Welcome to the dark side of the crime genre, where creeps and psychopaths dominate and the good guys don't always win. Award winning librarian Gary Warren Niebuhr organizes and describes more than 600 crime titles according to popular reading tastes. He adopts the premise that, as in mystery, character is the defining appeal characteristic of these books, but the characters are of a different sort.

Books are arranged in three broad categories--"professional criminals," "caught up in crime," and "criminal detectives." Within these chapters, titles are organized in sections on the mob,...