If you're the type to cope with daily anxieties and stress by burying your head in a pile of riveting true crime stories—the devil you know, as they say—then do we have just the reading list for you.
Women are more drawn to true crime stories than men, according to researchers Amanda M. Vicary and R. Chris Fraley. In their 2010 study, they looked at online book reviews and learned that men were more likely to choose books about gang violence or war, while women were drawn to gruesome stories of crime—even when those books involved women being kidnapped, raped, tortured, and/or killed.
One reason for this: By reading about these crimes and investigating the psychology of a criminal, we may hope that on some level we'll get clues on how to protect ourselves. The study by Vicary and Fraley concluded, "Women, more so than men, were drawn to the book that contained tips on how to defend oneself from an attacker. It appears that the potential to learn defense tactics from these stories is one factor that draws women, more so than men, to true crime books."
So, if immersing yourself in true crime stories makes you feel a little bit braver or a little bit more prepared, then have at it. From nonfiction books about shocking robberies and serial killers to moving memoirs about survival, below, we rounded up the best true-crime books from the past decade that are worth reading.
Finkel’s 2023 book tells the story of Stéphane Bréitwieser, perhaps the most prolific art thief of all time—he’s admitted to stealing artworks from museums across Europe at a rate of about one every two weeks between 1995 and 2001, when he was finally caught. Finkel spent plenty of time getting up close and personal with Bréitwieser to describe his many spur-of-the-moment heists, as well as his subsequent downfall.
A hybrid of memoir and investigative nonfiction, this is the story of Liza Rodman's lonely girlhood on Cape Cod in the 1960s. Her mother worked at a hotel and enjoyed the Provincetown night life. While she was out, the handsome hotel handyman babysat Rodman and her sister. They'd go get popsicles in his truck and hang out in his "secret garden" in the woods of Truro. Turns out, their nice-guy sitter was also a serial killer. Some of his dismembered victims were buried in that woodsy glade. Decades later, Rodman made the connection between her buddy and the splashy murder headlines and became obsessed with researching the case.
This collection of true tales about hot women committing cold-blooded crimes follows a multitude of cases from 1850 onwards. Attorney and true crime historian Laura James asks whether these women—such as Glasgow socialite Madeline Smith, who poisoned one lover to move on to the next—got away with murder (and other mayhem) because of their good looks. Smith's lawyer used gender bias in her favor, making the case that someone so pretty and feminine couldn't possibly be a killer.
A roundup of the most notorious female con artists by the author of Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History, this book is perfect for anyone fascinated by the likes of faux-blood test entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes and N.Y.C. society trickster Anna Delvey. Tori Telfer reaches back to 1700s France when a woman claimed to be Marie Antoinette's BFF for scamming purposes (think: loads of jewels), tracing scams through to the present day, as New York sisters Kate and Maggie Fox started a movement when they claimed to speak with spirits. Telfer examines what we love about these devious women and why.
True crime fans love to follow the trail of a whodunit. However, this book interestingly analyzes what happens after. The author, a psychoanalyst, writes about how Brian Bechtold, who was 22 in 1992, walked into a Florida police station and confessed that he'd shot his parents back home in Maryland. Saying he was possessed by the Devil at the time, Bechtold was judged not responsible for the murders on grounds of insanity. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he lived for decades in a limbo of psychiatric hospitals—complete with escape attempts, being shot by police, and seeing several patient-on-patient murders. It's an insider's view of life in the psych ward and the long aftermath of an act of violence.
Harper Lee shot to stardom for a book centering on a high-stakes criminal trial. But it was a very different trial that captured her attention in the years after To Kill a Mockingbird’s publication. As described by Cep, Lee spent years working on a book about the real-life 1978 case of a rural preacher accused of killing five family members. Lee never ended up publishing the book, but Cep used her notes to create this multifaceted story of the trial—and the racial and social constructs at play—and of Lee herself.
This much-anticipated book is from Mary Roach, the master of the weirdly delightful dive into scientific nonfiction. But this is less "when animals attack" and more of "when moose jaywalk" or "when macaques mug." Roach's books, including Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, have a cult fandom. This book looks at how we are in conflict with nature—and, just maybe, can learn to coexist.
Two teenage girls in a tiny Indian village were so close that they were known by a single name. One summer night in 2014, the pair went missing. A few hours later, the girls were found hanging in a mango orchard. The investigation into their murders started a national soul-searching about violence against women in India. At first, the girls' families refused to let the bodies be cut down and demanded an investigation. But what happened? Was it murder, death by suicide, or an honor killing?
As the subtitle implies, true crime journalist Michelle McNamara became determined in the 2010s to uncover the identity of the person responsible for a long list of rapes, murders, and burglaries across California in the 1970s and ‘80s and began documenting her efforts for eventual publication. Though she died in 2016, before the Golden State Killer had been caught and her book was complete, her husband, actor Patton Oswalt, and others finished the book and published it in 2018. Just a few weeks later, California police arrested the man who would later plead guilty to many of the crimes; they credited McNamara’s work with boosting awareness of the case.
This 2017 book shined a light on a historical event that’s all too often been swept under the rug: a string of murders in Oklahoma’s Osage Nation in the early 20th century. In a sweeping narrative that was later adapted into a Best Picture-nominated film directed by Martin Scorsese, Grann provides a deep dive into the crimes, a product of the long-running abuse of Indigenous populations on their own land by white settlers and the U.S. government.
In the '90s, an elusive serial killer preyed on gay men in N.Y.C. Instead of merely examining the crimes and turning the killer into an object of fascination, author Elon Green feelingly portrays the lives of the victims; from the bars where they felt free turned out not to be safe spaces to a maintenance worker who found the bagged remains of the first victim at a Pennsylvania rest stop. The nicknamed "Last Call Killer" took advantage of an era when it was, for many, difficult to be visibly and openly gay.
A bit of a meta take on the true crime genre, this book is less about a specific crime, focusing more on the scientific advances that have helped crack open so many otherwise unsolvable cases. Laurah Norton is the host of the popular “The Fall Line” podcast, which digs into murders and disappearances in Georgia that didn’t receive much media attention and center on people from marginalized communities. In this book, she maps out the history of forensic science, stretching from the primitive techniques of the Roman Empire to the wildly advanced technologies used today. We also get to see those modern methods put to use, as Norton describes the work she put in alongside a forensic anthropologist to solve a 1993 cold case. If you really want to call yourself a true crime expert, you’ll need to give this one a read.
Driven by a powerful combination of grief and rage, Rivera Garza traveled from Texas to Mexico City in 2019 to dive into an investigation of her sister’s murder nearly 30 years before. This is her account of that work: Not only does she document her relentless quest for justice in Liliana’s death, but she also meticulously crafts an image of her beloved sister, all the way up to her relationship with the abusive boyfriend who would ultimately kill her. Liliana’s Invincible Summer was a finalist for the National Book Award and an entry on several prestigious “best books of 2023” lists, and it’s sure to fill you with the same feelings of heartbreak and devastation—not to mention an undying rage at the all-too-common crimes of femicide and intimate partner violence—that have shaped Garza’s life and work.
Tales of Munchausen by Proxy always make for particularly devastating, headline-grabbing true crime stories, as they so often revolve around mothers abusing their own children. In that respect, this book is no different: It offers a trio of shocking up-close looks at MBP investigations. But it also goes several steps further than many other true crime stories by attempting to clear up misinformation about the diagnosis and offering possible solutions.
In a time between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, white schoolgirl Marie Smith was brutally killed in the seaside town of Asbury Park, New Jersey. This book weaves this and another story into a narrative. One thread tells of a pedophile, a sheriff, a detective on his first murder case, and the Black laborer who was wrongfully accused of murder and narrowly avoided being lynched. The other story involves Ida B. Wells, the crusading Black journalist, abolitionist, and feminist who led an anti-lynching campaign in the 1890s. Through her writings, she was instrumental in helping found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization at the forefront of current events today.
This 2018 bestseller—which has since been turned into a Hulu drama series—is both a true crime account and a history of an era that you may not know much about: the Troubles of Northern Ireland. Amid a chronicle of the decades-long bloody conflict over whether Northern Ireland should be part of the U.K. or the Republic of Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe homes in on one 1972 abduction. The book is packed with extensive details, plus a fascinating look at the still-reverberating effects of the Troubles following their 1998 end.
This powerful book is really a chronicle of a wide variety of mysteries and misdeeds. It centers on not just the erasure of the woman who invented the first rape kit in the 1970s and her subsequent disappearance, but the lack of attention paid to rape cases by law enforcement for decades and the massive rape kit backlog discovered in recent years. Additionally, the author weaves in her own experiences with sexual assault, and all together, this makes for an intensely moving portrait of a still-ongoing fight for justice.
“Grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, and unprecedented.” Those words—and, more commonly, their acronym, GUBU—are often used to describe a shocking series of events that occurred in Ireland in the summer of 1982, and which are described in Mark O’Connell’s book. The events explored surround Malcolm Edward MacArthur, a socialite who was running out of money and decided to turn to robbery—and an escalating series of subsequent crimes—to help keep funding his lifestyle. O’Connell’s book is based on many hours’ worth of conversations with MacArthur, who was released from prison in 2012 after 30 years, and it explores the often-murky line between MacArthur’s version of the story and the actual facts of the case.
This riveting read is the memoir of a reporter-turned-private investigator who looks back at the case that snagged her imagination. It also inspired her change of profession. As a reporter for The Miami Herald, she covered the execution of Jesse Tafero for the murder of two police officers. Years later, Ellen McGarrahan dives back into the criminal world of Miami in the 1960s and '70s to take another look at that case. As she follows the threads of evidence—court files, interviews, and articles—looking for the truth, she realizes that the questions of who is innocent and who is guilty are complex and difficult to untangle.
A young British college student named Stephen Jackley was obsessed with the inequalities of the global financial crisis that began in 2007. A modern-day Robin Hood, Jackley planned to steal from the rich (banks) and give to the poor. It actually worked—he robbed a series of banks using disguises, elaborate escapes, fake guns, and all—until it didn't. Journalist Ben Machell had access to Jackley and his diaries for this combo of psychological thriller and heist story.
