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 …
Author: jessleonamae
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale 
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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Roll Red Roll by Nancy Schwartzman
Roll Red Roll: Rape, Power, and Football in the American Heartland (Hachette Books 2022) by Nancy Schwartzman was a title that was immediately intriguing to me because I had seen the feature documentary Roll Red Roll (2018), directed and produced by Schwartzman. The documentary, like the book, depicts a rape committed, filmed, photographed, and posted on the internet by …
22 Murders by Paul Palango
Paul Palango’s 22 Murders: Investigating the Massacres, Cover-Up, and Obstacles to Justice in Nova Scotia (Random House Canada 2022) is an extremely detailed account of the mass murder of twenty-two people in the most unlikely of places: Portapique, Nova Scotia. The perpetrator, Gabriel Wortman, was on the loose for twelve hours, shooting rural Nova Scotia residents in …
Trailed by Kathryn Miles
Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders (Algonquin Books 2022) by Kathryn Miles details the brutal murders of Lollie Winans and Julie Williams, who were killed in Virginia’s Shenandoah national park while on a hiking trip in 1996. The case has long since been cold, although the FBI and rangers from the National Park …
Duped by Saul Kassin
Saul Kassin’s Duped: Why Innocent People Confess and Why We Believe Their Confessions (Prometheus Books, 2022) is a part of the growing body of literature that discusses false confessions, the psychology behind false accusations, and the injustice that is baked into the American judicial system. What I think this book is doing differently is explaining why false …
Bone Deep by Charles Bosworth Jr. & Joel J. Schwartz 
Charles Bosworth Jr. and Joel J. Schwartz’s Bone Deep: Untangling the Betsy Faria Murder Case (Kensington 2022) is a classic true crime tale of murder, intrigue, suspicion, and wrongful conviction. The book is fast-paced, and the case is shocking: Betsy Faria was brutally murdered in her home and discovered by her husband, Russ. Russ is suspected of …
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Death in the Air by Kate Winkler Dawson
In Death in the Air: The True Story of a Serial Killer, The Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City (Hachette Books, 2018), Kate Winkler Dawson draws attention to two killers that gripped the attention of London and the world in the early 1950s. In February 1952, King George VI died at the age of …
Boys Enter the House by David Nelson
In David Nelson’s 2021 book Boys Enter the House: The Victims of John Wayne Gacy and the Lives they Left Behind (Chicago Review Press) the text begins with an illuminating author’s note, one wherein Nelson explains the terms he uses throughout the book, the way the interviews were conducted and complied, and most importantly, what his intentions …
Catch the Sparrow by Rachel Rear
Rachel Rear’s Catch the Sparrow: A Search for a Sister and the Truth of her Murder (Bloomsbury, 2022) tells the complex and devastating story of Stephanie Kupchynsky’s 1991 disappearance and murder. Rear grew up in Greece, New York, and was fourteen when Stephanie went missing. She remembers the case well and spends many poignant passages in the book discussing …
True Crime Index 