Best of 2023: True Crime Books
What was your favorite true crime book in 2023?
the true crime that's worth your time
Here we are again. It’s the end of the year, a time when one looks back, reflects…and realizes that it’s a great time to ask friends and colleagues to do your work for you share their insights from the past 12 months. All Best Evidence readers, paid and free, will get the next two weeks — our Best Evidence Best Ofs — in their inboxes; we hope you enjoy these issues and will agree, disagree, and share your own picks in the comments.
We’re kicking things off with the best true crime books of 2023, so get those wish lists — and/or your library reserve app — up and ready. — EB
I was really taken with Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy, a sensitive and thorough investigation of not just a heartbreaking crime (a group of Indiana teen girls kill a grandmother in a home invasion), but the way it traced the reverberations of the violence through both the families of the victim and one perpetrator, fifteen-year-old Paula Cooper, who was sentenced to death. It’s a complicated and emotional story that spanned decades, and Alex Mar handles it powerfully. — True Crime Fiction author Tracy Bealer
That came out in 2023? It's probably unseemly to cite a book I was honored to serve as an early reader on, but fuck it, it's a great piece of work: our esteemed colleague Maureen Ryan's Burn It Down. If I don't get to count that one, Alex Mar's Seventy Times Seven, and on the audio side, Jeff Guinn's Waco. True crime I read IN 2023 and highly recommend but that came out earlier: Mike Weiss's Double Play: The San Francisco City Hall Killings and Jarett Kobek's How to Find Zodiac. — Best Evidence co-author Sarah D. Bunting
The best true crime book I read this year is an old one - Erik Larson's Devil in the White City. Two men with visions who build their edifices. One a destroyer. Top marks! — writer and Crime Seen co-host Sarah Carradine
A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention and Murder, by Mark O’Connell. Malcolm Macarthur was well-off, well-liked and well-known Dublin aristocrat who ran out of money. Deciding to rob a bank, he needed a car to go buy a gun, so he bludgeoned a woman to death with a hammer in order to steal hers. He eventually did buy a shotgun from a farmer, then killed the farmer with it. Before being caught, he was staying in the guest room of the Irish Attorney General, who he might have been sleeping with (if this sounds familiar, there’s a John Banville novel based on the events). When convicted, he refused to say anything about his crimes.
The book follows the efforts of the author to try and get him on the record, earning his trust in ways that feel very much like Fatal Vision, only to find not only that he can’t get any satisfying answers, but that Macarthur himself doesn’t seem to know why he did what he did. It’s both a fascinating case that’s not received too much attention in the US, while being well enough known in Ireland to be known only by the acronym “GUBU” (for grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented), that also functions as an indictment of true crime’s tendency towards pat answers and the belief that we can ever get at the truth of a killer’s thought process. — Professor and Best Evidence contrib Dan Cassino
It’s not too late to give the gift of Best Evidence! Five days a week of true crime analysis and insights, discussion threads, bonus reviews, and a weekly podcast, which you can support for only $5 a month, or a steal at $55/year. Santa would be so proud.
A Place for Us: A Memoir by Brandon J. Wolf. The book isn't entirely about the 2016 massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, though it does tell us the story of that crime from someone who survived it. Instead, Brandon tells the story of his life: what led him to move to Orlando, how he found community there, and what happened during and after he ended up in the middle of a mass shooting that killed his best friends. I hope for a world in which no one else will have a story like this to tell, but I am grateful Brandon told the story, and for his perspective as both survivor and activist. — Andy Dehnart, TV critic and creator of reality blurred
We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxanna Asgarian. This was my most anticipated book of 2023 and it did not disappoint. A searing investigation of the Hart family murder-suicide and the foster care, adoption, and child protection systems that failed these children. — Best Evidence contributor Susan Howard
The Woman in Me by Britney Spears, a harrowing victim's account of being placed in a legal (somehow) but ethically compromised conservatorship that should shine a light on ableism and corruption. Mostly people made fun of Justin Timberlake. I'd rather the conversation did both. — Margaret Howie is a marketing drone by day, co-founder of spacefruitpress.com by night.
Genealogy of a Murder by Lisa Belkin, which, as I said in my review for AirMail, points to one of the ways the genre can evolve and move forward -- it is, essentially, investigative genetic genealogy in narrative format. (I also loved two books I blurbed, Seventy Times Seven by Alex Mar and We Were Once a Family by Roxanna Asgarian, one I wrote the introduction for, This House of Grief by Helen Garner, and two I have no connection to at all, The Sullivanians by Alexander Stille and Anansi's Gold by Yepoka Yeebo.) — Author Sarah Weinman, aka The Crime Lady
This might be recency bias, but Rebecca Renner’s Gator Country was such a good time I didn’t even want to review it for BE. It’s a little bit The Orchid Thief, a little bit true life Carl Hiaasen — but without either of those references’ “holy smokes look at the wild and crazy characters we got here”-ness. This is a book about alligator poaching in Florida, and animals are indeed killed…but, y’all, it’s alligators, which are hardly the most sympathetic members of nature’s kingdom. If I can take it, you can. — Best Evidence co-author Eve Batey
Tuesday on Best Evidence: Prick up your ears for the best podcasts of 2023.
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