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I especially enjoy true crime books with a local connection, so I knew I needed to get on the wait list for Something Big: The True Story of the Brown’s Chicken Massacre (2025) by Patrick Wohl. This horrific crime occurred in January 1993, in Palatine, a northwestern suburb of Cook County.

The Man in the Rockefeller Suit: The Astonishing Rise and Fall of a Serial Impostor (2011), by Mark Seal, tells the unbelievable story of German con man Christian Gerhartsreiter. At age seventeen, Hollywood-obsessed Christian achieved his childhood dream of moving to the United States.

We Would Never (2025) by Tova Mirvis is a dark family drama inspired by an infamous 2014 murder in Tallahassee, Florida involving feuding ex-spouses and toxic family members. In the fictionalized story, Hailey and Jonah Gelman are going through a bitter divorce and fighting constantly over custody of their daughter.

Raised by a Serial Killer (2024) by April Balascio is a memoir by the daughter of Edward Wayne Edwards, whose crimes went unpunished for decades until April, who long suspected that her father was a murderer, called a cold case line in 2009, and helped finally bring her father to justice.

The Murderess (2024) by Laurie Notaro is a historical true crime novel based on notorious “trunk murderess” Winnie Ruth Judd. In October 1931, Judd arrives from Phoenix at the Los Angeles train station and her trunks soon attract attention from the station porters, as there appears to be blood oozing from them.

American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI (2020) by Kate Winkler Dawson recounts the life and career of Edward Oscar Heinrich (1881-1953), one of the founding fathers of forensic science in the United States.

The Feather Thief (2018) is a fascinating combination of true crime and natural history which reads like a novel. Its author, Kirk Wallace Johnson, was on a fishing trip when his guide told him an anecdote about an unusual heist: the 2009 theft of hundreds of dead birds from a British natural history museum.

Many people associate the Ku Klux Klan with the South. But in Timothy Egan’s compelling and infuriating history, you’ll learn about the rise of the Klan in the 1920s Midwest, particularly Indiana.

I'm new to actually enjoying nonfiction, but author Tori Telfer made it easy in Confident Women. I often get a crime bug in me, and I was looking for something longer and more substantial than an internet article, but I didn't want to feel like I was doing required reading on a subject that truly interests me.