Nut Jobs: Cracking California's Strangest $10 Million Dollar Heist, by Marc Fennel (author, narrator)

Audible Studios, June 2020

Marc Fennel is an Australian reporter who came to the US to do an Audible Original story on nut heists.

Yes, nut heists. Thefts of almonds and other nuts, grown in California, and sold all over the world at a very high profit.

The high profit margin means there's a lot of incentive to steal truckloads of nuts and sell them elsewhere. And loads of raw nuts, not yet processed and packaged, are really hard to distinguish from each other, whether stolen or legit.

Crossfire Hurricane: Inside Donald Trump's War on the FBI, by Josh Campbell (author, narrator)

Highbridge, September 2019

Josh Campbell was an FBI special agent for twelve years, and special assistant to FBI Director James Comey for eighteen months. He was directly involved in Crossfire Hurricane, the initial investigation into the Trump campaign's connections to Trump's connections to Russia.

Let me first say, this is a great, well-written, informative look at how the FBI works, and what it was like to be working in the upper levels of the FBI while under sustained attack by Trump and his allies, while trying, genuinely, to conduct an honest investigation of the Trump campaign and its ties to Russia. I'm about to start ranting about my problems with what he has to say, so don't lose track of this. It's a very good book, and you will learn a great deal from it.

Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump by Glenn Simpson (author), Peter Fritsch (author), Mark Deakins (narrator)

Random House Audio, November 2019

In 2010, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, two former Wall Street Journal reporters, left the news business and founded Fusion GPS, to do research mostly for businesses and law firms, and occasionally opposition research for political campaigns.

In 2015, they were hired to do opposition research on Donald Trump.

What started as an investigation of Trump's tangled business dealings became ever more intertwined in previous investigations into Russian corruption, as they realized that investigating Trump meant investigating his Russian associations and business dealings.

Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal, by Eugene Soltes (author, narrator), Johnny Heller (narrator)

Highbridge, a Division of Recorded Books, October 2016

Eugene Soltes examines the problem of white collar crime--what makes some of the most successful and respected businessmen in the country (and the world, but his focus is mainly on the US) commit financial crimes that destroy their careers and land them in jail. He takes a hard and detailed look at how our views of white collar crime have evolved, as well as why white collar criminals do it.

Loose Ends (Loose Ends #1-4), by Jason Latour (writer), Chris Brunner (illustrator), Rico Renzi (illustrator)

Image Comics, ISBN 9781534302150, July 2017

Sonny Gibson already has a tough past when he turns up at his old favorite honky-tonk, "The Hideaway." He spent time in Iraq during the war, and he's had some shady connections both over there and since he's been back.

But he's been out of sight for a while.

Now he's turned up again, and some old connections have some old business they want to discuss. A gunfight and a death start a crime spree that runs from the Carolinas down to Florida.

The art is good. I believe in these people physically, how they look and how they move. I also believe in them as people; there are certainly people like them, making up a good part of the crime-committing population. They're violent, impulsive, not overly smart, not much inclined to think things through even after the fact.

Some of them are veterans, too. The military doesn't make everyone stronger and more disciplined; some people are wrecked by it, and not just physically.

Violent Love (Volume 1:Stay Dangerous), by Frank J. Barbiere (story), Victor Santos (art)

Image Comics, ISBN 9781534300446, May 2017

A young girl named Penny visits a neighbor, a friend of her mother's, who we gradually learn is a retired federal marshal. Back in the 1960s, he was involved in investigating a pair of violent killers, Daisy Jane and Rock Bradley. Penny sees some newspaper clippings he's kept, and he tells her the rest of the story.

That story is most of this book, with Penny and the marshal as a frame story.

Daisy Jane enters the story as a young girl as innocent as Penny, but her life is about to hit some very rough waters.

Her father, who loves her and supports all her ambitions of going to college and making something of herself, runs an auto repair garage now--but he used to be a gangster. A fortuitous car accident puts him back in tough with old associates, and he sees an easy way to make the money Daisy Jane needs to go to college. She goes happily off to UCLA, having no idea what her father is doing.