Ten groundbreaking true crime books

Sarah Weinman is the author of The Real Lolita: A Lost Girl, an Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece and the editor of Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit & Obsession.

Her new books is Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free.

At Publishers Weekly Weinman tagged ten true crime "books [that] helped me make sense of the world's darkest corners," including:

The Five by Hallie Rubenhold (2019)

The more time passes, the more in awe I am of this book. Rubenhold flips the usual script and elevates the stories of the five women known to have been murdered by a man roaming the streets of East London's Whitechapel neighborhood in 1888. In doing so, she restores them—Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary-Jane—as complex, flawed, human figures struggling to live in a world rife with poverty, homelessness, and cruelty towards women, while shattering a great many myths about who and what they were not.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue