The first True Crime book I ever read was Robert Graysmith’s Zodiac—I spent my allowance on a trade-sized copy and was hooked. It’s (famously) his story of being a political cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle when the newspaper received all the Zodiac Killer’s deranged puzzles—and I couldn’t put it down.
Since then, I’ve torn through all the so-called classics (think Ann Rule’s entire bibliography or Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood), and dived into memoirs like Kerri Rawson’s A Serial Killer’s Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love, and Overcoming. Now that we’re in the midst of October, I’m recommending some recent True Crime books that you probably haven’t heard of before.
My choices will hopefully help expand your definition of True Crime, reexamine who the genre focuses on, and chronicle just how many different ways humans have chosen to scam, maim, and injure each other.
