Kathryn Canavan

Kathryn Canavan started her journalism career on the crime beat. By age 26, she had covered a mass murder, reported one story at gunpoint and negotiated the surrender of a killer who was the subject of a five-state manhunt

Lincoln's Final Hours, her first true crime book, introduced the ordinary people thrust into an extraordinary event -- the nation's first presidential assassination. Some handled it better than others.

She has discussed the assassination on PBS, C-Span and the Discovery Channel.

True Crime Philadelphia chronicles the most sensational crimes in city history -- including one that stayed in the headlines for 50 years and gave rise to the admonition "Never take candy from a stranger."

Things don't always go exactly according to plan for criminals in Philadelphia. For 300 years, clever, heroic, quietly confident Philadelphians stepped in when it looked like things could break badly. Even famed crooks like Willie Sutton and Al Capone and H.H. Holmes proved no match for the ordinary citizens of Philadelphia.