Considering True Crime through academic and popular perspectives with reviews, interviews and more.
Even the most tragically familiar stories can devolve into shocking and unbelievable true crime cases. Part true crime narrative and part courtroom drama, At Any Cost: A Father’s Betrayal, A Wife’s Murder, and a Ten-Year War for Justice by Rebecca Rosenberg and Selim Algar (2021 St. Martin’s Press), recounts the worst results of domestic violence …
Continue reading At Any Cost by Rebecca Rosenberg and Selim Algar
My favorite nonfiction texts are those that place narratives about individuals in larger sociological contexts, because they draw the reader in on a human level and allow them to connect with larger-than-life stories. Not only does no other work of true crime do that better than The Devil in The White City: Murder, Magic, and …
Elon Green’s Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York (Celadon Books 2021) has three central avenues of exploration: a queer history of the United States and New York City in the 1980s and 90s, a history of the AIDS crisis and its massively devastating effect on the queer …
Angela Bourke’s The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (1999) chronicles the far from ordinary murder case of Bridget Cleary in rural County Tipperary, Ireland in March 1895. Gruesomely murdered by immolation on her own hearth by her husband, Michael Cleary, who, along with many of Bridget’s relatives and friends were present when she …
Continue reading The Burning of Bridget Cleary by Angela Bourke
The degree to which crime stories saturate our cultural (re)productions, especially in North America, is alternately fascinating and troubling. As writers and directors adapt from real-life tragedy, what do their films lose or gain in eliciting fear and revulsion in their viewers? What are the ethics of this complex process? Christopher Berry-Dee’s Serial Killers at …
Continue reading Serial Killers at the Movies by Christopher Berry-Dee
For me, the best type of true crime is the kind of text that blends memoir and nonfiction so seamlessly that the writer’s perspective and their reactions to the subject of their book seem inextricably wedded to the crimes the book recounts, as well as their consequences. Ellen McGarrahan’s book is just that. Two Truths …
“I found myself asking, what would my sister have made of all this? Was I championing her cause or making a fool of myself? Our series had taken the police and the school totally off guard, and I was enjoying every minute of it. But was Theresa laughing alongside me, or scorning me for being …
Continue reading Wish You Were Here by John Allore and Patricia Pearson
Thoroughly researched and unflinchingly strong-willed, Patricia Pearson’s When She Was Bad: How and Why Women Get Away with Murder (2021) is a stunning addition to the true crime genre and, in 1997 as much as today, gives readers a lot to think about. Pearson’s text is a reprint of her 1997 book of the same …
It would be easy to scoff at the amateur detectives out there searching, climbing, and snooping, or to dismiss the whole thing as shadow chasing, as if Therese and her colleagues were merely out on a ghost hunt, looking for shapeless bogeymen and imagined perpetrators, dreaming up convoluted conspiracy theories. Yes, they could be dismissed …
Continue reading The Dark Heart by Joakim Palmkvist, Agnes Broomé (Translator) by Rachel Friars
Justin Ling’s Missing from the Village (2020)is a thorough, timely, and incredibly thoughtful work of Canadian true crime that is a credit to the genre as a whole. Furthermore, the book is a powerful intervention into what we think we know about the way true crime is written. The text’s full title, Missing from the …
Continue reading Missing from the Village by Justin Ling, by Rachel M. Friars
