Nine true crime memoirs that explore our obsession with darkness

Rebecca Hannigan has an MA in Creative Writing Crime Fiction from UEA, graduating in 2023. She won the UEA/Little Brown Crime Prize for her dissertation. She has also been shortlisted for Virago/The Pool’s Best New Crime Writer.

Her first novel, Darkrooms, is a fictional work in which she explores the "feeling of betrayal and injustice" stemming from "a murder in [her] mother’s small Irish hometown" for which "no one was ever sentenced."

For People magazine Hannigan tagged nine "gripping true crime memoirs that explore why we're all so obsessed with darkness." One title on the list:

Hell In The Heartland by Jax Miller

When fiction author Miller set out to investigate an unsolved cold case set in the Oklahoma prairies, she had no idea what she was getting herself into. In 1999, an arson attack on a trailer home concealed the corpses of a couple, Danny and Kathy Freeman, but the bodies of their daughter Ashley and her best friend Lauria Bible were never found.

Miller spends a significant amount of time getting to know the local people and towns, but every discovery leads only to more pain; more disappearances, more tragic unsolved crimes, and more horrifyingly abusive characters terrorizing whole communities into silence. A desperately sad and bleak read about a class of society underserved by the justice system.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue