The Best True Crime Books of the Year

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The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the year’s best true crime books. (For more nonfiction, check out our list of the year’s best in criticism/biography.)  

Rachel Rear, Catch the Sparrow
(Bloomsbury)

Rachel Rear grew up often thinking about her stepsister Stephanie Kupchynsky. How could she not? Rear’s mother got together with Kupchynsky’s father after Stephanie’s disappearance from her home Rochester in an age of serial killers. Stephanie had moved from Martha’s Vineyard to leave an abusive partner, but fell victim to a mysterious assailant while on the cusp of a new life. Rachel Rear’s beautiful, heartbreaking memoir is also a fierce interrogation of violence against women in American culture, and essential reading to understand the experience of the families left behind.–MO

Jarrett Kobek, How to Find Zodiac
(We Heard You Like Books)

Jarrett Kobek, author of the 2016 novel, I Hate the Internet, has taken on a fascinating project in his latest book, at once an ingenious piece of sleuthing and an epistemological endeavor alternating between meditative and exuberant registers, all centered around a mystery that grips the cold case community like no other: the search for the Zodiac killer. In short, Kobek believes (knowing full well how bizarre that very belief is) that he may have discovered the Zodiac’s identity. He then sets out to prove himself wrong…but can he manage to do it? Linguistic clues and quotations lead him to believe the Zodiac was a comic book collector at a time when the practice was rare. From there he hones in on one suspect and explores the case against him from every angle. The book brings a fresh and aware perspective to a mystery that has permeated the culture. –DM

Katherine Corcoran, In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, a Coverup, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press
(Bloomsbury)

A powerful chronicle of the life, work, and murder of Regina Martínez, a trailblazing journalist whose stories in Proceso exposed major corruption in the ranks of Mexican politics, and who was brutally killed in 2012. Corcoran, AP bureau chief in Mexico at the time of the killing, trains a sharp investigative eye on the events leading up to the murder and the desperate coverup that ensued. –DM

T. J. English, Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld
(William Morrow)

T.J. English’s newest slice of American noir culture is a sweeping history of the long, entangled tradition of jazz and organized crime, from the early days of Storyville, with Black performers and Sicilian club owners operating a complicated network of protection, endorsement, exploitation, and wild, creative invention. In cities across America, jazz musicians often found their homes in connected clubs and performing venues. Some believed it was to their benefit, but as the century rolled on, divisions within the arts community began to spread, as some musicians no longer wanted to play along for the mobsters who had a taste of their careers and profits. So in the end, the story becomes a distinctly American one, of course: of racial inequality, economic injustice, and the immortal art form that sprang from this hotbed of corruption and striving. –DM

Kathleen Hale, Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls
(Grove Press)

Kathleen Hale initially wrote about the Slenderman case for Hazlitt, an article that still stands out from the general sensationalist coverage of the case for its enormous empathy for all involved. When two middle schoolers stabbed another middle schooler in the woods in 2012, they claimed to do it on behalf of a mysterious figure known as Slenderman. Hysterical parenting sites spread a moral panic about CreepyPasta, the website where stories of Slenderman originated and then became memes, but undiagnosed schizophrenia, midwestern stoicism, and intense friendship dynamics are much more to blame for the attack, as Kathleen Hale illustrates in both the original article and now a full-length title. –MO

Susan Jonusas, Hell’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, America’s First Serial Killer Family
(Viking)

The story of the “Bloody Benders”—the homesteading family in 1870s Kansas believed to have perpetrated one of the most grisly slaughters of the 19th century—is well known, or at least we think we know it. That’s where Jonusas’ illuminating new study comes in. The family itself remains something of an enigma, as they escaped the mobs descending on them looking for justice, but Jonusas finds, in their escape, a bigger story that depicts the country at an auspicious moment, as the frontier was beginning to close and new industries and attitudes were pushing their way across the nation. Jonusas’ dogged archival work reveals new truths that cut through the legend—in particular, she traces the Benders’ fugitive journey and appears to have solved a great portion of the mystery surrounding their escape. She also brings to life the marshals and other detectives on their trail, as well as the families left behind to grieve the victims. In all, it’s a masterful portrait of a nation revealing itself through one of its most atrocious crimes. –DM

Beverly Lowry, Deer Creek Drive: A Reckoning of Memory and Murder in the Mississippi Delta
(Knopf)

In Beverly Lowry’s hometown, when she was a small child just beginning to learn the horrific history of the American South, an elderly white woman known for being hateful was murdered with great violence. Her daughter tried to blame the crime on a Black man, but was instead put on trial herself—he attack was too brutal and lengthy for the townsfolk to ascribe such violence to the vulnerable Black community; what’s more, the daughter was suspected of a too-close relationship with a schoolteacher and this, combined with her mannish courtroom outfits, signaled her to be a gender rebel and thus a probable murderess. The daughter found herself convicted, but unending support from her loving husband (the contra-indicator for her suspected lesbianism) and the class differences between this upper-class wife and mother and her lower-class prisonmates eventually convinced the governor to secure her release back into the community that had so rejected her during the trial. –MO

Terry Williams, The Soft City: Sex for Business and Pleasure in New York City
(Columbia University Press)

Before the Disneyfication of Times Square, before luxury high-rises took over the meatpacking district, before the sex trade vanished from the corners and went indoors to secret semi-public spaces, before porn migrated from the theater to the internet, New School ethnography professor Terry Williams and his students roamed the streets of New York City doing fieldwork and having encounters with the denizens of the so-called “Soft City”—a place defined by activities and encounters, not marked or mapped geography, “an invisible part of the city by day and a lively, excitingly risqué section by night.” In this idiosyncratic exploration of the city and its sexual underground, Terry Williams alternates between academic inquiry and the fieldwork of himself and his students for a fascinating and thought-provoking new work. –MO

Hugh Ryan, The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison
(Bold Type Books)

For over a century, a prison stood at the heart of Greenwich Village; in the 20th century, now a women’s prison, the Women’s House of Detention incarcerated, educated and radicalized queer women from every walk of life and provided a space to challenge sexual binaries and gender norms, even as conditions inside the prison continuously deteriorated. Women and transmasc/gender-non-conforming people rioted in solidarity with the Stonewall Uprisings, which they could see from their windows. Queer denizens of the village waited in the dime store across the street from the prison to witness the comings and goings of their friends, allies, and neighbors. Wealthy bohemians went slumming at the women’s night court, desperate for the drama of human passions to interrupt their lives. And political prisoners were forced to examine their own prejudices towards queer women upon witnessing the many forms of family defining life behind bars. –MO

Sarah Weinman, Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free
(Ecco)

How could this have happened? That’s the question at the heart of Weinman’s latest incisive study of crime and culture. This time she’s looking at the long, strange, post-conviction life and crimes of Edgar Smith, who was on death row following a conviction for the murder of Victoria Zielinski, and from there managed to strike up a correspondence with William F. Buckley, of all people. The relationship grew to much more than a correspondence, as Smith ultimately convinced Buckley and others to become his champion. Soon enough, he had his freedom and the appearances and book deals came rolling in, until he attempted another murder, upending the lives of those who had supported him and countless others along the way. It’s one of the more bizarre sequences in modern American history, and brutally revealing of Buckley’s neoconservative narcissism and weakness to flattery. But he was just one along the way: Weinman’s book is a study in how person after person can be brought under a killer’s influence, and just how much damage a true psychopath can due with all that credulity. –DM

Javier Sinay, The Murders of Moisés Ville: The Rise and Fall of the Jerusalem of South America
Translated by Robert Croll
(Restless Books)

The Argentine investigative journalist Javier Sinay, in his new book, The Murders of Moisés Ville, brings his professional craft to bear on an intensely personal story: of the Jewish settlement of Argentina’s agricultural lands, and of the atrocities the new immigrants suffered there. For Sinay, the story begins with the discovery of a 1947 article written by his great-grandfather, addressing the murder of twenty-two settlers. The reader is then taken along for the investigation as Sinay discovers his great-grandfather’s central place in the era’s Yiddish-speaking community of Argentina. Sinay is soon learning Yiddish himself to better relay the stories of people who fled czarist Russia in search of a new life in the “Jerusalem of South America,” only to find new dangers and oppressors waiting for them. Starvation, land inequality, and bands of violent gauchos were just some of what the community faced, and their stories were passed down through family lore and through the country’s Yiddish press. Sinay’s new book is at once a compelling piece of journalism born of archival research and interviewing, and also a meditation on cultural legacies and inter-generational trauma. –DM

Erin Kimmerle, We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys
(William Morrow)

This book is intense, moving, and highly necessary. Erin Kimmerle, a forensic archeologist, tells the story of the Dozier School for Boys (chronicled in telling prose by Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys) and the survivors’ quest to inter and rebury with dignity the many victims of the school’s brutality. –MO

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Notable Selections

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Erika Krause, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation (Flatiron) · Shahan Mufti, American Caliph: The True Story of a Muslim Mystic, a Hollywood Epic, and the 1977 Siege of Washington, DC (FSG) · Barbie Latza Nadeau, The Godmother: Murder, Vengeance, and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women (Penguin) · Greg King, Penny Wilson, Nothing but the Night (St. Martin’s) · Andy Kroll, A Death on W Street (PublicAffairs) · Kate Winkler Dawson, All That Is Wicked (Putnam) ·  Deborah Holt Larkin, A Lovely Girl: The Tragedy of Olga Duncan and the Trial of One of California’s Most Notorious Killers (Pegasus) · Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden, The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits’ Improbable Crusade to Save the World from Cybercrime (FSG) · Martin Edwards, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators (HarperCollins) · Patrick Strickland, The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands (Melville House) · Rachel Rear, Catch The Sparrow: A Search for a Sister and the Truth of Her Murder (Bloomsbury) · Neal Bradbury, A Taste for Poison: Eleven Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Used Them (St. Martin’s) · Paul Fischer, The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Story of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies (Simon & Schuster) · Patrick Radden Keefe, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks (Doubleday) · Fabián Escalante, 634 To Kill Fidel (Seven Stories Press) · John Wood Sweet, The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America (Henry Holt) · Kathryn Miles, Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders (Algonquin Books) ·  Chas Smith, Blessed are the Bank Robbers: The True Adventures of an Evangelical Outlaw (Abrams) · Carla Valentine, The Science of Murder: The Forensics of Agatha Christie (Sourcebooks) · Martin Sixsmith, The War of Nerves: Inside the Cold War Mind (Pegasus Books) · Jefferson Morley, Scorpions’ Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate (St. Martin’s) · Huw Lemmy and Ben Miller, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History (Verso) · Jim Cosgrove, Ripple: A Long Strange Search for a Killer (Steerforth Press) · John Gleeson, The Gotti Wars: Taking Down America’s Most Notorious Mobster (Scribner) · Eden Collinsworth, What the Ermine Saw: The Extraordinary Journey of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Most Mysterious Portrait (Doubleday) · James T. Bartlett, The Alaskan Blonde (Territory Books) · Nancy Dougherty, The Hangman and His Wife: The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich (Knopf) · Howard Blum, The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officer’s Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal (Harper) · Leslie McFarlane, Ghost of the Hardy Boys (David R. Godine) · Keith Thompson, Born to Be Hanged: The Epic Story of the Gentlemen Pirates Who Raided the South Seas, Rescued a Princess, and Stole a Fortune (Little Brown) · Benjamin Gilmer, The Other Dr. Gilmer: Two Men, a Murder, and an Unlikely Fight for Justice (Ballantine) · Brian Hochman, The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States (Harvard) · Mark Arsenault, The Impostor’s War: The Press, Propaganda, and the Newsman Who Battled for the Minds of America (Pegasus)

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