Paris! Crime! A book with my name on it

I don't really enjoy contemporary true crime, but I very much enjoy the books of Ben Macintyre and Erik Larson. This new book about the first police chief of Paris sounds like it deserves a place at the top of my TBR pile. Alas, it will not be available until next year.

I love the cover line--Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris--who isn't going to read a book that offers all that?  Holly Tucker is a professor at Vanderbilt University (not to be confused with the singer of the same name), and has written several other historical true crime books. I can't wait to dig into them.

For the TBR pile...We Are Not Such Things

I'm not a big fan of most true crime, but this book by Nadine Justine Van Der Leun caught my eye in my Net Galley newsletters. I remember reading about this south African murder case and wondering, "How did this happen?" I've read the author's magazine pieces and she's a fine writer, so I look forward to reading this book.

True Crime comjing March 31

I'm not really a true crime junkie, particularly not when it comes to chronicles of serial killers, which I find kind of depressing. But a good murder story, particularly one like this, always piques my interest. Upstanding doctor, a pillar in his church, finds his wife of 30 years dead in the bathtub. Terrible accident, or so it appears. The Stranger She Loved is already available from St. Martin's Press via pre-order and it'll be out in 10 days. Written by Shanna Hogan, who has also written books about Jodi Arias, and several other notorious cases.

Fiction Friday: Thoughts on True Crime Books

I have friends who read a lot (a whole lot) of true crime. For them it's relaxing and entertaining and engaging. Certainly they'll never run out of titles to read, from lit fic (Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song) to quickie books churned out in the wake of controversial court cases. (There were no less than 11 books published in the wake of Casey Anthony's trial for the murder of her daughter.)

I don't read that much true crime. Some cases are pretty fascinating--I read two different accounts of the Jon-Benet Ramsey murder investigation--but I realized that I mostly prefer fiction to fact. But there have been some books that So for #fictionfriday, I decided to list the true crime books that I found memorable. They were, in no particular order:

1.  Serpentine by Thomas Thompson--Thompson wrote great true crime books, many of them just crying out for the "miniseries" treatment. The killer here was a handsome, enigmatic man named Charles Sobhraj and the tale is a globe-hopping "odyssey of love and evil" that stretches from Paris to Hong Kong, with a stop at Mt. Everest along the way.
2. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson--I have a particular fondness for period murder mysteries that just happen to be true.
3.  The Napoleon of Crime by Ben Macintyre--see above. This is the bio of a fascinating master thief named Adam Worth.
4. Fire Lover by Joseph Wambaugh--This is an account of a decorated fire firefighter who was secretly an arsonist. I had a personal connection to the case in that one of the stores he burned up was a place I used to shop. It's pretty chilling. This case also attracted the attention of NOVA, which did an episode on it.

5, And the Sea Will Tell by Vincent Bugliosi. Bugliosi, who prosecuted Charles Manson, is probably more famous for Helter Skelter than this book, but I found And the Sea Will Tell a lot more interesting, probably because the Manson story has been told and retold and told to death. It's the story of a double murder of a yachting couple and was made into a television movie.