The best true crime books of 2024
the true crime that's worth your time
Welcome to Best Evidence's fourth annual Year in Review, in which we celebrate the best true crime properties, complain about the worst, and spin hopeful dreams about the future of the genre. Keep checking back all this week and next for other responses including great podcast recommendations, hidden gems to seek out, and infuriating flops to avoid.
Today our crack team of experts is weighing in on the true crime books they loved this year. Was Wright Thompson’s The Barn the book of the year? Perhaps! Let us know what you think in the comments, and please do share your own favorites there, too.
Now I’m trying to remember what stopped me from writing about Joseph Cox’s Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever for Best Evidence. What fucked up part of 2024 happened around the time I glugged down this super nerdy book about Anom, an app that thousands of criminals thought was made to allow them to conduct covert business — but was actually set up by the FBI. Bonus: Cox is one of the co-founders of crime-adjacent tech journalism site 404 Media, so there’s more where Dark Wire came from.) — Eve Batey, Best Evidence co-editor, journalist, and sighthound person.
Liliana's Invincible Summer: An Experiment in Making Grief Legible. For me, the book models the best in what true crime can accomplish: situating discrete acts of lawbreaking within larger institutional frameworks, tracing the reverberations of trauma through families and communities, and experimenting with multiplicity of voice to capture the way perspective inflects our understanding and experience of violence. — Tracy Bealer, author of True Crime Fiction on Substack
I read a handful of 2024 genre books that I liked, but didn't LOVE/think were perfect. The one that stayed with me was Carrie Carolyn Coco; my review is here. — Sarah D. Bunting, co-EIC of B.E., proprietrix of Exhibit B. Books
HIGHWAY THIRTEEN by Fiona McFarlane. 12 interconnected stories from 1950 to 2028, revolving around serial killings in Australia in the 1990s, and the ripples backwards and forwards in time. Based on the monstrous Ivan Milat, but never focussing on the murderer. Yes it's fiction, but I'm counting it as a true crime book. — Sarah Carradine, co-host of the Crime Seen podcast
I've already written about The Witch of New York, and V13 Chronicle of a Trial for Best Evidence, so while they're excellent, I won't recap them here. Wright Thompson did an amazing job communicating the horror of the Emmet Till case in The Barn, and brought in a lot of information that was new - but shouldn't have been surprising - about the cover up that came afterwards. But as well done as it was, it joined my Did Not Finish stack, as it was just too harrowing, and while it's important, I'm not sure I can recommend it.
My true crime beach read this past year, has no such problem. A Gentleman and a Thief, by Dean Jobb, is a biography of a jazz age conman and cat burglar who stole from a cross section of who's who among the American elite of the time, and then confessed to it all to save his wife (before escaping from prison, natch). It's breezy, fun, and while not quite as process-y as I'd like, it's exactly what I wanted on vacation. — Dan Cassino, Professor of Government and Politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University
THE BARN: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi (Wright Thompson) — Elon Green, author of The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York (coming on March 11, 2025)
The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty by Valerie Bauerlein. Don't let Murdaugh fatigue steer you away from this masterpiece of investigative journalism. Susan Howard, Best Evidence contributor (Instagram: @veronicamers)
The Barn by Wright Thompson, and runner-up [is] The Fire We Carry by Rebecca Nagle — Sarah Weinman, author & editor