Every week writers for New Times and our parent company, Village Voice Media, produce elegant magazine-style feature writing -- a gritty portion of which comes in the form of true-crime stories.

Now VVM has collected some of its best recent true-crime yarns into an ebook: Seven Sins: A True Crime Anthology from Village Voice Media. Available on Amazon and iTunes, the book features seven stories, including the incredible tale of a young American Muslim woman "honor-killed" by her own father in Peoria (a Paul Rubin gem); the odd story of a young San Francisco woman so enamored of serial killers that she became known as America's most prominent "murder groupie"; and a historic murder case in Colorado in which the golden age of tabloid journalism collided with Erle Stanley Gardner, the larger-than-life creator of the Perry Mason mysteries.

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Mike Kiefer, a longtime colleague of ours and (more important) a longtime friend, writes these days for the Arizona Republic, mostly about bad guys in trouble down at the Maricopa County Superior Court and elsewhere.

One of those bad guys is Jared Lee Loughner, pictured to the left (just so folks don't get the idea that Mike looks like that these days).

Mike is a fine reporter and a true wordsmith (we know one when we read one, just like the Supreme Court justice and pornography) and wish we still had him over here.

All that said, Mike writes novels "on the side," and will be reading from his latest, The Lion Hunter, tonight at 7 at the Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe. The address: 6429 South McClintock Drive.

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Latino Vote 2012 Election

The emerging Latino vote in Arizona is the focus of the Arizona Latino Research Enterprise and Raul H. Castro Institute's annual Town Hall gathering at Phoenix College.

Panels of experts and speakers at the Town Hall will examine the increasing influence of Latino voters at a national, state and local level, as well as the growing contributions of Latino youth -- as voters and community organizers.

That was also the theme of "Brown Wave," a New Times feature about young Latinos, including undocumented students, mobilizing west Phoenix voters and helping increase voter turnout by nearly five times.

But it wasn't just in Phoenix, helping turn the tide in two city council seats and the mayor's race. Election experts say Latino voters played a pivotal role in the recall of former State Senate President Russell Pearce.

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Shannon Smith was killed on New Year's Eve in 1999 by a stray bullet someone randomly fired into the air.

​Saturday is New Year's Eve, and for a lot of Valley residents, that's apparently an invitation to randomly fire bullets into the sky.

If you didn't already know, the Phoenix Police Department wants to remind city residents that not only is blasting away at the sky an incredibly stupid thing to do (bullets, believe or not, are subject to the same rules of gravity as everything else), it's also a felony.

New Year's Eve marks the 12th anniversary of the death of Shannon Smith, a 14-year-old honor student killed in 1999 by a stray bullet fired randomly into the air while she was standing in her backyard talking on the phone.

Shocked that randomly firing a gun in an urban environment was only a misdemeanor, Smith's parents campaigned to pass "Shannon's Law" in 2000, which makes doing so a felony.

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Tempe Police

Griffith Smith

​The House of Glass Smoke Shop in Tempe was raided by police Tuesday after the store's owners accepted stolen cigarettes and sold unlicensed marijuana and morphine pills to undercover cops.

In February, Tempe Police were tipped off to shady behavior happening in the smoke shop's parking lot in the 1600 block of East Apache Boulevard. During the investigation, store owners Griffith Smith, 49, and 27-year-old Joshua Gault, of Peoria, knowingly bought stolen cigarettes from undercover officers.

Smith and Gault resold the cigarettes at the smoke shop for profit.

The two owners -- with the help of 20-year-old Arizona State University student Tyler Benenstuhl -- also sold weed and morphine pills to the undercover detectives, according to Tempe Police spokesman Sergent Steven Carbajal.

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www.pcrf.com

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The federal government avoided economic catastrophe today after the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill to increase the debt-ceiling yesterday. The bill cleared the Senate this morning, and President Barack Obama signed it into law moments ago.

The vast majority of Arizona's members of Congress, apparently, were no fans of the bi-partisan bill -- only two Arizona House members voted in favor of the bill, which kept the federal government from going into default.

So how did your member of Congress vote on the bill? Find out below:

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mcso.org

Anthony Jessup Sr.

​The ashes of Karen Dory's husband were found Saturday after a two-month search by Tempe police.

During a plea for the public's help Thursday, 76-year-old Dory remained confident in her hopes that the ashes of her husband, Grant Dory, would be returned. The next day, the ashes were found.

Tuscon native Anthony Jessup Sr. was arrested about 7:20 p.m. Friday after a Tempe police officer recognized his face during a traffic stop. The officer knew him as one of the two men who were caught by security cameras using Dory's stolen credit cards throughout Tempe and Mesa, according to Tempe police.

Police say the June 2 burglary was random and that the two men who used Dory's credit cards about 30 times were their main suspects.

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www.examiner.com

​The kennels of Maricopa County Animal Care and Control are now only slightly overcrowded -- rather than bursting at the seams -- thanks to a tremendous community turnout to this month's MCACC's $17 adoption sale.

Since July 12, shelters have seen about 1,200 adoptions --more than double the adoption rate from the same period last year. But MCACC's shelters continue to take in more dogs than they adopt out, despite the outpouring of community support.

"Oh my gosh, it's going incredibly well," MCACC shelter division manager Linda Soto tells New Times. "Last year, we had an adoption rate of 578. Now this year, from those exact dates we have 1,195 adopted. Unfortunately we didn't see any impact in our intake numbers. We're still at 150 a day of new dogs coming in."

Despite concerns about people only adopting pets because of the $17 price tag, Soto says the shelter's return rates haven't changed and that the constantly high intake numbers are the result of the hot Phoenix summer.

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Karen Dory

Karen Dory and her Husband (right) stand with their family in an old photo

​"Cowards."

That's how Karen Dory described the people who snuck into her Tempe home and stole her husband's ashes last month.

On June 2, Dory's East Fairmont Drive home was burglarized. The unknown suspects stole what she referred to as "memories' -- family heirlooms and jewelry. But what mattered most to her was also taken: a wooden urn, with gold trim, holding the ashes of her husband of 25 years.

This morning, the elderly woman, wearing round-rimmed glasses and a pink floral shirt, sat shaking inside the Tempe Police Department asking for help from the public.

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Apache Junction Police

Suspect Nikki Combs Small

​Police have identified the two men who were found dead in an Apache Junction trailer park over the weekend, and now have three people in custody for the drug-related double murder.

Edward L. Reagan Jr, 40, of Apache Junction and 22-year-old Jamie G. Mountain of Mesa were found Sunday night in a run-down mobile home with multiple gun shot wounds.

The suspects, 30-year-old Nikki Small and 30-year-old Timothy D. Bunting Jr., each of Payson, and 25-year-old Kylan L. Rubio, of Strawberry, were found at their homes and arrested late last night and early this morning.

The murders appear to be the result of a drug deal gone bad, police say. Reagan and Mountain weren't paying residents of the trailer park and the motor home in which they were found only showed up a few months ago.

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