We told Gray Newell, who's famous in the book world for her custom-designed reading lists, what VAGUE was all about and she stocked our virtual shelves with books she thought our visitors would want to read.

Kindred
by Octavia Butler
Can't do this book justice in a blurb. A fictional autobiography that culminates in a deadly act of self-defense. Butler uses two literary forms—slave woman's memoir and sci-fi—to push the boundaries of both and more: to take them someplace worth getting to.

God of the Rodeo: The Search for Hope, Faith and a Six-second Ride in Louisiana's Angola Prison
by Daniel Bergner
For years Louisiana's fearsome Angola Prison has been documented and romanticized in song (the Nevilles, Leadbelly) in audio-visual journalism (60 minutes, The Farm ) and in literature ( Coming Through the Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje ). Bergner spent a year with the men of Angola, learning of their torments and their search for grace. In his compelling book he tells of heinous crimes, both by prison officials and prisoners, and of the redemption to be found in a prison rodeo.

The Kiss: A Memoir
by Kathryn Harrison
Her reading public didn't come with her when she stopped fictionalizing her experiences of incest and wrote this memoir about them. Yet this is a powerful and compelling examination of the interplay between a loving daughter and her predator father.

Point Last Seen: A Woman Tracker's Story of Domestic Violence and Personal Triumph
by Hannah Nyala
Hannah Nyala's young adulthood ended in the arms of her extremely abusive husband. She fled with their two children; he tracked her down and she learned to track the tracker. She turned this skill into a job with the search and rescue unit of the National Park Service. Although her newfound ability to "read" her environment did not protect her from him physically, it saved her emotionally and turned her into one of our better nature writers.

The Chamber
by John Grisham
Grisham is a sly dog. In the guise of another thriller he has slipped by a rather thoughtful look at the pros and cons of the death penalty. It probes behind the headlines and buzzwords of the issue: Should we kill the killers?

The Axeman's Jazz
by Julie Smith
Based on a real New Orleans serial killer case in which the M.O.s repeated but the victims seemed to have no connection. Smith's loveable detective Jay Skip Landon analyzes their common traits—vulnerability and anonymity—to crack the case.

Computer Crime: A Crimefighter's Handbook—O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
by David Icove, Karl Seger & William Vonstorch
Anyone who has crawled past O'Reilly & Associates' fluffy animal icons and dipped into their widely respected and technical computer books will be surprised by this clear, straightforward wake-up call. If you've worried about having your credit information made public, your bank accounts assessed or you don't want to publicize the titles of the last twenty books you've ordered from Amazon.com, you need this book. It is a solid review of the risks, laws and countermeasures in computer crime.

All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence
by Fox Butterfield
In this astounding revision of conventional wisdom about crime, New York Times reporter Butterfield investigates the first child in his state to be tried as an adult. Butterfield traces the roots of Willie Bosket's violence back to "Bloody Edgefield"—a county in South Carolina where the tradition of killing to defend one's honor was passed down from father to son among Scotch-Irish settlers. Because freed slaves like the Boskets adopted that tradition of honor, their recent generations, although of "genius" I.Q., have murdered and done time like their daddies before them.

Also of interest:

Midnight in Sicily: On Art, Food, History, Travel and La Cosa Nostra
by Peter Robb
How The Mob ruined a neighborhood.

Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The basics, and from the proto-hip.

The Color of Crime: Racial Hoaxes, White Fear, Black Protectionism, Police Harassment and Other Macroaggressions
by Katheryn K. Russell
Title says it.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and Neuromancer by William Gibson. The cybercrime cult classics that rewired the crime thriller for the computer age.