Title: The 10 Best True Crime Books
Headings: The 10 Best True Crime Books
The 10 Best True Crime Books
1. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
2. The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
3. Columbine by Dave Cullen
4. Shot in the Heart by Mikhal Gilmore
5. Son of a Gun by Justin St. Germain
6. Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
7. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
8. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
9. Killings by Calvin Trillin
10. The Other Side by Lacy Johnson

Content: The 10 Best True Crime Books
The 10 Best True Crime Books
By Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich              |
May 19, 2017




Photo Credit: Nina Subin
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich's haunting hybrid of memoir and true crime, The Fact of a Body, explores how a law school internship set her on a collision course with Ricky Langley, a pedophile and murderer, forcing her to contend with past trauma and preexisting prejudice. Her writing is remarkably evocative and taut with suspense, with a level of nuance that sets the book apart from other true crime accounts. Marzano-Lesnevich picks her 10 favorite true crime books. What is it about crime that compels us? As an obsessive fan of podcasts like Serial, shows like The Making of a Murderer, and all the books I’m about to list below—and as a writer who just spent nearly a decade being haunted by a Louisiana murder, a haunting that eventually became my book The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir —I’ve wondered about this question. What I’ve come to think is that it’s not just the vivid suspense of a crime story, the lure of the whodunit, that pulls us in. Rather, it’s how much of the unsayable questions in life crimes lay starkly bare—how much of ourselves, as individuals and as a society, they reveal. In them are passion, blood, extreme acts, and extreme emotion—but in them are also the questions of who we are and who we wish to be, the various ways we love and fail and harm one another.