True crime recommendations?

[Amiieey]

Looking to find some good true crime books. I'm not a big fan of books that like to play things up with the fear factor, but more of a fan of facts and stuff like that. So books like Killer Clown by Terry Sullivan, etc. I'm just a forensics student who'd love to get more of an insight on the investigation and motivation part of true crime.

[Dr. Drib]

How about Ann Rule?

Have you tried her books?

[Dazrin]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

How about Ann Rule?

Have you tried her books?

She's the first one I would go to as well.

[issybird]

I always think of Capote's In Cold Blood as the masterpiece of the genre.

[Cinisajoy]

Not sure the titles but here are three authors Michael Baden and Thomas Nogushi and Milton Helpern.

[SteveEisenberg]

Quickly going through the list of books I've read since 2005, I'm finding a bunch that I remember as being excellent. Here are 11 titles I just pulled off.

The first five are closest to what people may think of when they think of a true crime book:

Jeff Guinn, Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde

Jeff Guinn, Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson

Michael Capuzzo, The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases

Deborah Blum The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence

The next two are about the least bad kind of crime -- non-violent:

Betty L. Medsger, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI

Frank Partnoy, The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals

These last four may not be what you think of as true-crime books but are too good to exclude, besides being highly relevant if you are a serious forensics student:

Philip Houston et. al., Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception

Tom Wells and Richard Leo, The Wrong Guys: Murder, False Confessions, and the Norfolk Four

Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

David Kennedy, Don’t Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America

[Catlady]

Another vote for In Cold Blood; it doesn't get any better than that. I also like Ann Rule, especially Small Sacrifices (Diane Downs case). Joe McGinniss's Fatal Vision (Jeffrey MacDonald case) is a terrific book; I also liked his Blind Faith (Rob Marshall case).

Another pretty good author in the genre is Kathryn Casey. Gregg Olsen used to write true crime before turning to fiction. Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is about a famous child murder in Victorian times. A few others that come to mind are Peter Graham's Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century, Douglas Starr's The Killer of Little Shepherds, and Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter.

[darryl]

Joseph Wambaugh's Echoes in the Darkness.

[SteveEisenberg]

Re repeated mentions of In Cold Blood, that book is a blend of fact and fiction. The author bragged about his doing interviews "without taking notes or using tape-recordings." Most of what is in quotation marks is thus, at best, paraphrase, and charges of interviews being made up are plausible.

Based on past threads, I think the recommending posters know about the authorial misconduct claims and have every right to recommend the book anyway. However, Amiieey, and even though it's not a big item, I wouldn't want a future crime investigator to have a partly fictional knowledge base.



`

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Quickly going through the list of books I've read since 2005, I'm finding a bunch that I remember as being excellent. Here are 11 titles I just pulled off.

The first five are closest to what people may think of when they think of a true crime book:

Jeff Guinn, Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde

Jeff Guinn, Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson

Michael Capuzzo, The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases

Deborah Blum The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence

The next two are about the least bad kind of crime -- non-violent:

Betty L. Medsger, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI

Frank Partnoy, The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals

These last four may not be what you think of as true-crime books but are too good to exclude, besides being highly relevant if you are a serious forensics student:

Philip Houston et. al., Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception

Tom Wells and Richard Leo, The Wrong Guys: Murder, False Confessions, and the Norfolk Four

Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

David Kennedy, Don’t Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America

So what did you think of the Murder Room? The subject sounds interesting, but the reviews on Amazon are pretty mixed.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by issybird

I always think of Capote's In Cold Blood as the masterpiece of the genre.

I read this as a teenager and was mesmerized.

A great book (with assistance from Harper Lee) on a horrible series of murders.

[Dr. Drib]

You may wish to check out Norman Mailer's, "The Executioner's Song," which won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction.

I read this when it came out and I was transfixed by the mounting tension and the experimental narrative that Mailer uses to tell his story.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

So what did you think of the Murder Room? The subject sounds interesting, but the reviews on Amazon are pretty mixed.

I finished it, I liked it, and thought it had unusually high relevance to forensic science compared to the typical true crime book. So I recommended it to our forensics student, Amiieey.

Here's what I gather from glancing at the Amazon reviews: Some people who probably have no subject matter expertise loved it, with 38 percent giving it the highest rating. Others, who likely have just as little subject matter expertise, couldn't finish it. That doesn't tell me anything of great importance. About half the books I start I don't finish, and every one of them got multiple positive reviews.

Here is the kind of review I like:

Michael Capuzzo's 'Murder Room' belongs on the same shelf as David Simon's 'Homicide'

Here's how the review ends:

One footnote: For a couple of pages deep into The Murder Room, Capuzzo writes about a local case that I know quite intimately, having been the first reporter on the scene of that crime. Capuzzo has made, according to my memory of the case, a couple of fact errors in the short description of the investigation. Did it give me pause about the veracity of the rest of the book, considering he has details that make you wonder how on earth he ever got them? Yes.

Did I end up giving Capuzzo the benefit of the doubt? Sure.

So, it's not perfect.

As for the Amazon reviewers who say they finished The Murder Room and found it to be poorly written and edited: I don't recall being annoyed by the writing. Still, they may be right. But maybe they don't know enough about the subject matter to judge the book more broadly.

Maybe the review I linked, in this post, isn't all that well-written either. But, as with the book it is about, I like it.

[Cinisajoy]

I recommended 3 Forensic experts turned writers.
Or I would say being head of one of the biggest morgues would make one an expert.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

I finished it, I liked it, and thought it had unusually high relevance to forensic science compared to the typical true crime book. So I recommended it to our forensics student, Amiieey.

Here's what I gather from glancing at the Amazon reviews: Some people who probably have no subject matter expertise loved it, with 38 percent giving it the highest rating. Others, who likely have just as little subject matter expertise, couldn't finish it. That doesn't tell me anything of great importance. About half the books I start I don't finish, and every one of them got multiple positive reviews.

Here is the kind of review I like:

Michael Capuzzo's 'Murder Room' belongs on the same shelf as David Simon's 'Homicide'

Here's how the review ends:



So, it's not perfect.

As for the Amazon reviewers who say they finished The Murder Room and found it to be poorly written and edited: I don't recall being annoyed by the writing. Still, they may be right. But maybe they don't know enough about the subject matter to judge the book more broadly.

Maybe the review I linked, in this post, isn't all that well-written either. But, as with the book it is about, I like it.

ok, thanks. I'll give it a try.