Five novels that get at the truth of true crime

Claire Fuller is the author most recently of the novel Hunger and Thirst. Her previous novels include Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize; Swimming Lessons; Bitter Orange; Unsettled Ground, which won the Costa Novel Award and was a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction; and The Memory of Animals.

[The Page 69 Test: Our Endless Numbered Days]

At Oprah Daily the author tagged five novels "that weave in real crimes and real questions about literature’s most controversial genre." One title on the list:

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

This ambitious literary thriller covers power, privilege, and the #MeToo movement. Bodie Kane is nearly 40 when she takes a short-term job teaching a podcasting course at the New Hampshire boarding school she once attended. Returning brings back memories of the murder of her roommate, Thalia, when they were both 17. Two of Bodie’s students take on Thalia’s murder as a subject for their own podcast, looking at whether the school’s sports technician was wrongfully convicted. Bodie can’t help but fall down her own rabbit hole, re-examining everything she had once accepted about the murder.

Just as with the title, I Have Some Questions for You is addressed throughout to “you,” an alternative perpetrator, but it could of course, also be us, the readers. In doing so, Makkai manages to make us queasily complicit as she examines some of the tropes of true crime, including objectifying the victim, the role of amateur detectives, and an imperfect justice system.

Read about another entry on the list.

I Have Some Questions For You is among Melissa D’Agnese's seven best dark academia books, Allie Tagle-Dokus's eight titles that reckon with the impacts of cancel culture, Jo Firestone's five top laugh-out-loud mysteries, Jacqueline Faber's seven top thrillers about the role of the witness, Kat Davis's top ten feminist crime novels subverting the Dead Girl trope, Elise Juska’s eight best campus novels ever written, Nicole Hackett's six top mysteries about motherhood and crime, Brittany Bunzey's ten books that take you inside their characters’ heads, Anne Burt's four top recent titles with social justice themes, and Heather Darwent's nine best campus thrillers.

--Marshal Zeringue