True crime books have enjoyed a resurgence since the podcast Serial and Netflix series Making a Murderer woke a new generation to the thrill of real-life investigations. For the new fan, there is a rich vein of excellent narrative nonfiction ready to tap into, not least Truman Capote's classic, genre-defining In Cold Blood (1966), and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song (1979).
The resurgence of enthusiasm for true crime has also seen a wave of brilliant new writing in recent years. The New Yorker's David Grann, himself the author of the bestselling, award-winning Killers of the Flower Moon, highlighted in an interview some of his favourite true crime books, as did lawyer Cara Robertson, author of The Trial of Lizzie Borden. Scroll down to see which true crime books have been recommended on Five Books.
For more specific areas of true crime, we also recommend:
“This is a completely gripping book that looks at a notorious Victorian murder case, often referred to as the Road Hill House case, involving the murder of the young boy, apparently taken from his bed, one night in 1860. Summerscale manages to balance the psychological dynamics of living in a house with many secrets and tensions in the Kent family and the mechanics of the crime solving plot, exactly where are the different members of the household at critical moments. So the story zips along, drawing out the central mystery, without sacrificing psychological depth or historical context.” Read more...
Cara Robertson, Lawyer
“It chilled my blood. No pun intended . . . In some of my books, I’ve taken to heart that if you turn right instead of left, either nothing will happen to you, or something really bad will happen to you just because of a seemingly random confluence of events. I learned that lesson vividly from In Cold Blood.” Read more...
David Baldacci, Novelist
“It is an astonishing story about one of the earliest known and most infamous serial killers in the United States—a guy calling himself Doctor Holmes. It takes place during the 1890s and there are these two parallel stories woven together. One is the construction of the Chicago Fair of 1893—this great World Fair, and all the marvel and wonder and engineering and ingenuity and innocence involving the construction. But there is also this really brutal psychopathic serial killer plotting and using the Fair to lure young women to this house of horror, this chamber that he has built in the basement of a Bates’ Motel type place. It is a classic story of good and evil playing out side by side.” Read more...
David Grann, Journalist
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
by Hallie Rubenhold
🏆 Winner of the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction
“Hallie Rubenhold, the author of The Five, has researched the lives of these five women absolutely brilliantly. It’s a great piece of detective work into some very obscure sources…She really disproves what the ‘Ripperologist’ literature says about the victims and recovers these women’s lives with a good deal of sympathy. It’s a moving book. It’s humane, it’s scholarly, and it challenges, from a feminist position, a whole library of books on Jack the Ripper.” Read more...
The Best History Books: the 2020 Wolfson Prize shortlist
Richard Evans, Historian
“I think Macintyre is particularly good at taking very thorough scholarship and translating it into an entertaining story, so that, without realising it, you’re learning about real historical facts. His books are scrupulous in the accuracy of their detail but reading them is like eating a bar of candy. The Napoleon of Crime was the first of his books that I read. To be fair, it’s not really about art crime. It’s about a person called Adam Worth who, after Al Capone, is probably the most famous criminal in history. The term ‘the Napoleon of crime’ was coined to describe him, and he was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis Moriarty.” Read more...
Noah Charney, Novelist
When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold
by Alia Trabucco Zerán & Sophie Hughes (translator)
*** Winner of the 2022 British Academy Book Prize ***
“It is wholly original. It’s the unpicking of four rather mundane but awful stories of acts of killing involving women. It’s taking the events of many decades ago and reviewing them with reference to a new set of understandings and the values of today. This book has a particular gendered aspect that is incredibly significant in explaining to us the circumstances in which, in Chile, society came down like a ton of bricks on individual women who, for one reason or another, found themselves in a situation in which they were involved in an act of killing…It’s also sublimely written.” Read more...
The British Academy Book Prize: 2022 Shortlist
Philippe Sands, Lawyer
The Devil You Know: Encounters in Forensic Psychiatry
by Eileen Horne & Gwen Adshead
The Devil You Know is a series of 12 encounters with a range of offenders: serial killers, arsonists, stalkers, and other people who are usually seen as ‘monsters’.
“It’s the wonderfully written story of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They were young metro reporters who were assigned to Watergate when it was seen as a local burglary that happened to be at the Democratic Headquarters in DC. Recall, reports about Watergate didn’t deter Nixon’s reelection by a landslide in 1972. But the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein did catch the attention of senators and the judge in the trial of the burglars who were apprehended during the Watergate break-in.” Read more...
The best books on Richard Nixon
David Greenberg, Historian
“Alison really opens up what might be in the mind of Napper. And we can only speculate, but it’s a very dark place, a very strange world, where there’s this connection between sex and horrific violence and humiliation and torture. It’s pretty horrible.” Read more...
The best books on Forensic Science
Jim Fraser, Medical Scientist
“It’s an amazing novel, this. It’s compelling. It’s a novelization of a real event: the second last hanging in New Zealand. It’s a case that Fiona remains convinced was a miscarriage of justice, and that gives her an opportunity to debate the validity of the death penalty.” Read more...
The Best Crime Fiction of 2019
Val McDermid, Novelist
Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee
by Casey Cep
***Shortlisted for the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction***
“This is flat-out one of the most enjoyable—or one of the most enjoyable—books I’ve read this year. It’s fascinating, thrilling, in the sense that it is a thriller, a nonfiction thriller. It has all the elements of a John Grisham novel, but it happened in real life.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books of 2019
Stig Abell, Journalist
“When I was doing the research, one of the things that I discovered early on was that there were going to be a number of unsolved crimes and thus unknowables. So, there were different ways to deal with that. You could try to minimise them, but I think that’s really…not going to bring you to the truth or the reality. Instead, you could make that unknowability part of the very fabric of the story—which is that we all have partial information. Facts elude us. And going back to what you were saying, one of the things that struck me in doing the research for the book was that I had always thought of crime stories as the horror of what you know. But in writing The Killers of the Flower Moon there were so many unsolved cases—cases for which there is still no accounting and in which the evidence has dried up or disappeared. The horror in many cases is the unknowability. To me that was very scary because that gets, again, at the very question of what we’re driving at in these detective stories, trying to impose some order and meaning on the world. But what if the order isn’t perfect or complete? That is something I wrestle with, because, in some ways, the most terrifying thing is when Sherlock Holmes can’t put it all back together again.” Read more...
David Grann, Journalist
“It tells two intertwined narratives: one is this really horrific serial killing in 19th-century France; it also tells you about the origins of forensic science and policing.” Read more...
The best books on Forensic Science
Jim Fraser, Medical Scientist
“I can’t possibly do justice to this book. I really can’t. It’s such an extraordinary book. It’s an extremely candid memoir, written by someone directly involved in a murder case—the victim was her aunt. She goes to court, she meets the cops, she sits through the trial.” Read more...
The best books on Forensic Science
Jim Fraser, Medical Scientist
“They write the history of this notion of a ‘crime scene’—as a special place, a social creation, as an idea. They explained something to me that I’ve always struggled to explain to other people, which is: what’s a crime scene like? What can a crime scene be? My answer now would be, well, a crime scene is an idea, a concept. It can be anything you want.” Read more...
The best books on Forensic Science
Jim Fraser, Medical Scientist
“What he asks is: how did we get to this idea that we can identify people? Where did it come from, how do we do it, and does it work? That’s the short of it. We need to identify people because if you’re going to put somebody in prison, or even accuse them of a crime, we need to be confident it is the right person. So it’s a really important aspect of criminal justice.” Read more...
The best books on Forensic Science
Jim Fraser, Medical Scientist
“One could argue that the Borden case as one of the first examples of the trial as a public spectacle, a sort of celebrity trial. Obviously, Lizzie Borden is not herself famous before the crime. She’s actually quite unremarkable, and a bit unreadable, which is part of the reason she’s such a compelling figure.” Read more...
Cara Robertson, Lawyer
“Lawrence Friedman’s book is a panoramic social history of our criminal justice system from the colonial times to the end of the twentieth century. It shows how changes in the definitions of crime and the contours of the criminal justice system mirrored society. What we choose to criminalize and how we view the seriousness of those crimes, judged by what we designate as punishment, is a social construction. It’s a reflection of its era.” Read more...
Cara Robertson, Lawyer
“Malcolm’s style is so different from the other writers I’ve chosen. It’s so distilled; there isn’t one extra word.” Read more...
Cara Robertson, Lawyer
“Roughead was a Scottish lawyer. He started out as what you’d call an amateur criminologist. I picked that particular book because it collects some of his best stories and also because it’s still in print, so I thought it would be the easiest for people to get a hold of, which I heartily recommend!” Read more...
Cara Robertson, Lawyer
“Pearson once wrote that basically eight of any ten people are interested in murder, and the other two are lying. He has a sense that this is a subject people find really interesting, and he describes himself as a ‘murder fancier.’ Most of his analyses are of what you might call historic crimes—crimes that have already happened—so that he can tell you the story not only of the crime, but also its resolution or irresolution.” Read more...
Cara Robertson, Lawyer
“Goldman looks at the way we make sense of crimes, how we get at the truth and how we process it” Read more...
David Grann, Journalist
“Mailer’s ego can overwhelm his work but in this book he seemed constrained, in a good way, by the material—there’s almost a minimalist quality to his writing” Read more...
David Grann, Journalist
The Hollow Needle
by Maurice Leblanc
One of Leblanc’s popular series of novels about an art thief called Arsène Lupin, who is skillful, non-violent, dextrous and elegant
The Lost Masters
by Peter Harclerode and Brendan Pittaway
The story of art looting during World War II: What was taken, how the thefts were rationalised and what the repercussions were
“Hartt wrote six or so seminal textbooks that are read by literally thousands of undergraduate students all around the world. They led me to Florentine Art Under Fire, which is Hartt’s memoir of his time as an officer working for the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Commission during World War II. These officers were assigned to protect the art of Florence and the area around it from war damage, and Hartt’s book is a very dramatic and heart-wrenching account of his activities in Florence as the Allies were moving in. They were one side of the Arno river and the Nazis were on the other side. The Nazis had laid mines around Florence and there was a danger they were going to blow up most of the city as they retreated. There was some very serious fighting right in the centre of the city and the major loss was the Ponte Santa Trinita, a 16th century bridge designed by Bartolomeo Ammanati that many people consider far more beautiful than the Ponte Vecchio. The Germans blew it up. They also destroyed a section of the city just across from the Ponte Vecchio in order to try to block the bridge with debris. They were not allowed to damage the Ponte Vecchio, though, because it was one of Hitler’s favourite works.” Read more...
Noah Charney, Novelist
“In recent years there have been a number of undercover investigative journalists who have been involved in major recoveries of stolen works of art, in particular the journalist Peter Watson. For several decades Watson has done absolutely incredible work where he goes undercover, along with the police, to try to make headway with unsolved crimes. This began back in the 1980s when he worked with Rodolfo Siviero, a star of the Carabinieri art squad, when he went undercover to try to recover the so-called “Palermo Nativity”, the Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence by Caravaggio, which was stolen from the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo in 1969. The theft prompted the establishment of the world’s first art police, the Carabinieri art squad. Watson wrote a book about that called The Caravaggio Conspiracy. And then more recently he has written, with co-author Cecilia Todeschini, another book called The Medici Conspiracy, which is an in-depth, very thoroughly researched investigation of the theft, looting and smuggling of antiquities by a chap called Giacomo Medici.” Read more...
Noah Charney, Novelist
The best books on True Crime, recommended by Cara Robertson
Why do women kill? What does violence tell us about human nature? How do the methods of the criminal justice system speak to an era? Cara Robertson—a lawyer, author and expert on the famous Lizzie Borden case—picks five true crime books that deal in murder, individual psychology, public trials and justice.
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1
The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science
by Douglas Starr -
2
Murder and the Making of English CSI
by Ian Burney & Neil Pemberton -
3
The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial
by Maggie Nelson -
4
Killer in the Shadows: The Monstrous Crimes of Robert Napper
by Laurence Alison & Marie Eyre -
5
Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification
by Simon A. Cole
The best books on Forensic Science, recommended by Jim Fraser
The best books on Forensic Science, recommended by Jim Fraser
Jim Fraser, veteran forensic investigator and author of Murder Under the Microscope, selects five of the best books about forensic science. Forget what you think you know about the subject from crime fiction and television dramas, and bring a healthy scepticism: this line of work can be as much a craft as a science.
The Best True Crime Books, recommended by David Grann
True crime books can be all too easily chalked up as a genre of grisly murders and cheap, voyeuristic thrills—but to do so would be to overlook compelling evidence to the contrary. David Grann, whose true crime book revisits long-forgotten, or concealed, crimes in the Osage community of Oklahoma, raises the bar with examples of true crime books rich in historical discovery, literary merit and the kind of political inquiry these murky times are calling for
The best books on Art Crime, recommended by Noah Charney
Art historian Noah Charney takes us on a grand tour of art theft and looting, taking in the Romans, Cosa Nostra and the man who stole the most famous painting in the world and didn’t know what to do with it.
