December 26, 2023

2024's Most Anticipated True Crime

Tell us the true crime project you’re looking forward to the most in 2024.

the true crime that's worth your time

Happy Boxing Day! We’re continuing our end-of-2023 series with a look at 2024, and the properties we’re hopeful about, and those we can’t wait to see/hear/read.

Meanwhile, over at Best Evidence HQ, we continue to figure out our Substack escape plan. While we’d love to hear that three ghosts1 visited the founders of this platform Sunday night and convinced them that amplifying Nazi voices makes the world a worse place, we’re not holding our breath. While we’re working as hard as we can to find a new solution quickly, that all this went down (to the tune of more and more national headlines that dispute Substack’s assertions) over the holidays makes moving fast a challenge. As always, we appreciate your patience. — Sarah and Eve

The novelist and essayist Sarah Gerard's true crime memoir, Carrie Carolyn Coco, is out in July, and I am almost 100 percent certain it will be exactly up my alley, interrogating the genre with gorgeous prose.

And July also brings Margalit Fox's next book, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, on a 19th century Jewish lady gangster -- *of course* I'm going to read this. (The book after that is on Somerton Man, also Margo is my neighbor, so I can't really be objective here.) — Author Sarah Weinman, aka The Crime Lady

Under the Bridge finally arriving on Hulu; Rachel McCarthy James's book; whatever comes out of the Mystery Bookshop non-fiction imprint. — Best Evidence co-author Sarah D. Bunting

Who is going to adapt that Carreyrou NYT article on the Netflix $55m boondoggle? [Here’s a gift link to that piece. — EB] That and whatever a cunning journo digs up on the cursed Devil in the White City series.  — Margaret Howie is a marketing drone by day, co-founder of spacefruitpress.com by night. 

I’ve already pre-ordered Alex Hortis’ The Witch of New York, about the sensational trials of Polly Bodine, a Staten Island woman who was accused a beating her sister-in-law and infant niece to death, then burning down their house to cover up the crime. In many ways, the Bodine case is the inverse of Lizzie Borden, as Bodine was a “fallen woman” used as a boogeyman to illustrate the perilous state of American womanhood in the press, including Walt Whitman, James Fenimore Cooper and Edgar Allen Poe. Hortis’ 2014 book on the relationship between New York and the mob was well done, and I’m always eager for more historical true crime, especially one that interrogates the relationship between crime and the media, by looking at the earliest instances we have. — Professor and Best Evidence contrib Dan Cassino

As a podcast, I thought The Girlfriends was perfectly fine (shrugging lady emoji), but a series adaptation from A24 led by The State’s Michael Showalter has me extremely intrigued. Also, I don’t know that author Robert Kolker is working on a follow-up to his book Lost Girls, but with the arrest of Rex Heuermann in the Long Island Serial Killer case, he’s arguably the best person to report out what’s to come. If one can look forward to something that you can’t confirm will actually happen (did I just define many Western religions? Maybe!) then that, too. — Best Evidence co-author Eve Batey

In 2015 we were all gripped and astounded by Andrew Jarecki's The Jinx. It may be the reason many of us are here (though mine is The Thin Blue Line in 1988.) Coming to HBO and Max in 2024 - The Jinx – Part Two. What more could there be? Plenty, apparently, including "interviews with people who had not previously come forward, as well as Durst’s prison phone calls, and other new information that connects Durst to the murders of Susan Berman and Morris Black, as well as the disappearance of his wife, Kathleen McCormack" according to the Hollywood Reporter. Be assured that I will be seated for this one. — writer and Crime Seen co-host Sarah Carradine

Not The Jinx part two, especially after learning that its biggest moment was created in the editing bay, not in real life. — Andy Dehnart, TV critic and creator of reality blurred

According to a recent Instagram story from author Patrick Radden Keefe, shooting of the television adaptation of his brilliant book Say Nothing wrapped in Ireland. I’m crossing my fingers this makes it to our screens in 2024. — Best Evidence contributor Susan Howard