The Kidnap Years

A fascinating crime book like no other. - David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist With a page-one eye for detail and trenchant prose, David Stout's The Kidnap Years feels like a Ken Burns documentary about the Depression-era phenomenon of kidnappings ripped from a police detective's whisky-soaked casebook. The spree of often violent abductions victimized the rich and celebrated, turned a few kidnappers into national anti-heroes and helped launch the careers of a generation of crime-fighting lawmen and prosecutors. The stories of these cases are as riveting as they are true. - David Johnston, former New York Times criminal justice reporter and co-author of Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, an American Spy David Stout's The Kidnap Years is a great read and great history-a rollicking, often nail-biting chronicle of the wave of kidnappings that overwhelmed law-enforcement agencies in the Great Depression. New York Times-veteran Stout sheds important new light on the rise of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and on the Crime of the Century -the 1932 kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh's baby son. - Philip Shenon, New York Times-bestselling author of A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination I feel vaguely guilty about having enjoyed The Kidnap Years so much. A lot of blameless people died and a lot of evil people did terrible things, but David Stout writes with so much innocent enthusiasm that his book is addictive. Using the kidnapping of the Lindbergh Baby as a thread running through the years from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, we are regaled with stories about gangsters, prohibition, early kidnappers and their victims, the formation and development of the F.B.I., and the passing of the Federal Kidnapping Act of 1932. This can't-put-down book reminds us that virtuoso detective work was done long before the discovery of DNA, and that criminals were being profiled well before the term to describe it came into common use. - Shelly Reuben, author of The Boys of Sabbath Street and Tabula Rasa Blending meticulous research, the personal experiences of a seasoned journalist and a reader-friendly prose style, Dave Stout has produced a terrific book. If anyone has the chops to tackle this grim but compelling subject, it is Stout, an Edgar-award winning novelist, the author of other important true crime books and a longtime editor and reporter for the New York Times whose reporting assignments once required him to witness and a write about a state-sanctioned execution. - Neal Hirschfeld, author of Detective: The Insipirational Story of the Trailblazing Woman Cop Who Wouldn't Quit