5 True-Crime Books Better Than Any Netflix Documentary
At any given moment, Scott Simone has at least three books jockeying for his attention. He’ll never turn down a campus novel with a literary bent, nor will he hesitate to add yet another mystery to his Leaning Tower of Pisa-inspired to-be-read pile — which is built upon the bedrocks of too many short story collections, how-are-these-real true crime books, and classics waiting to be cracked open again. Topics that have him ripping through pages the fastest include closed-circle murders, unhappy professors, life-questioning philosophical deep dives, so long as they feature sharp sentences, a dark sense of humor, and at least a little malice.
He’s spent so much time in book shops over the years he is, to his wife’s chagrin, continuing to build a library that doesn’t quite respect the dimensions of the apartment meant to contain it.
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Sure, Netflix has perfected the true-crime documentary. The streamer knows how to keep us hooked: the staccato violins that never foreshadow something good, the fact that no small town is ever as sleepy as it seems, and how you can be sure anyone described as “lighting up a room” won’t be around for an interview. It’s why its near-weekly true-crime releases have such a stranglehold on our watch lists. But Netflix, of course, didn’t invent the genre. Even before Steven Avery was made into a murderer, there were writers who were weaving true-crime threads more encompassing than any docuseries has since matched.
That’s especially true if you’re the type who — before those violins are snuffed out as the credits finish rolling — dives down a Reddit rabbit hole to check in on where each suspect is now, whether that odd piece of evidence was ever fully explained, or which conspiracy theory most neatly fills the remaining holes. The best of these books (and no, we’re not talking about the In Cold Bloods of the world) are full of exactly the stuff you go looking for afterward.
'Victim: The Other Side of Murder' by Gary Kinder
Image via Grove Atlantic
There are documentaries about Ted Bundy. Documentaries about Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and Richard Ramirez. There are series about the Zodiac Killer, the Son of Sam, the Golden State Killer, and BTK, about their childhoods, their girlfriends, their houses, their letters, their lost tapes. Bundy alone has received the Hollywood treatment so many times that even people who have never watched anything about him can probably picture the Volkswagen. The men who tortured five people and killed three during the 1974 Hi-Fi Shop murders in Ogden, Utah, get no such treatment in Gary Kinder’s Victim.
In a subversion of the genre, Kinder turns the focus to 16-year-old survivor Cortney Naisbitt. That may not sound stalking-through-crime-scenes levels of interesting, but you’ll find it hard to stop reading about Naisbitt’s recovery. Kinder turns the reader into a fly on the wall as doctors try to save Naisbitt’s life through a seemingly endless array of surgeries, setbacks, and years of rehabilitation. Kinder’s account is so visceral that the hospital rooms start feeling claustrophobic; Naisbitt’s pain starts thronging through your body. When Naisbitt receives good news, the relief will barely register before you’re waiting for the next setback, and your stomach will drop each time he gets a new diagnosis. Unlike most in this genre, it’s not the killers loitering in your mind when it’s all over — it’s Naisbitt.
'A Death in White Bear Lake' by Barry Siegel
Barry Siegel’s A Death in White Bear Lake is bogged down by paperwork. There are adoption files and medical records strewn about alongside autopsy reports and notes from those who encountered three-year-old Dennis Jurgens before his death in 1965. Writer Brandon Taylor has a term for movies that make this sort of thing exciting: the “paperwork movie.” Consider this the paperwork true-crime book.
So if you’re that aforementioned Reddit sleuth, you’ll find a comfortable home inside the pages of Siegel’s paperwork thriller. There’s a bruise noted in passing, which doesn’t seem important until dozens of pages later. Siegel highlights something a doctor jotted down that seems forgettable, until something 50 pages later jogs your memory of it. As you read, all these hidden-in-the-paperwork details compound. Pretty soon you’re connecting dots across chapters and getting increasingly annoyed that nobody made them decades earlier. In the end, there's not just one of Chekhov’s guns sitting on the mantel; there’s a cache — and you’ll be wondering how no one noticed it before.
'The Dreams of Ada' by Robert Mayer
If Steven Avery is the name that made Making a Murderer famous, Brendan Dassey’s confession is the part that made it memorable for the queasy feeling it left viewers. Robert Mayer’s was leaving the same boulder in readers' stomachs decades earlier with The Dreams of Ada. In it, he recounts the confessing-cum-recanting by Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot when it comes to their involvement in Denice Haraway’s disappearance.
It’s a seesaw journey, both literally and figuratively. It’s the type of book that’ll have you flipping three chapters back, read a little further, and then flip back again. Because each time the book delves further into someone’s story, it seems as though they’ve — yet again — said something a bit different than the last time. In that way, details from each interrogation will nag at you, especially as you see a story that started as gossip gets turned into gospel. It all gets so convoluted that Ward’s dreams somehow get dragged into the case. By the time the case is moving toward conviction, you may find yourself less interested in whether Ward and Fontenot confessed than in how everyone around them got so comfortable with those confessions in the first place.
'Bitter Blood' by Jerry Bledsoe
A family tree is helpful when reading Bitter Blood. A legal pad wouldn’t hurt, either. For a bit of reference, think Knives Out. Only the Thrombeys married into another wealthy family, the heart of each grudge beat for 20-plus years, and there was no Benoit Blanc to sort everything out. Jerry Bledsoe begins this twisted tale delving into murders in Kentucky, then covering another set of killings in North Carolina. The connective tissue of it all is three prominent Southern families. The eye of the family hurricane is Susie Sharp Newsom Lynch, whose ugly divorce and custody engulfs more and more of the families. Then there’s her first cousin Fritz Klenner, who’s upgraded from relative to lover.
Bledsoe’s nosiness, like Blanc’s, is what will keep you hooked, no matter how much you come to despise each character. He brings you into the family fold through painstakingly detailed accounts of every old marriage, custody dispute, and family resentment that somehow the murders recede into the background. What sticks in your mind well after the final page is all the damage everyone managed to do before the killing even started.
'Unanswered Cries' by Thomas French
Karen Gregory’s screams pierced the air of her Gulfport, Florida, neighborhood the night she was murdered. Several neighbors heard them, yet continued on with their lives. When a book starts with characters as immediately unlikable as those neighbors, you know you’re in for a twisted tale. And Thomas French — who covered Gregory’s murder for the St. Petersburg Times — does not disappoint, methodically taking the reader through an investigation messy enough to make any armchair detective look foolish.
It’s French’s proximity to the case, and the intimacy that comes with it, that makes Unanswered Cries one of the best true-crime page-turners. He takes you inside the neighbors’ routines before, during, and after the murder; the odd comments more than a few people say to the police, and their polygraphs that only further muddy the waters; Gregory’s complicated relationship with her boyfriend; and, through it all, Sgt. Larry Tosi’s rotating suspicions. Lingering within each chapter is a different cause for someone’s suspected guilt. Maybe not specifically for the murder, but the choices each person made after those cries rang out. Years after the final page, the people who seemed guilty along the way remain almost as vivid as the person who actually was.
Collider Exclusive · Villain Personality Quiz Which Criminal Mastermind Would Be Your Nemesis? Lecter · Joker · Moriarty · Chigurh
Four of the finest criminal minds ever put on screen. One of them would look at you and see something worth their time. Eight questions decide which one comes for you, why they picked you, and what they would want when they arrived.
🍷Lecter
🃏Joker
♟️Moriarty
🪙Chigurh
01
What would a criminal mastermind notice about you first? Great villains choose their opponents carefully. Something about you got their attention.
02
How do they make first contact? The introduction tells you everything about what is coming next.
03
What do you actually believe about right and wrong? Every nemesis is really an argument about the thing you believe most.
04
What finally gets under your skin? Everybody has a pressure point. Finding yours is the whole plan.
05
They have made their move. How do you fight back? This is the part of the film where the audience finds out who you are.
06
What would they use against you? A good villain never brings a weapon you have not already handed them.
07
What do they actually want from you? The money is never the point. Something else always is.
08
How does it end between the two of you? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides who comes for you.
The Case File Is Complete Your Nemesis Is…
Four criminal masterminds. One of them was always going to be yours. Here is who comes for you, why they picked you out of everyone available, and what they want from the encounter.
Hannibal Lecter
Your nemesis does not want to beat you. He wants to know you completely, and he is patient enough to wait for it. The frightening part is how good the conversation is.
- Lecter is the most dangerous kind of opponent: the one who finds you interesting. He never raises his voice, because he has never needed to.
- You keep a great deal to yourself and you are careful about what you show. That reserve is exactly the door he would knock on.
- The films understood something other thrillers missed. The horror is not the violence. It is being perfectly understood by the wrong person.
- He would be unfailingly polite about all of it. That is the worst part.
The Joker
Your nemesis is not after money, territory or revenge. He is after a demonstration, and you are the person he has chosen to prove his point on.
- The Joker only picks opponents who believe in something. Your decency is not a defence against him. It is the entire reason he showed up.
- He has no plan you can predict and nothing you can take away, which removes every tool you would normally reach for.
- His whole argument is that you are one bad day away from being him, and you would spend the rest of your life proving him wrong.
- He would call it a magic trick. You would call it the worst night of your life.
Moriarty
Your nemesis respects you, which sounds flattering until you work out what it means. He chose you because nobody else was worth his time.
- Moriarty is the original criminal mastermind, the template every later one borrows from: a mind the equal of the hero's, pointed the wrong way.
- You enjoy being the cleverest person in the room. He is counting on exactly that, and he has already built the room.
- This is the rare nemesis who would be genuinely disappointed if you lost badly. He needs the game to be worth playing.
- It ends the way these things always end. Two people, one problem, and only one way down.
Anton Chigurh
Your nemesis has no personal interest in you whatsoever, and that is precisely what makes him unsurvivable. You are not a rival. You are a stop on the way.
- Chigurh does not negotiate, gloat or explain. He arrives, he asks one question, and the answer was decided long before you opened your mouth.
- You trust yourself to handle things. He is the one problem in the world that has no interest in how capable you are.
- No Country for Old Men rewrote the screen villain by removing the thing audiences quietly rely on: the sense that talking might work.
- Call it. He will wait.
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