Considering True Crime through academic and popular perspectives with reviews, interviews and more.
Paul Fischer’s The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies (Simon & Schuster 2022) is a rather misleading title. Yes, it is about the man who invented motion pictures, on record as being the first man to record a moving photograph, but it is not at all about obsession, murder …
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The latest gripping true crime text from prolific crime writer John Glatt, The Doomsday Mother: Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell, and the End of an American Family (St. Martin’s Press, 2022), is the absolutely gripping account of the Vallow/Daybell murder case. The first book published on the very recent crimes, Glatt brings his research expertise and precise writing …
A best seller when it was first published just over two decades ago, Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (Harper Perennial, 1999) remains a captivating read for the contemporary reader. Although today physical copies have been made largely obsolete by internet …
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Michael Arntfield’s How to Solve a Cold Case And Everything Else You Wanted to Know About Catching Killers (Harper Collins 2022) is a patchwork quilt of a book, its first half explaining the business of cold cases, its second using particular case studies to show how catching killers does (or does not) work and subsequently how cases …
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As an in-depth and harrowing exploration of a little-known Canadian crime, The Castleton Massacre: Survivors’ Stories of the Killins Femicide by Sharon Anne Cook and Margaret Carson is one of the best true crime texts published this year and is not to be missed by readers. Authored by Margaret Carson, who miraculously survived the Castleton …
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Kathleen Hale’s Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crimes of Two Midwestern Girls (Grove Atlantic, 2022) is a balanced, well-researched, and thoughtful account of an extremely sensational case and its even more sensational aftermath. What became known as the “Slenderman Stabbings” started with two pre-teen girls and an internet obsession with the horror website Creepypasta …
David King’s Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi Occupied Paris (Crown, 2011) chronicles the grizzly crimes of French serial killer Marcel Petiot which shocked France and the world alike when they came to light in March 1944. Alerted by neighbours concerned about a foul smell and intense smoke emanating from one of …
Rick Emerson’s Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries(Penguin Random House 2022) is a whiplash of a book. Detailing the rise of the infamous published diary Go Ask Alice (1971), the life of a woman named Beatrice Sparks who alleged to have counselled the diary’s subject and published the diary after …
True Crime writer Casey Sherman’s latest book, Helltown: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer on Cape Cod (Sourcebooks, 2022), is a fascinating and unflinching look at the crimes of Tony Costa and the two great American writers who were inspired by him. Tony Costa’s crimes have been given less attention in the true crime …
Later made into a popular British miniseries of the same name, Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective (Bloomsbury, 2009) delivers an intensely thorough analysis of a real 1860 murder case that had a profound impact in Britain. On the morning of 30 June 1860, it …
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