True Crime Books Worth Checking Out

The untold story of how poison rocked Jazz Age New York City. A pair of forensic scientists began their trailblazing chemical detective work, fighting to end an era when untraceable poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime.

In the tradition of The Orchid Thief, a compelling narrative set within the strange and genteel world of rare-book collecting: the true story of an infamous book thief, his victims, and the man determined to catch him.
Rare-book theft is even more widespread than fine-art theft. Most thieves, of course, steal for profit. John Charles Gilkey steals purely for the love of books. In an attempt to understand him better, journalist...

"The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of a multibillion-dollar startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end in the face of pressure and threats from the CEO and her lawyers. In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with...

"The girls' names were Padma and Lalli, but they were so inseparable that people in the village called them Padma Lalli. Sixteen-year-old Padma sparked and burned. Fourteen-year-old Lalli was an incorrigible romantic. They grew up in Katra Sadatganj, an eye-blink of a village in western Uttar Pradesh crammed into less than one square mile of land. It was out in the fields, in the middle of mango season, that the rumors started. Then one night in the...

"A chilling true story-part memoir, part crime investigation-reminiscent of Ann Rule's classic The Stranger Beside Me, about a little girl longing for love and how she found friendship with her charismatic babysitter-who was also a vicious serial killer. 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-the...

"On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian...

"In this work of nonfiction, Elon Green reports on a series of baffling and brutal crimes. The victims of the serial murderer dubbed the 'Last Call Killer' were all gay men, and Green tries to shine a light onto their complicated lives and the queer community in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s as well. Peter Stickney Anderson was the first of the known victims"--

"The remarkable true story of a modern-day Robin Hood: a British college student who started robbing banks in the aftermath of the financial crisis. When the global financial crisis of 2007 hit, British college student Stephen Jackley decided to become a bank robber, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Against all likelihood, his plan actually worked. Jackley used disguises, elaborate escape routes, and fake guns to hold up a string of...

Framed around one salacious trial in 1891 London, Jobb provides a fascinating and vividly told true-crime narrative about the hunt for one of the first known serial killers. Dr. Thomas Neil Cream used poison on vulnerable and desperate women, many who had turned to him for medical help. Cream's poisoning spree in the US, Canada, and England coincided with the birth of forensic science as well as the public's growing appetite for crime fiction. --...