True crime captures audiences in all media forms: TV shows, podcasts, documentaries, and, of course, books.
But what makes a good true crime read? Traci Thomas, creator of “The Stacks” podcasts, said she doesn’t tend to go for books about isolated incidents, like a crime of passion between two people. Instead, she gravitates to books about crimes that touch on wider societal issues or impact a mass number of people.
“The ones that are about these bigger structural issues that result in crime,” Thomas said, “those are the ones that I could just sink my teeth into for days.”
Book recommendations from Traci Thomas
About cults and mass death
- “A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown” by Julia Scheeres
“This is one of my all-time favorite books. Jonestown is a fascinating story. People are familiar with this phrase, ‘drink the Kool-Aid,’ and what happened to almost a thousand people.
“But what Julia Scheeres does in this book is she takes us back to 1954 when Jim Jones first opens the church in Indianapolis, and then they go to California, they go to the Bay Area, and they’re doing a lot of great political work. They’re one of the reasons Harvey Milk is elected. They are knocking on doors for him. One of the pieces of the People’s Temple is racial inclusion in the 1960s and 70s.
“Obviously, things spin out horribly, but what Julia Scheeres does in this book is she talks a lot about the victims and she talks a lot about nobody willingly joins a cult. There is a seduction, and there are ideals and values. She goes into that in such a beautiful way. She really honors the people whose lives were taken at Jonestown.”
- “Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage” by Jeff Guinn
- “Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders” by Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry
- “Columbine” by Dave Cullen
- “Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation” by Robert W. Fieseler
Individual crimes
- “Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story” by Rich Cohen
“I picked up the book because I was curious, and one of the things that Rich Cohen does beautifully is he talks a lot about Jennifer Dulos’ life leading up to her disappearance.
“He talks about how she was a playwright and she was an artist, but she was also raised in a very wealthy family. Her father was very protective. When she was in college in New York City, he would have a car sent for her. She never went on the subway.
:And so she was torn between these two worlds, wanting to be a mother and a wealthy housewife, socialite, and then also wanting to be a downtown artist, and she was part of this playwright’s collective. And so this piece of her story, this sort of tension about who she wanted to be and then how her husband eventually comes in and sort of exploits these desires, was really, really compelling to me.”
- “Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy” by Alex Mar
- “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote
- “The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder” by Charles Graeber
- “The Real Lolita: A Lost Girl, an Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece—Unveiling the Dark Inspiration Behind a Literary Classic Through True Crime Investigation and Cultural History” by Sarah Weinman
- “Vulgar Favors: The Hunt for Andrew Cunanan, the Man Who Killed Gianni Versace” by Maureen Orth
- “To the Bridge: A True Story of Motherhood and Murder” by Nancy Rommelmann
Political crimes
- “From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial that Galvanized the Asian American Movement” by Paula Yoo
“I was not familiar with the Vincent Chin story. It happened in the 1980s before I was born. It was not something that I was taught in school, and I was so taken by this story. It reminded me so much of what we’ve seen with Black Lives Matter, of a person who is murdered.
“It’s after his bachelor party. He’s on the street. These white men come. There’s questions about, ‘is this a hate crime?’ There’s questions about, ‘was it self-defense?’ There’s all these questions that we’re still grappling with now when we talk about racialized violence.
“Paula Yoo lays it out so beautifully, and because it’s for a younger audience, it’s extremely clear what’s happened and it’s very easy to read, and it brings up so many questions to think about when we talk about not only what happened with Vincent Chin, but with the justice system as well as true crime and kind of consuming these stories for pleasure.”
- “One Day in September” by Simon Reeve
- “Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed–and Why It Still Matters” by Andrew Gumbel and Roger G. Charles
- “Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed” by Maureen Callahan
Organizational crime
- “No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson” by Gardiner Harris
“ I think sometimes when we talk about true crime, people limit it to where someone dies. But I like to have a broader category of true crime. I like to include corporate crime. It’s a kind of true crime that I’m really fascinated by.
“This book about Johnson & Johnson will change the way that you think about this company for certain. Unless you already knew a lot about Johnson & Johnson.
“But [Gardiner Harris] goes back through all of these different scandals and questionable behavior, their relationship to the [Food and Drug Administration], the money going in and out, clinical trials that they sort of zhuzh to fit their needs, the conversations that happen between Johnson & Johnson executives and the FDA and other oversight groups where Johnson & Johnson admits to knowing things that would be helpful for consumers and they choose time and again to proceed with their product instead of taking a pause and protecting their consumers. And it is extremely criminal and a fantastic read.”
- “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup” by John Carreyrou
- “Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels” by Paul Pringle
- “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty” by Patrick Radden Keefe
Lyrical/crime memoir
- “The Fact of the Body: A Murder and a Memoir” by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
- “Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice” by Cristina Rivera Garza
- “A Better Ending: A Brother’s Twenty-Year Quest to Uncover the Truth About His Sister’s Death” by James Whitfield Thomson
- “The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi” by Wright Thompson
Deathless crimes
- “The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession” by Michael Finkel
- “The Library Book” by Susan Orlean
- “There Is No Ethan: How Three Women Caught America’s Biggest Catfish” by Anna Akbari
- “Madoff: The Final Word” by Richard Behar
Traci also recommends
- “Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence” by Bill James
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Grace Griffin adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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