Considering True Crime through academic and popular perspectives with reviews, interviews and more.
Brandon L. Garrett’s monograph Autopsy of a Crime Lab: Exposing the Flaws in Forensics (University of California Press, 2021) is a brutally honest look at the inadequacies of forensic science, its practitioners, and a legal system that legitimizes aspects of the field that seemingly have no genuine scientific basis. In this carefully and expertly researched book, Garrett, …
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Pulitzer-Prize nominated reporter Justin Fenton seriously delivers with his organized crime thriller We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption (Penguin Random House Canada, 2021), to be published this month. Fenton’s book tells the story of Baltimore Police Department and the 2015 scandal that led to eight of their officers being charged with …
Liza Rodman’s and Jennifer Jordan’s book The Babysitter: My Summers with a Serial Killer (Atria Books, 2021) chronicles Rodman’s 1960s childhood in Provincetown, MA. The book also chronicles Rodman’s interactions with Tony Costa, otherwise known as the “Cape Cod Ripper”. Costa killed at least three women in the 1960s; he buried their bodies in the woods after …
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In the beautiful author’s note that concludes Sonia Faleiro’s The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing (Penguin Random House, 2021), Faleiro connects the brutal 2012 Delhi bus rape to the deaths of the two young Indian children that are the subject of her book. The gang rape and murder of a young medical student in Delhi becomes an …
When I saw that Peter Vronsky had published another book, I couldn’t wait to read it. I had read his previous book Sons of Cain (2018) and found its overall argument compelling and original. Sons of Cain did an excellent job of not only drawing a thread between some of the earliest serial killings known …
Here at True Crime Index, we are especially interested in the intersection of true crime and memoir. The Hot One by Carolyn Murnick (Simon and Schuster, 2018) is a text I was drawn to because it is so interested in combining these two genres. The Hot One is so much more than its salacious tagline, …
The synopsis for Cold Case North: The Search for James Brady and Absolom Halkett (University of Regina Press, 2020) captured me immediately. Two prospectors, Jim Brady and Abbie Halkett disappeared from the Northern Saskatchewan bush in 1967. After an extensive ground, water, and air search, nothing of note was found and the RCMP assumed they …
Continue reading Cold Case North by Deanna Reder, Eric Bell and Michael Nest
In Emma Copley Eisenberg’s The Third Rainbow Girl (Hachette Books, 2020), Eisenberg vividly describes the mountains of West Virginia. She explains that, on some mornings, the mountains would be partially obstructed by a dense kind of fog that is particular to the area. Little by little, as the day wears on, more and more of …
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I have read many true crime books. I have consumed the good, the bad, and the ugly of this genre. I have been totally unaffected by some books, and unable to sleep because of others. The reaction I had to Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir (Flatiron Books, 2017) …
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This week on True Crime Index, our hometown reviews continue with Jesyka's review of Vanessa Brown's The Forest City Killer. The Place It’s hard for me to say that I grew up in London, ON, because really, I only spent my teenage and young adult years there. My father was in the military and as …
