Even though it has been a few weeks since I finished Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (Penguin Random House, 2021), the book does not feel over for me. The book has not left me. Part of the reason why I still feel very much in the middle of this …
Author: jessleonamae
The Donnellys: Powder Keg (Vol. 1) by John Little
In The Donnellys: Powder Keg, 1840-1880, Vol. 1 (ECW Press, 2021), author John Little delves into the history of the infamous Irish-Canadian family known as the ‘Black’ Donnellys. The notoriety of the Donnelly family has lived on within the popular imagination of many Canadians, their crimes and escapades often being recounted by academic historians and writers of popular history …
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The Uninnocent by Katherine Blake
Katherine Blake’s The Uninnocent: Notes on Violence and Mercy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) is one of the best non-fiction books I have read in recent memory. I purposefully do not call this book true crime because although it has many true crime elements—a violent murder and the search for the reasons why that crime was committed—Blake’s …
Psychopathy: A Very Short Introduction by Essi Viding
Essi Viding’s Psychopathy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2019), a part of Oxford’s A Very Short Introduction series, identifies the common misconceptions about psychopathy and instead explores the term medically, psychologically, and sociologically. There is no shortage of both popular and academic texts on psychopathy, especially as the term relates to serial killers, but Viding’s text distills that …
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Children Under Fire by John Woodrow Cox
John Woodrow Cox’s Children Under Fire: An American Crisis (Ecco, 2021) is an unflinching look at gun violence in the United States. Cox, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his Washington Post series Children Under Fire presents a detailed account of two elementary school children—Ava from South Carolina and Tyshaun from Washington, D.C.—and explores how they have both been affected …
The Violence Project by Jillian Peterson and James Densley
There are many books that discuss mass shootings and their causes, and I have read a few. What I have not seen in most of these books are solutions to prevent mass shootings. Jillian Peterson’s and James Densley’s The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic (Abrams Press, 2021) is that book—it is the book …
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Murder in the Family by Jeff Blackstock
I first became interested in Jeff Blackstock’s Murder in the Family: How the Search for my Mother’s Killer Led to my Father (Penguin 2020) after I picked up the book in a bookstore and read the first line of the prologue: “I think that my father murdered my mother” (1). It was equal parts tragic and intriguing …
“Strange Piece of Paradise” by Terri Jentz
In 1977, the summer after her sophomore year at Yale University, Terri Jentz and her friend (whom she refers to by the alias Shayna Weiss) set off on the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail, a 4,200-mile route established the year before in celebration of America’s Bicentennial. Just seven days into their trip, they stopped to rest at …
Blood in the Water by Silver Donald Cameron
I was excited to read and review Silver Donald Cameron’s Blood in the Water: A True Story of Revenge in the Maritimes (Viking 2020) because its story takes place in Petit de Grat, a small Acadian fishing village off the coast of Cape Breton Island. My family is spread across Nova Scotia, but my roots are in …
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True Crime Addict by James Renner
The current popularity of true crime has raised many ethical questions about the consumption of works with the genre. Is it moral to be entertained by such horrible things? What does the public owe the victims and their families? Unsolved cases raise even more questions, because it is easy for people to get caught up …
True Crime Index 