The National Archive in Kew holds thousands of petitions from prisoners, their families, employers, supporters and even prosecutors written after the prisoner had been sentenced in the hope of gaining a commutation of their punishment. By using these primary sources, the book shows how little has changed in the types of crime committed, the circumstances and how human emotions remain constant across the centuries. From the woman accused of bigamy to the young men caught up in a duel and the middle-class forger, as cases are followed in this book, some far beyond the Home Secretary's decision, the criminals, supporters, prosecutors and judiciary are brought to life, occasionally with surprising results. Includes chapters Words from the Hulks, Theft, Words from the General Penitentiary, Mill Bank, London, Forgery, Shooting and Stabbing with Intent and Words from Newgate Prison, London. 169pp, paperback, illus.

'On the day there were seven of Bill's boys all masked up and they snatched what in modern cash would be around eight million quid. They boxed in the PO van with two cars, took off with about 30 mail bags before the alarm went off, and stashed the money at a pre-arranged drop. It was as smooth as can be. There was hell to pay. Churchill was Prime Minister and was furious...' This was the unsolved 1952 'daylight' robbery. The last King of Gangland gives the final word on his war with the Krays. Eddie Richardson is the last brand-name gangster, one of the few survivors from a vanished world of violent criminality. The Richardson brothers Eddie and Charlie, and their famous 'Torture Gang' made money, while their rivals Ronnie and Reggie Kray made fatal mischief. They fought each other, but Eddie also had to contend with his older brother - 'Charlie was evil.' Now his brother is dead, Eddie is free to tell the story of a vicious family feud and a life lived on the frontiers of the law. Eddie's comrade-in-arms was 'Mad' Frankie Fraser. Eddie reflects on his journey from the scrapyards of South London to the glitz and glamour of West End nightclubs, to the flesh and tease of Soho, through the door of No.10 to the perils of espionage and international intrigue, and finally as an inmate of a high-security prison, but with a personal fridge well stocked with gourmet food. 292pp, paperback, photos.

'You're all fallen women. You've sowed the seed of Satan. You are nothing.' When Mary Creighton found herself pregnant at just 15 out of wedlock in 1960s Ireland, she dreamed of a happy life with her child, but found herself sent away to Castlepollard, a home for mothers and their unborn babies. Stripped of their clothes and forced into gruelling work, those women who survived childbirth were made to force-feed their children for adoption into wealthy families. Babies were ripped out of their mother's arms, but Mary refused to let that happen to her. She managed to escape only to later lose her beautiful daughter to social services and the meddling nuns, who always caught up with her. After spending time in an infamous Magdalene Laundry, and having two other children snatched away, Mary sought to demand answers for the atrocities committed in God's name. Hundreds of babies died and are still buried in the grounds of Castlepollard today. 325pp, paperback.

The BBC TV series Peaky Blinders was a hit from its first showing in 2013. Transforming our perception of Birmingham of a century ago with swagger, glamour and extreme violence - not to mention a visceral soundtrack - we see the charismatic yet deeply flawed Shelby family prowl the second city's dingy backstreets leaving bloody chaos in their wake as they strive to remain the Birmingham's top gang. But who were the real Peaky Blinders, and how close to the truth is the show? Leading historian Prof. Carl Chinn discovered his own PB heritage back in the 80s and is himself the son of an illegal bookmaker and was thus able to draw on a wealth of totally original photos and interviews with family and friends to write this book. First myth to dispel is that the name was not derived from the practise of fitting razor blades to the specially stiffened peaks of their flat caps to create a fearsome weapon. While some real-life PBs may have done this, the real reason was their fashion for pulling the peak of their cap to one side of their heads, thus covering (or blinding) one eye. Secondly, there was not one gang called the Peaky Blinders. It was a generic term for the city's roughs that came into use in the 1890s and was interchangeable with "slogging gangs", itself a label for any gang member with a predilection for violence. Weapons were belts, stones, knives, coshes and boots and these people were not glamorous - they were brutal and vile, and eventually put to flight by strong police action led by Chief Constable Charles Rafter. Whether you want the truth behind the TV, or have an interest in the history of Birmingham, this is the book for you. Packed with miniscule detail and the kind of insights and information that only come from close association. Many photos, 276pp paperback.

Manchester Arena, Finsbury Park Mosque, the Bunch of Grapes bar at London Bridge, the 7/7 bombings, the nail bomb which ripped through the Admiral Duncan pub April 1999, the 1988 Omagh car bomb in Northern Ireland, the 1996 Manchester IRA bombing, the explosion onboard Pan Am 747 over Lockerbie, the Grand Hotel in Brighton, the Birmingham pub bombings, that is just some of the extraordinarily poignant and upsetting Daily Mirror newspaper photographs included in the section on Terrorism. Some of the earliest pictures are of the old buildings, many now demolished, which were the scene of Jack the Ripper's victims plus No 10 Rillington Place where bodies were found in the garden, the Acid Bath murderer John Haigh seen driving away from his hotel, the Moors Murderers, and Anne Downey mother of Lesley Ann pictured during a search for her daughter and another of her brother retrained by police as Ian Brady and Myra Hindley leave Hyde Court. Serial killers like Peter Sutcliffe, Harold Shipman, the Kray twins, grim basements, crowds outside courtrooms and prisons, police searches, here are killing sprees and mourners in this first-hand look at some of Britain's darkest moments. An impressive archive of the most infamous crimes caught on camera in this photographic collection. 144pp, mono throughout.

Reading like a Cold War thriller, this is probably the biggest story in football of the last decade, the shocking ugly underside of the beautiful game. One anonymous football fan, 18.6 million confidential documents, here is the explosive story of the shady underworld of modern football. In 2016 a whistler-blower known only as 'John' began leaking a treasure trove of top-secret files, revealing the clandestine dealings of clubs, players and agents at the highest levels of international football. From the eye-popping details of player transfers and fees to loopholes and opaque tax structures than ensure maximum earnings, this is a tale of rapacious greed and dodgy deals and also at the same time a gripping story of a fan who wanted to free football from corruption, but finds himself on the run. Sunday Times: 'Reveals the extraordinary add-ons Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and the two Manchester clubs have been willing to pay in their pursuit of supremacy... An insane and frankly obscene world.' 314pp, paperback.

Whitaker Wright has been dubbed the world's most shameless swindler. He was one of the great characters of the Victorian age - Methodist, minister, businessman, swindler and symbol of excess, whose life inspired some of H. G. Wells's finest books. Henry Macrory has found a glorious subject in telling the forgotten story of an extraordinary man, a roguish hustler with a genius for self-reinvention who was for a time the richest man in Britain. Beginning his career as an impoverished preacher, Wright crossed the Atlantic to prospect for gold, surviving a Native American massacre before he made his fortune. Then the bubble burst. Leaving behind a string of angry investors, he fled to England to start again and soon he was one of the world's richest men. At his 10,000 acre estate in Surrey he employed an entourage of 77 staff, moved a hill that blocked his view, and built an underwater glass smoking room. On his vast steam yacht, he entertained the Prince of Wales, the Kaiser, and half of Britain's aristocracy. His downfall was as dramatic as his ascent. On the last trading day of the 19th century his financial empire, which he had propped up by cooking the books, went belly up. This time, the trail of furious investors stretched all the way to the Prime Minister. With the police in hot pursuit, Wright fled to New York, but his escape was short-lived. At the end of what the press dubbed 'the most dramatic trial of modern times' he was sentenced to seven years in jail. Minutes later, he sprang a last dreadful surprise. 356pp.

Journalist Walter Shapiro always assumed that the stories about his great uncle Freeman Bernstein, particularly the one where he conned Hitler's war effort out of a valuable shipload of scrap metal, were just urban myths, particularly as other family members were law-abiding types with a healthy respect for the long arm of the law. This is the story of a professional swindler with a phenomenal gift of the gab, told in racy style to match the subject's extraordinary career. The story starts in Hollywood in 1937, where Freeman went up to see Mae West with a consignment of jewels from which the streetwise star easily extracted the best pieces, leaving Freeman with the junk, though she rewarded him with several pages in her autobiography. Freeman knew he was wanted by several police departments and submitted to arrest quietly as he left Mae's apartment block. In fact the charge was defrauding Hitler, to which he responded with the immortal line, "Hitler ain't got a thing on me". The son of Polish immigrants, Freeman got on the rung of showbusiness with a vaudeville arcade, inching his way towards Hollywood by fleeing from serial bankruptcies and dud cheques. His fortunes turned when he signed on the popular artiste May Ward, whom he married to cement the contract, and in World War I they had considerable success entertaining the troops. But Freeman could never go straight, and soon he and May had perfected the Anniversary Gag in which cruise ship passengers were conned into believing they were celebrating an anniversary and were then cheated at cards. The crowning con of Freeman's career was exporting scrap-metal claiming it was valuable nickel, swindling his Nazi clients with the time-honoured method of providing a few inspection bags of the real thing. 430pp, photos. Remainder mark.

An unforgettable journey into Cold War espionage, this is a breakthrough book in intelligence writing, drawing on CIA operational cables. Hoffman reveals CIA tradecraft tricks and chilling insight into the Cold War spy game between Washington and Moscow that has erupted anew under Vladimir Putin. The story pulses with a dramatic tension of running an agent in Soviet-era Moscow where the KGB is ubiquitous and CIA officers and Russian assets are prey. January 1977. While the Chief of the CIA's Moscow station fills his petrol tank, a stranger drops a note into the car. In the years that follow, that stranger, Adolf Tolkachev, becomes one of the West's most valuable spies. At enormous risk he and his handlers conduct clandestine meetings across Moscow using spy cameras, disguises and secret codes to elude the KGB in its own backyard, until a shocking betrayal puts them all at risk. 391pp, paperback, 16 pages of archive photos.

In 1978 Warren Fellows was convicted in Thailand of heroin trafficking and was sentenced to life imprisonment. This is his story of an unthinkable nightmare in a place where sewer rats and cockroaches are the only nutritious food, and where the worst punishment is the khun deo - solitary confinement, Thai style. Fellows was certainly guilty of his crime, but he endured and survived human-rights abuses beyond imagination and even the most hardened criminal would appear an innocent inside the barbaric prison system he endured. It's a gruelling cautionary tale reminiscent of Midnight Express. 'I was overcome by love for Avril, but driven by a sense of obligation to Ahma. In succeeding for him, I was betraying her. I had no idea what would happen when we arrived, but Avril's apprehension was beginning to unsettle me...By the time we reached the outskirts of Bangalore, I was convinced I had made a dreadful mistake.' 192pp, paperback.