When the season of love becomes a crime scene.

Christmas. Lights in the windows, family around the table, the promise of peace on earth. But close quarters can bring out the worst in people, too.

Behind those same lit windows, celebrations turn violent. People vanish. Families are torn apart. Somewhere between the snow, the presents, and the carols, a familiar place becomes a crime scene.

In True Crime Christmas, a special volume of the True Crime International series, Adrian Langenscheid covers ten real cases from the holiday season:

• the 1927 Santa Claus Bank Robbery in Cisco, Texas;
• the Sodder children, who vanished in a Christmas Eve fire and were never found;
• Barbara Jane Mackle, buried alive for eighty-three hours;
• a family murdered in a town called Santa Claus;
• the unsolved death of JonBenét Ramsey;
• a Christmas Eve shooting outside an English pub;
• a bomb in a South African supermarket;
• a Grindr date that ended in a Michigan basement;
• and two cases so strange they could only be true.

These aren't invented thrillers. This isn't manufactured drama.

Langenscheid writes in the style that's made his books a staple of the German true crime scene: carefully researched, plainly told, and never sensationalized. That restraint is what makes these stories land.

Featuring an exclusive case by Alexander Apeitos, host of the German true crime podcast Wahre Verbrechen.

For readers who want more than the crime itself, who want the question underneath it:

How does the unthinkable happen in the place we feel safest?

Behind the lights and the promise of peace is a hard look at what people are capable of.