5 True Crime Books Powerful Enough to Change Your Worldview
Character-driven crime stories that will expand your thinking
Sometimes the world seems to be made up of two types of people, and I’m not talking about Republicans and Democrats. I’m talking about people who read and love True Crime, and people who do not.
I am one of the former. For a long time, I was also a librarian, and I know from experience that you can really only suggest True Crime titles to people who you know are True Crime readers.
I always thought that was a real shame, because some True Crime books also happen to be, in my opinion, some of the best-written and most character-driven nonfiction narratives around.
Here are five of the best I’ve found, that I re-read regularly because I want to keep learning what they have to teach me about human nature.
1. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, by David Simon
What it’s about
I came across this one late, first reading it in 2017 (it was originally published way back in 1991, and was at least partially the basis for Simon’s TV shows, first Homicide: Life on the Street, and later, The Wire, which aired from 2002 to 2008). I don’t know how I missed it for so long.
Simon embedded himself with homicide detectives in Baltimore, and this is a journalistic account of his year spent observing their work and the crimes they investigated. He had formerly worked as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, and he knows how to get the facts out there quickly while also telling a compelling story.
Unfortunately, most of the stories here are beyond sad. The crimes are horrific, both those perpetrated by individuals and those perpetrated by the police (also known as “bad shoots”). Simon presents his stories in the crime and investigation framework, but he also organizes them so that each book section highlights broader problems in Baltimore and American society: how poverty and drug use co-exist with crime; how the courts do (or don’t) work; the failures of journalism; to name just a few.
Why you need to read it
There are very few all-bad guys or all-good guys in this book. There are only people, with varying degrees of luck, personality, and advantages and disadvantages. Nothing is simple in the simplest of murders (as you will see with the detectives’ attention to detail while investigating). Nothing is simple in Baltimore. Nothing is simple in life.
It’s an unbelievably dark book that will mostly leave you saddened about the many ways people can hurt each other. In at least one story, however, Simon investigates all the detectives’ desire to find the person who sexually assaulted and killed a young girl, and then left her fully-clothed body neatly arranged in the backyard of a house in her neighborhood.
Until we recognize that people are complex, and we need complex ideas and work to help them, we won’t get anywhere.
2. After the Eclipse: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Search, by Sarah Perry
What it’s about
When author Sarah Perry was twelve years old, her mother was brutally murdered one night, in the home where they lived by themselves, just a short hallway away from where Perry slept. The murderer got away, and Perry spent the remainder of her childhood being shuffled among either indifferent or even cruel relatives. When she grew up, she took it upon herself to investigate both her own family’s difficult histories and to try to come to terms with her mother’s murder, while also providing any assistance she could to the police still investigating the crime.
If this was just a memoir about what poverty and dysfunctional relationships can do to a family, it would be a fascinating read. However, when Perry investigates the way her mother was viewed by people in their hometown, how they often saw fit to pass judgment on her relationships (particularly as a single mother), and how violence almost always promotes more violence, this book becomes something more.
Why you need to read it
I have never read another book that so captured the existential dread faced, on a daily basis, by seemingly every woman in the world.
Perry’s book shows, in great detail, the power dynamics in the relationships between men and women. It’s a disturbing look, but it rings true. And when she tells an entirely ordinary story from her own daily life, about when two men arrive at her apartment door to fix an issue with her water, and how she felt unsafe with them there, so she stepped out into the hall, and the men obviously knew how uncomfortable she was and seemingly took some pleasure from it? I was horrified. And I knew just how she felt. I think most women would.
After all of that, there is a resolution to the story of her mother’s murder. But again, Perry cautions against simplistic thinking when she says: “But I think it’s a lot more likely that [he] was born with a natural tendency to violence, which worsened in a violent home, and easily found a target in a world where many men are trained to exert power over women. Punishing him should not prevent us from trying to understand how he was made.” (p. 327.)
3. The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City’s Cold Case Squad, by Stacy Horn
What it’s about
Nonfiction author Horn found herself fascinated with New York City’s cold cases and the detectives who were assigned, in a unique unit, to investigate them. For three years, she followed the detectives, and in this book she shares the stories of five (previously) unsolved cases and their victims, and details the ways in which the detectives methodically investigated them.
Why you should read it
I’ll be honest with you: this is one of my favorite nonfiction books of all time. Horn is a relentlessly detailed author who takes her fact-checking (which most nonfiction authors now have to do themselves) seriously, so you know she is going to present the most accurate report of a crime and its investigation that she can.
But mostly what I love about this book is how it shows the softer side of humans. For all the terrible things we do to each other, and all the crimes we commit, and all the ways in which police can also fall short in their duties, here we still are, in a world where time and resources are given to still trying to solve years-old cases. There are people out there working every day to restore dignity to people who have died; who feel that there is value in finding out who did what (and perhaps even lessening the chance of fewer crimes being perpetrated by the same people).
People, in short, and even some of the institutions we have set up to provide justice for people, are amazing.
4. Lost Girls, by Robert Kolker
What it’s about
Perhaps the most straightforward True Crime narrative in this list, Kolker’s book is about the Long Island serial killer (who has still not been caught) and his victims, many of whom were sex workers.
This book does not start with a simple recounting of the crimes. Instead, Kolker starts by telling you the daily and life stories of the victims.
Why you need to read it
Think about the way popular culture books and TV shows and movies sometimes portray sex workers: as easy victims, as people who can go missing, and nobody will miss them. Kolker singlehandedly turns that narrative on its head.
By detailing the lives of the women who became victims of the Long Island serial killer, Kolker points out that they are emphatically not people who can just disappear without being missed. They are sisters; they are daughters; they are mothers; they are girlfriends or lovers or spouses or co-workers. They work the sex jobs they do because they offer the chance of good wages for fewer hours, and they offer the flexibility many of these women need to raise their children and help their families. They know it’s dangerous work, and they try to take precautions to keep themselves safe. Even so, those precautions sometimes fail.
This book will make you look at everyone just trying to get by as best they can in a whole new light.
5. A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, by Sue Klebold
What it’s about
Sue Klebold relates some of the story behind the story of the Columbine school shooting. She has a unique and horrible perspective: she is the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the two boys who killed twelve others (and wounded twenty-four more) in 1999 at Columbine High School, before killing themselves.
Klebold does not recount the events of the day of the shooting in great detail, but rather offers a memoir about how she and her husband tried to raise their son, how and why they were not able to predict what he was going to do, and how she has had to live with her guilt and depression in the aftermath of such horrific violence.
Why you need to read it
Once, when I was in my suburban public library, I heard a bunch of little boys playing some computer game at the library’s terminals, and most of what they were shouting at each other was “shoot them shoot them, come on, shoot them, oh you’re a terrible shot.”
It gave me the absolute creeps.
This book will not be for everyone, particularly those individuals and parents who believe you can know and affect every single thing about your children. For anyone else, Klebold has powerful lessons to offer about violence, human relationships, and mental health.
Before you judge True Crime (or True Crime readers), try reading any one of these narratives. They are books that have made me rethink a lot of what I think I know about human behavior and human relationships. They have helped me learn, and that’s one of my favorite things about reading.
Sarah Cords is the author of Bingeworthy British Television: The Best Brit TV You Can’t Stop Watching. Fellow curmudgeons welcome at citizenreader.com.
