Where is your nonfiction section please.
Since I've been having a bit of a stress-induced reading slump these last months, I'm trying to motivate by picking up books that I've really wanted to read but never seem to get around to. Which brought me to a favorite topic: Empress Elisabeth. I've mentioned before that if you don't know Sisi already and... Continue Reading →
What Happened to Paula: On the Death of an American Girl, by Katherine Dykstra Katherine Dykstra's mother-in-law roped her into the story of Paula Oberbroeckling, an 18-year-old from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who disappeared one summer night in 1970. Her remains were found a few months later but a cause of death was never determined. Instead,... Continue Reading →
We Keep the Dead Close, by Becky Cooper (Bookshop.org) I complain a lot, A LOT about the spate of true crime books in the last few years where an author with no or minimal connection to a crime they find interesting writes a book about it that's also memoir, and inserts themselves into the story... Continue Reading →
I'm not sure why now, but the Jeffrey MacDonald case is having something of a cultural resurgence. A new Hulu/FX documentary based on legendary documentarian Errol Morris's book A Wilderness of Error just aired, with a podcast, Morally Indefensible, to accompany it. Ok, maybe it's just that one thing which is actually two things, plus... Continue Reading →
Book review: Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, by Tom O'Neill with Dan Piepenbring So many years later, Manson’s name still served as a kind of shorthand for a very American form of brutal violence, the kind that erupts seemingly from nowhere and confirms the nation’s darkest fears about... Continue Reading →
The Case of the Vanishing Blonde, by Mark Bowden (Amazon) Unspeakable Acts, edited by Sarah Weinman (Amazon) Two new books of long-form true crime nonfiction are out this month, and they're both pretty good. Let's get into it. First up is gifted narrative nonfiction author Mark Bowden's The Case of the Vanishing Blonde. My introduction... Continue Reading →
The Last Book on the Left: Stories of Murder and Mayhem from History's Most Notorious Serial Killers (Amazon / Book Depository) Marcus Parks, Henry Zebrowski, and Ben Kissel of The Last Podcast on the Left, the long-running, make-you-laugh-til-you-cry comedy podcast covering stories of crime, the macabre and supernatural, conspiracy theories, alien abductions, high strangeness and general... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Forest City Killer, by Vanessa Brown (Amazon / Book Depository) Author, bookstore owner, and local historian of London, Ontario Vanessa Brown spent five years researching a series of unsolved, decades-old homicides in her quiet hometown. *Keith Morrison voice* Well, mostly quiet, that is: London had the unofficial and unenviable title of the "serial killer... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Skeleton Crew, by Deborah Halber (Amazon / Book Depository) Chances are good that you or someone you know has at one point stumbled over a dead body. There are shockingly large numbers of them out there. According to the National Institute of Justice, America is home to tens of thousands of unidentified... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Darkest Web, by Eileen Ormsby (Amazon / Book Depository) In The Darkest Web, Australian lawyer and journalist Eileen Ormsby breaks down "the internet's evil twin" into three levels of badness: dark, darker, and darkest. I have spent the past five years exploring every corner of the dark web, one of the few who is... Continue Reading →
Book review: Red River Girl, by Joanna Jolly (Amazon / Book Depository) "The wide, frozen snake of the Red River curved through the city's landscape, a timeless witness to all that had gone before and all that would come." BBC journalist Joanna Jolly learned of the murder of Tina Fontaine, a 15-year-old Indigenous girl from... Continue Reading →
Book review: Savage Appetites, by Rachel Monroe (Amazon / Book Depository) For the past few years, as the US murder rate has approached historic lows, stories about murder have become culturally ascendant...whether our tastes tended toward high-end HBO documentaries interrogating the justice system or something more like Investigation Discovery's Swamp Murders. (Or, as was often... Continue Reading →
