True Crime--Well Written
Top 10 True Crime--Well Written
: The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Columbine, Small Sacrifices, Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters, Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters, Kentucky Bloodbath: Ten Bizarre Tales of Murder from the Bluegrass State, A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders, All the President's Men
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
| Author | Erik Larson |
| ISBN | 0739303406 |
Erik Larson's gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized...
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
| Author | John Berendt |
| ISBN | 0679751521 |
A sublime and seductive reading experience. Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, this enormously engaging portrait of a most beguiling Southern city has become a modern classic.
Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was...
| Author | Dave Cullen |
| ISBN | 0446546933 |
"The tragedies keep coming. As we reel from the latest horror . . . " So begins a new epilogue, illustrating how Columbine became the template for nearly two decades of "spectacle murders." It is a false script, seized upon by a generation of new killers. In the wake of Newtown, Aurora, and Virginia Tech,...
| Author | Ann Rule |
| ISBN | 0451166604 |
This is one of the best books from Ann Rule's best stretch of writing, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. "Small Sacrifices" is leaner, fairer and more balanced than Rule's bloated, often slanted later works in which saccharine philosophizing pushes its way into the narratives.
The irony...
Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China
| Author | Paul French |
| ISBN | 0143121006 |
Peking in 1937 is a heady mix of privilege and scandal, opulence and opium dens, rumors and superstition. The Japanese are encircling the city, and the discovery of Pamela Werner's body sends a shiver through already nervous Peking. Is it the work of a madman? One of the ruthless Japanese soldiers now...
Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters
| Author | Peter Vronsky |
| ISBN | 0425196402 |
The comprehensive examination into the frightening history of serial homicide.
In this unique book, Peter Vronsky documents the psychological, investigative, and cultural aspects of serial murder, beginning with its first recorded instance in Ancient Rome, through fifteenth-century...
Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters
| Author | Peter Vronsky |
| ISBN | 0425213900 |
The first book of its kind-photographs included.
Mothers, daughters, sisters and grandmothers-fiendish killers all.
Society is conditioned to think of murderers and predators as men, but in this fascinating book, Peter Vronsky exposes and investigates the phenomenon of women...
Kentucky Bloodbath: Ten Bizarre Tales of Murder from the Bluegrass State
New From The Author of Vampire: The Richard Chase Murders and The Bundy Murders!
Think Kentucky is all about horses and mint juleps? You may revise that image with this excursion into the weird and the bizarre: from a medieval-esque murder in a small town museum to the jilted boyfriend who decided...
| Author | Gary M. Lavergne |
| ISBN | 1574410296 |
On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman ascended the University of Texas Tower and committed what was then the largest simultaneous mass murder in American history. He gunned down forty-five people inside and around the Tower before he was killed by two Austin police officers. In addition to promoting...
| Author | Carl Bernstein |
| ISBN | 1416522913 |
This book was truly unbelievable. The entire time I was reading it, I kept reminding myself that this was real history and it all happened. There was so much drama in all the proceedings, and to realize that it’s the select few (in great positions) of the government beneath it all. I completely admire...
Vampire: The Richard Chase Murders
By the time Richard Trenton Chase graduated high school, everyone knew he was strange. But no one had any idea how bizarre he'd become, or what dark impulses were flowing through his troubled brain. The transformation from the outwardly strange young man to the diabolical killer he ultimately became,...
Dead Man Walking: The Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty That Sparked a National Debate
| Author | Helen Prejean |
| ISBN | 0679751319 |
In 1982, Sister Helen Prejean became the spiritual advisor to Patrick Sonnier, the convicted killer of two teenagers who was sentenced to die in the electric chair of Louisiana’s Angola State Prison. In the months before Sonnier’s death, the Roman Catholic nun came to know a man who was as terrified...
| Author | Erik Larson |
| ISBN | 1400080665 |
The interwoven stories of two men whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time - Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication.
A true story of love, murder, and the...
A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy
| Author | Sue Klebold |
| ISBN | 1101902760 |
On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill twelve students and a teacher and wound twenty-four others before taking their own lives.
For the last sixteen years, Sue Klebold, Dylan’s...
Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery
| Author | Paul Collins |
| ISBN | 0307956458 |
Duel with the Devil is acclaimed historian Paul Collins’ remarkable true account of a stunning turn-of-the-19th century murder and the trial that ensued – a showdown in which iconic political rivals Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr joined forces to make sure justice was done. Still our nation’s...
In a memoir hailed for its searing candor and wit, Alice Sebold reveals how her life was utterly transformed when, as an eighteen-year-old college freshman, she was brutally raped and beaten in a park near campus. What propels this chronicle of her recovery is Sebold's indomitable spirit - as she struggles...
| Author | Keith Simpson |
| ISBN | 0586050388 |
'Find that whip and you've found your man.' Keith Simpson told the police, pointing to the diamond-pattern weave of the lash marks on the savagely mutilated body of Margery Gardner. The police found the whip in an attache case left in a railway cloakroom by Neville George Cleverly Heath.
Another...
When the Dancing Stopped: The Real Story of the Morro Castle Disaster and Its Deadly Wake
| Author | Brian Hicks |
| ISBN | 0743280083 |
During the dark days of the Great Depression, thousands of weary souls escaped their bleak lives for a week of paradise aboard the Ward Line's glamorous cruise ship, the "Morro Castle." It was the most famous passenger liner of its day, lightning fast, elegantly appointed. It was also a ticking time...
Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest
| Author | Gregg Olsen |
| ISBN | 1400097460 |
In 1911 two wealthy British heiresses, Claire and Dora Williamson, came to a sanitorium in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to undergo the revolutionary “fasting treatment” of Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard. It was supposed to be a holiday for the two sisters. But within a month of arriving at what...
The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
| Author | Deborah Blum |
| ISBN | 1594202435 |
Deborah Blum, writing with the high style and skill for suspense that is characteristic of the very best mystery fiction, shares the untold story of how poison rocked Jazz Age New York City. In The Poisoner's Handbook Blum draws from highly original research to track the fascinating, perilous days...
| Author | Philip Sugden |
| ISBN | 1841193976 |
A comprehensive account of London's celebrated East End killer, revised and updated. The murders in London between 1888-91 attributed to Jack the Ripper constitute one of the most mysterious unsolved criminal cases. This story is the result of many years meticulous research. The author reassesses...
It feels weird to be describing a book about Jack the Ripper as beautiful, but, in fact, this is a beautiful book. Also fascinating. It's about the letters--some 200+ in all--sent to the police and newspapers and, of course, the Central News Agency--purporting to be from Jack the Ripper. Evans and Skinner...
| Author | Donald Rumbelow |
| ISBN | 0140173951 |
Few stories have fastened their claws so firmly into the public imagination as the notorious and gruesome Whitechapel Murders of 1888. They were responsible for one of the most evocative legends in English folk history - Jack the Ripper. Best of all - for the myth-makers, that is - he was never caught,...
