BEST TRUE CRIME 4 AUGUST
You'll be Locking Your Doors And Windows
We all love a good beach read, and the lazy, hazy days of summer are perfect for a page-turner, and True Crime seems to be more popular than ever. Just turn on your favorite streaming service, and you’ll find an array of true crime documentaries to keep you enthralled for hours. In addition, podcasts are now an outlet for true crime authors investigating an actual crime. To help you explore the darker side of humanity safely, Provokr has put together a list of some of the newest True Crime novels that will satisfy anyone who is fascinated with evil.
Elon Green’s latest novel, Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York, is a true-crime narrative that tells the story of the Last Call Killer and the decades-long pursuit to find him. The killer preyed upon gay men in New York in the ’80s and ’90s and had all the hallmarks of the most notorious serial killers. Yet his crimes are almost forgotten because of his victims’ sexuality, sky-high murder rates, and the AIDS epidemic. “I was surprised to learn that, within my lifetime, the assault of queer New Yorkers was functionally legal,” said Green. “The police didn’t care, and the courts were intellectually unprepared to defend the assaults. That made the backdrop to the murders all the more horrific.”
Murder in Canaryville: The True Story Behind a Cold Case and a Chicago Cover-up. Author, Jeff Coen, paints a vivid picture of underworld Chicago while detailing one man’s quest to close a cold case. In 1976, 17-year-old John Hughes was partying with friends in a park when he was shot dead by someone in a passing car. It should have been a simple case that wound up going nowhere. Forty years later, a detective on loan from the Chicago PD to the FBI, James Sherlock, pulled a slender file on the murder and began reconstructing the case. Though it was never officially solved, Sherlock’s dogged police work pretty much clarifies who killed Hughes, why the incident led to a second murder years later, why there was a cover-up, and just how high it went. One of the suspects had a relative in the police department, judges were likely bribed, and Coen alleges that Mayor Richard Daley could have been involved. Along the way, Coen details the history of the mob in Chicago and the corruption within the city’s police department.
Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob by Russell Shorto writes about his past. He grew up knowing his grandfather and namesake was a small-town mob boss but maintained an unspoken family vow of silence. Smalltime is a mob story straight out of central casting―but with a difference, for the small-town mob, which stretched from Schenectady to Fresno, is a mostly unknown world. The location is the brawny postwar factory town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The setting is City Cigar, a storefront next to City Hall, behind which Russ and his brother-in-law, “Little Joe,” operate a gambling empire and effectively run the town.
The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing by Sonia Faleiro is the tragic story of two cousins, 16-year-old Padma Shakya and 14-year-old Lalli Shakya, who grew up in a village in the Indian state Uttar Pradesh. Padma and Lalli, who tended the family’s goats, disappeared one night in 2014. They were found the following day hanging from a mango tree. Was it rape and murder, or suicide? Months of bungling police, corrupt politicians, lying witnesses, and missing evidence resulted in the arrests of Padma’s boyfriend, his two brothers, and two police officers in a case of a gang rape gone wrong. However, when the Central Bureau of Investigation officers, India’s equivalent of the FBI, took over the ruined case, they concluded it was suicide, not murder. The girls took their own lives out of shame after being caught in a field with a boy. Faleiro, who offers no opinion on what happened, examines India’s family honor system and the grueling lives of lower caste women.
We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption is the work of investigative journalist Justin Fenton. In 2015, riots erupted in Baltimore as citizens demanded justice for Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old Black man who died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody. Drug and violent crime surged, and Baltimore reached its highest murder count in more than two decades. Facing pressure from the mayor’s office and a federal investigation of the department over Gray’s death—Baltimore police commanders turned to a rank-and-file hero. Sergeant Wayne Jenkins and his elite plainclothes unit, the Gun Trace Task Force, were asked to help get guns and drugs off the street. But behind these new efforts, a criminal conspiracy of an unprecedented scale was unfolding within the police department. Entrusted with fixing the city’s drug and gun crisis, Jenkins chose to exploit it instead. Fenton’s reporting uncovers a rogue police unit, the city they held hostage and the ongoing struggle between American law enforcement and the communities they serve.
The Babysitter: My Summers with a Serial Killer is part memoir, part crime investigation. Growing up on Cape Cod in the 1960s, Liza Rodman was a lonely little girl. During the summers, while her mother worked days in a local motel and danced most nights in the Provincetown bars, her babysitter was the kind, handsome handyman at the motel where her mother worked. He took her and her sister on adventures in his truck. He bought them popsicles, and together, they visited his “secret garden” in the Truro woods. To Liza, he was one of the few kind and understanding adults in her life. Everyone thought he was just a “great guy.” But there was one thing she didn’t know; their babysitter was a serial killer. So Liza became obsessed with the case. Now, she and co-writer Jennifer Jordan reveal the true story of a charming but brutal psychopath through the eyes of a young girl who once called him her friend.
We Keep The Dead Close explores a murder at Harvard. Author Becky Cooper was a junior at the university when she first heard the story. However, it had been campus lore for decades: A female student in Harvard’s graduate archaeology program was murdered by a professor with whom she was having an affair, but the police could never pin the professor down. Cooper’s fascination with the story sparked her 10-year investigation into the tragic, unsolved murder of Jane Britton in 1969. “Her death felt less like a mystery and more like an open secret, and it bothered me that people believed the rumor enough to repeat it but not enough to do anything about it,” said Cooper. “I wanted to be the one to take it seriously. Then, as the story became more complex, I felt compelled to pursue it as far as it would go, even if the chances of solving the crime were increasingly slim.”
