14 new and upcoming true crime books from the first months of the year, featuring dogged modern investigations, horrifying real-life mysteries, shocking miscarriages of justice, and sweeping histories of organized crime.
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Shelley Puhak, The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster
(Bloomsbury)
“This is no remote historical figure [Puhak]’s writing about, this is a living, breathing woman who was not who we thought she was. A splendid exploration of one of history’s most enduring enigmas.” –Booklist
Eric Lichtblau, American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate
(Little, Brown)
“Oscillating between alarming and infuriating, American Reich takes readers on a cross-country journey to examine how racial hatred slithered, like tentacles, out of Orange County and into the rest of the country. It’s all here in clean, unflinching prose.”–Air Mail
William J Mann, Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood
(Simon & Schuster)
“A meticulous and thorough retelling — five years in the making — that resists the sensationalism of the infamous crime to restore dignity back to this young woman’s image.”–The Los Angeles Times
Joe Tidy, Ctrl + Alt + Chaos : How Teenage Hackers Hijack the Internet
(Hanover Square Press)
“[A] game of cat-and-mouse that Tidy fluently recounts.”–Kirkus
Scott Eden, A Killing in Cannabis : A True Story of Love, Murder, and California Weed
(Spiegel & Grau)
“[A] compelling read for true crime enthusiasts and those interested in the cannabis legalization movement alike. If you appreciate true crime that goes beyond the whodunit to examine why a crime unfolds within a particular time and place, this book offers fresh insights and real emotional weight.”–The Street
Chris Jennings, End of Days : Ruby Ridge, the Apocalypse, and the Unmaking of America
(Little, Brown)
“Not just a searing account of the standoff but a definitive intellectual history.”–Harper’s
Amy Littlefield, Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights
(Legacy Lit)
“A quirky yet hard-hitting inquiry into the overturning of Roe v. Wade. A fan of murder mysteries, the author frames her narrative as a whodunit in search of perpetrators… The result is a dogged pursual of those responsible for women’s deaths.”–Publishers Weekly
Ryan Gingeras, Mafia : A Global History
(Avid Reader)
“Gingeras paints a convincing picture of an interconnected, increasingly diversified, and truly global business which is tightly and apparently irrevocably intertwined, in so many different ways, with the apparatus of the state itself.” –Financial Times
Benjamin Hale, Cave Mountain : A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks
(Harper)
“A book of rabbit holes: fascinating, maddening, maundering, and often electrifying . . . . Goose pimples become hard to suppress.”–Garden & Gun
Elliot Williams, Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ’80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation
(Penguin Press)
“Five Bullets presents a deeply researched, richly detailed portrait of how a racially divided city came to excuse potentially deadly white-on-Black violence.” –Columbia Magazine
Heather Ann Thompson, Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage
(Pantheon)
“[Thompson] writes expansively about the Goetz case as both a reflection of a city torn apart by neoliberal neglect and a harbinger of what she calls ‘the rebirth of white rage’. . . . Vibrant, powerful and moving.” –Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
Josh Ireland, The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy
(Dutton)
“Mr. Ireland’s The Death of Trotsky is an exciting and propulsive nonfiction account that reads like an Alan Furst novel…a tremendously readable book with a haunting message: Vengeance never sleeps.” −Wall Street Journal
Rick Tulsky, Injustice Town: A Corrupt City, a Wrongly Convicted Man, and a Struggle for Freedom
(Pegasus Books)
“Tulsky, a lawyer, journalist, professor, and founder of Injustice Watch, has written a tour-de-force narrative illustrating how Lamonte McIntyre’s case exposes the failings of our local and national criminal justice systems.” –Booklist
Andy McPhee, Doctors’ Riot of 1788 : Body Snatching, Bloodletting, and Anatomy in America
(Prometheus Books)
“The author places his account in the medical, cultural, and racial context of the time . . . A brief, fast-paced history, loaded with surprising detail.”
–Kirkus Reviews
