Considering True Crime through academic and popular perspectives with reviews, interviews and more.
Leah Sottile’s 2022 text When the Moon Turns to Blood: Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell, and a Story of Murder, Wild Faith, and End Times tells the story of the murders of seven-year-old JJ Vallow and his sister, sixteen-year-old Tylee Ryan—Lori Vallow’s children. JJ and Tylee’s bodies were found in Chad Daybell’s backyard; Vallow and Daybell had been …
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Erin Kimmerle’s 2022 text We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys (William Morrow) is an unflinching examination of systemic racism in the state of Florida. Kimmerle is a forensic anthropologist who led a dig at the graveyard of the former Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. The …
Katherine Corcoran’s In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, A Cover-up, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press (Bloomsbury 2022) is a harrowing account of the murder of Mexican journalist Regina Martínez. Martínez was found bludgeoned to death in her bathroom in 2012. Because Martínez often covered political corruption and drug cartels in her …
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Did She Kill Him?: A Victorian Tale of Deception, Adultery, and Arsenic (Little Brown, 2014) by Kate Colquhoun is a recent addition to a vast number of books and other publications that have sought to illuminate the story of Florence Maybrick, convicted of murdering her husband in 1889. Born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1862, as a young …
Paul Pringle’s Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels (Macmillian 2022) is a hard-hitting account of a scandal involving USC’s Dean of Medicine Dr. Carmen Puliafito. Puliafito was caught in a Los Angeles hotel surrounded by illegal drugs and most alarmingly, in the company of a young woman who had clearly overdosed and …
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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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 …
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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