Podcast chart. As of 2020, the podcast gets 35 million downloads per month.
Billy Jensen is an American investigative journalist, author, producer, and podcaster. He is known for his work creating content in the true crime genre, including co-hosting the Discovery+ podcast and associated television special Unraveled: The Real Story of the Long Island Serial Killer, and the podcasts The First Degree, and Jensen & Holes: The Murder Squad. He is also the author of the books Chase Darkness with Me: How One True Crime Writer Started Solving Murders, and Killer Amidst Killers: Hunting Serial Killers Operating Under the Cloak of America's Opioid Epidemic.
